Israel's Jubilee

...And how, despite all the debates about its wide open gates, this nation's greatest accomplishment since its rebirth has probably been the rapid absorption of millions of immigrants—so that now the population is almost tenfold what it was on May 14, 1948...

...Following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin at a rally celebrating the Oslo Accords, the originally dovish, largely Orthodox Sephardim moved decidedly to the Right, virtually assuring the electoral victory of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish Likud Party...

...Its elements include: • How small things have often changed big events, while promising dramatic developments have somehow tended to peter out...

...Images of endless lines of shoes abandoned by fleeing Egyptians get mixed up with those of the columns of burned-out Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights and the rows of planes destroyed on Egyptian airfields...

...Today, you travel to Jerusalem in airconditioned coaches...

...Still, they were possibly the greatest gift Israel could have received in the final quarter of this century...

...The first trickle at the end of the '60s soon turned into a controlled wave...

...But hardly anybody in Israel can forget the wail of air-raid sirens piercing the total noontime silence of Yom Kippur 1973...

...But fundraising campaigns were always about a good deal more than simply gathering money...

...There we parked among equally tiredlooking vehicles...

...This is Jerusalem, so you better get off...

...One does see Russian street sweepers and street musicians in Israel, but the preponderance of Russians enjoy a broad spectrum of good jobs...

...he whispered to me...

...Some experts estimate that the skills of these newcomers added up to an unintended Russian aid package of $5 billion to $6 billion...

...Even the dovishly-inclined waxed euphoric as they traveled freely from Mount Hermon, overlooking Damascus, to the Suez Canal...

...And I hope your agricultural machinery does not blow up my ship...

...Markedly in the early years, each major wave of immigrants clung to its baggage and kept the country in constant demographic flux...

...Coming at a point when Israel was entering the high-tech revolution, they helped change the face of the country...

...This was a very special immigration...

...After several days of bloody fighting they were again threatening Damascus and within 60 miles of Cairo...

...They also have formed their own political party, Yisrael B'aliyah, led by Natan Sharansky...

...After three hours of negotiating bumpy roads and shifting gears to chug up hills, we entered a street of old stone houses and then turned into a narrow lane that led to a noisy courtyard...

...Most Russians socialize among themselves, read one of the three new Russian-language dailies, and watch the three television channels from Moscow available on cable (which now carry commercials for Israeli products aimed at the viewer both here and in Russia...

...Here, however, the changes have been deeper and more qualitative...

...The sight of Haifa and the Carmel Mountains was almost familiar from the countless picture postcards and Zionist journals and leaflets I had seen at home and in school...

...Both have contributed to diminishing a sense of social equality...

...The founders of the State were mostly Ashkenazim, Jews of European origin, who shared various shades of Western culture and either experienced the Holocaust themselves or lost family members...

...Of course, skylines around the globe have been transformed in the past half century...

...There is a realization that a country surrounded by hostile neighbors from the first day of its existence cannot survive sticking to the highest precepts of morality...

...In purely military terms, the rapid rebound of the surprised, holiday-depleted Israeli forces was probably a more formidable achievement than the celebrated 1967 victory...

...After Israel's stunning victory in the Six Day War, the Ashkenazi Orthodox became increasingly nationalistic and hawkish and were gradually joined by the newly politicized Sephardi Orthodox...

...Finally, the dynamic growth of Israel's economy has made aid less significant for progress than business investments—and has redefined the terms of the Israel-Diaspora relationship...

...Particularly striking has been the consequent shift away from an economy based almost entirely on agriculture, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor—previously much less obvious because it was determined by the value of an individual's property, rather than the current disparities in income and living standards...

...My fellow passengers began to leave the bus...

...I'm going on to Jerusalem," I called back...

...In the case of very wealthy Jews, besides donating to local projects and institutions they wanted to have "monuments" here...

...I remained seated, waiting to continue my voyage to the Holy City...

...His words were quite a shock...

...The Dutch Captain, raising his glass, said: "L'chaim...

...Browsing through my own accumulated memories, I have found myself putting together a necessarily more idiosyncratic, sometimes seemingly contradictory, picture...

...They supplied a good deal of the brains, hands and even entrepreneurship of the new electronic age...

...For besides the proverbial violinists and pianists, they included tens of thousands of mathematicians, doctors, and engineers, plus hundreds of thousands of mechanics, technicians, nurses, skilled artisans, and newly emerged middlemen...

...A few hours later, he came aboard for a goodbye drink...

...Precedents from the War of Independence existed, yet Peres rejected the idea, saying only half-jokingly: "No warplane could take off with all the heavy nameplates of the donors...

...Several years afterward, Israel was laying a pipeline from Eilat to the Mediterranean that was to carry oil semiclandestinely imported from Iran, in violation of the Arab boycott...

...they served as a means of identifying with the Zionist undertaking...

...They were less ideologically inspired, less Jewishly motivated...

...the list goes on...

...The northern half of once relatively sparsely occupied Israel has become one of the world's most densely populated areas...

...How pride in producing "our own" steel and cars gave way to the recognition that such heavy industries were inherently inefficient in a country without raw materials or sources of energy...

...Unlike previous major waves of immigration, this one did not create territorial ghettos, but it has carved out "islands" in every major city...

...They introduced modern industries, teaching new skills and creating new jobs for the oldtimers...

...One indication of Israel's evolution is its relationship to Diaspora Jewry...

...Israelis, forbidden to enter the Old City of Jerusalem since 1948, streamed into the narrow shaded courtyard at the foot of the Wall of Lamentations where for centuries Jewish pilgrims had gathered...

...As you approach the entrance to the city, a panorama of ancient holy places, high-rises and new suburbs opens up as far as you can see...

...Most Israelis do not appreciate being forced to abide by laws or accommodations they see as the product of religious blackmail...

...This has angered the Sephardim, who have been here much longer and have hardly fared as well...

...But most important of all, this is a caring country...

...Suddenly, I noticed an old friend from the Ministry of Defense (who eventually was appointed to an important ambassadorship in Europe...

...And its once predominantly agricultural economy has moved to the electronic and biotechnical cutting edge...

...Nor do they like, to put it gently, the exclusive control the Chief Rabbinate has been able to maintain over various matters that elsewhere would be the domain of civil authorities...

...No other place in the world —Scandinavia, famous for its cradle-tograve welfare, included—so openheartedly takes care of its weak and underprivileged...

...But being stuck on the lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder had resulted in a steadily growing resentment of the Labor Party and its Leftist coalition partners, for decades the ruling Establishment...

...Was this Israel's capital...

...It consisted of "refuseniks" whose hopes were kindled by news of the Six Day War, who learned Hebrew in clandestine classes from self-taught instructors, who demonstrated in the streets and went to jails and gulags for the right to come here...

...The existential fears of Jewish vulnerability that reemerged will remain a determining component of Israel's politics and military thinking at least as long as the last survivor of Auschwitz is alive...

...Remarkably, only in recent years did the majority of Ashkenazim finally recognize the depth of the Sephardim's latent hostility toward them, although it occasionally came to the surface in verbal clashes on bus lines and in more refined comments heard in offices or at dinner tables...

...It is the creature of decades of youthful energy and a lack of real planning, unending excavations of 3,000-yearold ruins and the launching of earth orbiting satellites...

...the driver called out to me...

...For another, within philanthropy the increase in earmarked donations has strengthened the influence of the donors vis-à-vis the preferences of the funds-distributing politicians and bureaucrats...

...Shhh...

...By now that has changed...

...Driving home late at night through the slumbering streets of Jerusalem's Rechavia quarter, you saw whose car was parked near whose house—the stuff of tomorrow's juicy gossip...

...The Rabbinate's status has also aroused the ire of the American Reform and Conservative movements...

...How rarefied institutes of higher learning became the birthplaces of Israel's vital high-tech enterprises...

...Years of counting the dead, ours and theirs, started a process of ever-widening questioning among Israelis that was intensified by the daily Intifada battles seen on the evening newscasts...

...But the bus terminal—a concrete-block building with a few kiosks and ticket windows that slopes down to a row of platforms—is still in a temporary location...

...Generally that involved financial contributions...

...many came here only because visas to the U. S. were not available...

...But it continued well into the '60s and sometimes manifested itself in unexpected ways...

...Moreover, unlike the U. S. where assimilation into the Anglo-Saxon culture was the goal until "ethnicity" raised its head not long ago, no such equalizing factor has functioned here...

...Its trials and tribulations notwithstanding, Israel has remained a country where the rule of law prevails, courts are free and enlightened, and individual freedom is protected...

...How most of us failed to realize the children of docile newcomers growing up in the prefab houses of barren new townships nurtured a feeling of discrimination that would turn them politically into bitter masses of ethnic opposition— yet many of them became officers in elite Israel Defense Forces units, successful farmers, or skilled lawyers, doctors and professors...

...It seemed like a miracle...

...Journalists used to address generals and government leaders—except for President Chaim Weizmann and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion— by their first names...

...Those among the Orthodox who oppose the doctrine denounce it as "idolatry," because it gives divine priority to the Land over the People...

...How a few hundred devoted students at ultra-Orthodox yeshivas mushroomed into some 30,000 young men who shirk military service and continue to receive government-financed stipends well into their 20s and even 3 0s...

...I asked the then Finance Minister (and later Prime Minister) Levi Eshkol, what would happen to the huge investment if Teheran capitulated to Arab pressure...

...The second big fissure in Israeli society threatens to separate the "religious" and the "secular"—or, more precisely, the bulk of the Orthodox minority and the majority who are semi- or non-observant...

...Investing here, especially in high-tech and startup ventures, is today not only fashionable but also profitable, attracting more and more "nonsentimental" money to Israel...

...Per capita GNP has reached that of the richer European nations...

...The speed of the Egyptian and Syrian advance inevitably evoked the old nightmares of physical annihilation...

...It all was reminiscent of the Babylonian exiles' support for the Second Temple, or of the later philanthropy of England's Sir Moses Montefiore and France's Baron Edmond de Rothschild...

...As time has passed, the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six Day War have conflated in the minds of younger Israelis into a single picture of past glory...

...In places where hopeless soccer teams and dull "culture clubs" had been the only source of entertainment, high-quality orchestras were assembled and local ballet companies and music schools were established...

...After the 1956 Sinai Campaign, when the Red Sea was opened to shipping from Eilat, a fellow journalist and I arranged a trip on one of the first freighters scheduled to sail to East Africa...

...Were the run-down houses and small shops we had passed the center of the historic city where I planned to complete my university studies during the next two years, before pursuing a career in journalism...

...You not only knew where important and not-so-important personalities lived, you knew the make, year and color of their cars and whether they were in the country or abroad...

...Hundreds of settlements were built with money that was provided by the United Jewish Appeal—on land bought with the worldwide collections in the blue and white boxes of the Jewish National Fund...

...Don't worry Salpeter," he responded, adding in his beloved Yiddish: "There will be no empty pipes rolling around in the Negev...

...For many years—with anti-Semitism and religious observance on the decline and intermarriage on the rise around the world—support of the new Jewish State was perhaps the most important expression of Jewish identity...

...This has caused one of the two big fissures in Israel's society...

...That small-town atmosphere, especially in Jerusalem and "old" Tel Aviv, was one of the nicest aspects of daily life that got lost in the rush of immigration and construction...

...The following day, in possession of an Immigrant's Identity Card and five onepound bank notes (the equivalent of a little over $15.00 at the time), I boarded an ancient bus to Jerusalem where my aunt and uncle lived...

...My high-school Hebrew came back to me...

...Many felt superior to the arriving masses of Sephardim, their coreligionists from North Africa and the Middle East, who grew up in a less achievement-oriented Muslim environment and whose defining experience was an outward familiarity yet inner mistrust of their dominant Arab neighbors...

...Despite the increase in both Jewish and Arab life-expectancy, it has remained a young country: 35 per cent of the population is now under 18, compared with 20 per cent at the establishment of the State...

...At one point somebody suggested to then Defense Minister Shimon Peres that the Jews in the West should be asked to raise money for the purchase of planes and other military equipment...

...True, it has not become "a light unto the nations" as Ben-Gurion, a Bible scholar, hoped...

...The two lined up with Likud and parties farther Right to form an alliance for whom the "Land of Israel" is a religious and nationalist imperative...

...In Israel the Law of Return guarantees citizenship to all Jews who need or want it, so the proportion of newcomers and their children is even higher than in the United States...

...Out-of-the-way towns where labor-intensive textile factories and government subsidized farms and public works provided the jobs for most of the second and third generation immigrants from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Algeria, suddenly received an injection of university-educated immigrants...

...You don't know me or my name...

...How regrets over cutting down sweetsmelling orange groves were replaced by the satisfaction of providing housing for the initial wave of immigrants...

...To a large extent, though, the political discourse concerns how far we may stray from those precepts...

...Nevertheless, the halo of Israel's invincibility was broken—not only in the eyes of the Arabs but also, more significantly, in the eyes of the Israelis...

...How a country where at least twothirds of the population comes from lands without any democratic traditions managed to preserve civil rights, independent courts and free elections—though the principles of equality have occasionally suffered where the Arab population is concerned...

...Extremism aside, the way the Orthodox parties exploit their leverage in any coalition government has long been an additional source of divisiveness...

...Two members of Yisrael B'aliyah hold portfolios in Netanyahu's Cabinet...

...In the mid-'70s the doors were pretty much shut again—until the Soviet Union collapsed and there was a huge exodus of 750,000 Russian Jews to Israel...

...The broad sunlit plaza tourists would visit was built later...

...To be sure, not everything has been candy and kisses...

...And the pastoral scene of smiling newlyweds in front of a small whitewashed church whose bells mingled with the sound of gunfire around the corner...

...They were quite different from the earlier refuseniks...

...I arrived in Israel from Czechoslovakia early in 1949, on the old creaky immigrants' ship grandly named Atzmaut ("Independence...

...Museums, concert halls, parks, and hospitals across the country were named for donors from Miami, Paris, Rio de Janeiro...

...When they finally arrived they did their best to adjust to Israeli society...

...Families separated in World War II, grandparents and grandchildren who had never seen each other, now met at BenGurion Airport...

...Unquestionably, Diaspora funds were critical to Israel's development, particularly before statehood and immediately afterward...

...For one thing, U. S. government aid has exceeded and overshadowed the contributions from individuals solicited by different fundraising campaigns...

...Standing on the pier, we watched the loading of huge crates marked "FARM MACHINERY" onto the ship...

...If few anywhere seem to recall Prime Minister Eshkol's vain offer right after the Six Day War to give back practically all the occupied territory lost by the Arab nations in exchange for peace treaties, possibly it is because the mood here quickly changed to one reflected in General Moshe Dayan's dictum that he would "prefer [the Straits of] Sharm el-Sheik without peace, to peace without the Sharm el-Sheik...

...I still vividly remember the absurdity of a tuxedoed waiter serving an excellent lunch on the terrace of a French restaurant on the outskirts of Beirut, overlooking an artillery duel just a few hundred yards below...

...Yet, in another paradox of Israeli life, while ethnic grievances keep the Sephardim wedded to the Rightist Likud, the Russians' suspicions of the Labor Party's Socialist roots has likewise put them in the Likud camp...

...Israel and the West fought long and hard to make the Soviet Union let its captive Jews go...

...Young man, what are you waiting for...

...From the perspective of its Jubilee Year, few here doubt that Israel is a big success story...

...Rich lists of the Jewish State's crucial encounters and impressive achievements have filled the newspapers, magazines and television screens here, as well as scores of commemorative books...

...Most were intellectuals and Zionists...

...Thus began—at first secretly—Israel's strategic cooperation with Iran, which lasted until the overthrow of the Shah by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...

...The Lebanon War, 10 years later, was felt by many to be an exercise in the futility of the unending procession of wars...

...How the excitement and joy of welcoming the early flood of arrivals dissolved into questioning the wisdom of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's policy of unlimited immigration...

...The road to Oslo began in Beirut...

...Its growth in numbers has been accompanied by making an ancient language into a living national tongue...

...When you stumble in Israel, there are always plenty of people who rush to help you up...

...All of Israel is a mixture of the temporary and the eternal, the old and the ultramodern, the primitive and the highly sophisticated...

...A stage built by Russian actors in an old Jaffa warehouse quickly turned into a first-rank theater...