BRAVE NEW TRY
Lens, Sidney
Report from Israel Brave New Try By Sidney Lens Tel Aviv IF YOU look for beauty or comfort in today's Israel, you won't find it. For the process of being born, both for a new state as well as...
...Possibly Israel will not try to expand, certainly not until its long-term economic development is completed...
...Nor are these changes limited to the economic sphere...
...Big pipes more than five feet in diameter and little ones only an inch—all being laid with one purpose, to irrigate more and more land, to produce three crops a year where only one, or sometimes none, was possible before...
...Most of their land has been impounded by the state...
...Britain, which ran this part of the world until recently, was able to police it only by an alliance with the status-quo minded pashas...
...The fellah now rents lands from the state at 50 cents to $1.25 per dunam instead of from a private landowner at 50 per cent to 60 per cent of the yield...
...In the kibbutzim (collective farms) are some of the finest idealists on earth...
...No matter how much the Arab, 50 yards from Taibeh, hates the Jews, he is forced to concede that his Arab relatives on the Israeli side are far better off economically and socially...
...Uninhibited by the social obstacles of feudalism, Israel, with the aid of science, is turning a barren land capable only of the skimpiest livelihood into a full fertility that will make possible the doubling of the population at a European—not Asian—standard of living...
...Compulsory education for Arabs as well as Jews is now the law...
...it wants no change...
...Only its Zionism bars it from an effective appeal to the fellah across its borders...
...Geological surveys are digging everywhere for oil, precious metal, phosphates...
...The plain fact is that Israel has driven a big wedge into the Middle East...
...Overall, the number of irrigated dunams (four dunams to a hectare) has jumped in four years from 230,000 to 550,000...
...A Chicago labor leader, Lens is the author of two books, "Left, Right and Center" and "The Counterfeit Revolution" and has written for many publications, including The Yale Review, the Harvard Business Review, and The Bulletin of The Foreign Policy Association...
...The landlord class is wealthy enough...
...In the whole of the Middle East, water is the difference between hunger and plenty, health and disease...
...If the dollars were poured into an area where feudalism reigned supreme, they would cling to the pockets of the pashas and be wasted...
...Farm machinery is being provided...
...Chemicals, plastics, smelting paper, building materials, oil, ceramics, mining—almost everything is growing up on a modest but substantial enough scale...
...Unfortunately, the feudal system under which he lives precludes any real expenditure for such "luxuries...
...So long as Israel exists the Arab feudalists will use it as a scapegoat to draw the attention of their fellaheen away from their basic problems...
...Yet the very existence of Israel, the improving economic conditions, the expanding freedom cannot but attract emulators in the Arab nations...
...Much of it remains idle...
...Old-time Israeli (before 1948) seem to have benefited most by the $800 million poured into the country since the state was formed...
...Up north the Jordan River is being deepened and widened to drain off Hula Lake and the swamplands above it...
...Combined with the pipes are the new roads, along which modern trucks will speed tons of harvest on their way...
...Such diversions may work for long or short periods...
...Within the next four years that figure is expected to double, and within 15 years to rise to four million, capable of supporting a population of one person per irrigated dunam...
...Two pounds of apples cost almost a full day's pay, meat is terribly short, butter almost unavailable, potatoes a luxury, housing scarce and by European standards expensive...
...Those who remain no longer have the power to adjudicate disputes or tyrannize their fellah in any way...
...The Jewish sector has, of course, received the far greater portion of this progress, but even in the Arab areas the differences are noticeable...
...many are resisting the plea to become farmers...
...It was born as the backwash of a world refugee problem...
...The government is obviously eager to settle Jewish farm communities close to the Arab countries because, no matter how large its army, it cannot guard the unnatural, zig-zag border without trusted settlements to police it...
...Possibly the long term answer to Arab-Israeli peace.rests with America...
...Admittedly it is being done with many American dollars—approximately $800 million since the state was formed...
...Then he can produce enough to buy shoes (to protect him from energy-sapping bilharzia), secure medical attention to check the advance of trachoma, drain swamps to protect himself from malaria, eat better to protect himself from tuberculosis, and find schooling for his children so that tomorrow may be still better...
...The dynamism has spilled over, and those Arabs who have land are far better off than they were...
...Money is being spent for sewage, irrigation, classrooms, medical facilities...
...Underneath is something profoundly vital and significant...
...Increase the waters for irrigation, and you can give land to the lowly fellah...
...These and other mistakes have undoubtedly checked efforts to allay the plight of the immigrants...
...When a Middle Eastern country can become Westernized in one generation, let alone a decade, that is something new and exciting...
...The state's program for settling the immigrants seejns to have bogged down...
...If permitted to go on unmolested, Israel can become a beacon for a true experiment in democratic social revolution...
...Canal after canal was abandoned during one invasion after another...
...So do many elaborate factory machines which would be quite productive in a more elaborate economy, but which are a drag on a small economy because they work only an hour or two a day...
...her present-day descendant, Iraq, has little more than a tenth that number...
...Not enough people— only 19 per cent in all—live on the land...
...Everywhere the barrage against the old feudal towers of a British-controlled Palestine are gaining momentum...
...II Now comes Israel...
...Everything in Israel has a disquieting ambivalence...
...In Israel, a dynamic mixed economy is capable of absorbing these dollars, expanding, and laying the foundation for a better future...
...However, much of this is scheduled to change soon: military controls will end in many places, equal prices and equal wages will prevail (in many places they already do), and the state will grant new lands or compensation—at the discretion of the Arab—to those whose land it holds...
...No matter what manner of yardstick you use, this is progress that can hardly be measured unless you have seen the terrible harvest of hunger and disease which is the Middle East...
...in the cities are some of the worst opportunists...
...The latter, for the most part, have left...
...Feudalism as such is fast disappearing...
...Artificial canals and waterways are being dug to channel that precious water into irrigation...
...Yet, it is a teeming, dynamic, westernized nation...
...If you look only at its surface you will be disappointed...
...IV The hazards confronting the new state are both minor (and temporary) as well as major (and constant...
...The treatment of the Arab minority also leaves something to be desired...
...You can't pinpoint it on a sociological map because it is ceaselessly changing...
...Food is short, unemployment is growing under the new economic policy, and the new civil service is often maddeningly inefficient...
...But most of Israel's ailments, severe as they are, are but surface illness...
...until recently they received only a fraction of the produce prices paid to Jewish farmers and a somewhat larger fraction of the wages paid to Jewish workers...
...When Arab politicians say they fear Israeli expansion, they understand the dynamic qualities of this new economic-social system...
...What happened was that the gigantic irrigation system which made the land fertile was permitted to decay...
...Whether it can widen that wedge decisively is open to some doubt, but the wedge itself is of enormous importance...
...Essentially Israel is more of a social threat to the Arab states than a military peril...
...For the process of being born, both for a new state as well as the human animal, is more painful than elegant...
...Can a small country surrounded by hostile Arab states survive for long...
...If we can drive other "wedges" into other areas, if we can develop irrigation projects and condition them on the breakdown of feudal landholding, we can build the basis for true security in this area...
...The number of hospital beds has tripled...
...tortured by hunger and disease, the population died out...
...In Taibeh, in the famous Arab Triangle near Jordan, the favorable contrast with the villages across the border 50 yards away is clearly visible...
...The first person I met in Tel Aviv, a taxi driver, charged me $1.50 for a 50-cent ride and offered to buy dollars at the black market rate...
...It is certainly not a normal way to create a state—or a social revolution...
...It is madness for America to think it can enforce a peace between Israel and the Arab countries without simultaneously taking steps to change this whole world socially...
...Medical facilities have cleared the country of two-thirds of its malaria, checked bilharzia, cut down trachoma...
...Per capita land-holding of Arab fellaheen is smaller than previously, but with the aid of the state, production per acre is now twice as high...
...This is Israel, 1953...
...The Negev, which comprises 42 per cent of the total area of Israel, is alive with development as water pipes from the Yarkon, the Jordan, and natural springs are being harnessed to convert this desert area which housed only 20,000 people in 1948 to fertile land which now has 70,000 and may soon accommodate 400,000...
...If Israel itself cannot directly affect the course of events for progressives in the Middle East, it at least has given them ideas...
...But the very existence of the new system is a threat to the old order of the Middle East, to the landowners, to feudalism, to staticism...
...The refugees (720,000 within four years) are being absorbed at a considerably slower rate than planned, and more than 200,000 are still living in temporary quarters...
...Consider the social and economic character of the Middle East...
...The changes in Israel must give him ideas—and give his masters heart trouble...
...The more urgent problem is the international one...
...They will be overcome...
...But the last person I encountered, a member of Parliament and a leader of the Labor Party (Mapai), was a man who had suffered 28 years of riots, war, hunger, and hell to build this State...
...In an ocean of Middle East underdevelopment, here is an island of dynamic industrialization...
...But these are only children's diseases in a healthy growing organism...
...Arabs, for the most part, are under military governorship...
...Four years ago 40 million Arabs were unable to win a war against 600,000 Jews because they lacked something to fight for...
...In many respects it is an artificial state of colonizers who felt they had no place else to go...
...Ancient Babylonia had 30 million people...
...She imports nine times as much as she exports...
...Given visas and funds, quite a few would go elsewhere...
...The big story, however, lies beneath this bleak exterior, in the preparation for a better and more solid tomorrow...
...Minor hazards include the various economic mistakes of these last years...
...In particular, can it establish friendly relations so long as it has a Zionist philosophy which looks upon Israel as a place to "ingather" the 13 million "exiled" Jews...
...Obviously they are bad "security risks" so long as their social system remains...
...yesterday they had to be imported...
...The feudal landlord can always cry that the "13 million Jews who will come to your area from Europe and America are going to take your homes...
...Israel's tomorrow may be fertile and bountiful, but her today is skimpy and austere...
...Everywhere you turn in Israel you see the symbols of this great change: the roads and pipes...
...Cement and metal pipe factories are now supplying the country's needs...
...Economic planning has hit one snag after another...
...finally the gardens turned to desert, the land became SIDNEY LENS, on a year-long swing around the world, is reporting his major findings in a series of articles for The Progressive, of which this is the fifth...
...The disparity with the new immigrants is quite obvious, and many of them are disillusioned...
...Ill Side by side with agricultural progress is another imposing fact: industry is keeping pace...
...Many kibbutzim ordered far more farm machinery than they could use, and what they got was usually bigger than they needed...
...The Mukhtar with his autocratic powers is being replaced by local councils, which will soon be democratically elected...
Vol. 17 • June 1953 • No. 6
