Fifty years of statehood have not always fulfilled the Zionist dream. TIME's David Rubinger photographed much of that history during his 50 years in Israel, and last month he revisited the scene of some memorable pictures

By JOHANNA MCGEARY /JERUSALEM

or months, eight-year-old Meir Yosefi's days were filled with fear. Katyusha rockets from somewhere in Jordan would slam into the northern town of Bet She'an without warning as Palestinian guerrillas sought to terrorize Israel into concessions. He was in school, along with his 12-year-old sister Efrat, when a rocket crashed into a classroom. His mother Ella heard the terrible boom and raced to the schoolyard. Wrapping her arms around Meir, she stared in horror at the place where her daughter ought to be. She saw only a mass of twisted rubble, black smoke, burning debris. "I knew she couldn't be alive," recalls Ella. "It was all burning, and I wanted to go in there and burn with her." But as rescuers sifted through the ruins, they heard voices. Efrat was alive, trapped by fallen roof beams. "I remember the man who found me," says Efrat, now 40, "and lifted the weight off my leg."

Efrat's crushed, burned foot was amputated, and she spent the next 10 years in and out of hospitals, undergoing 24 operations to restore her mobility. Her parents had immigrated to Israel from Iran in 1952 and struggled hard to make a life. But with eight children and little education, the Yosefis never found their promised land. "There were days when I had one black bread to split among the whole family," says Ella. Her husband could not find much work, and she sold everything she had brought from Iran to keep them going. "We spent every penny on her," Ella says as she strokes her daughter's arm. "We had to help her walk again."

There was no money for Meir to study law, as he hoped, so he learned electrical engineering and now runs a contracting business. Married and the father of three sons, he hopes they will "go at least one step higher than I am." Efrat never really went back to school, endured years of painful therapy and did not realize her dream of teaching kindergarten. Eventually, after she had married and borne a son, an American specialist flew to Israel and restored her mobility. "I don't feel cheated," she says, "but disappointed. My life would absolutely have been better."

Israel, Ella had thought, "would be a much better place" than it turned out to be. "We lived very well with the Muslims in Iran," she says. But here, will there ever be peace? "There is no solution," says Ella. "Throw out all the Arabs," says Efrat. "Peace has to come," says Meir. "In another year, in two years..." Efrat looks sadly at her brother. "I want peace too," she says, "but I don't believe in it."

The Arja family house, set amid the rocky, bare hills of the West Bank, was little Etaf's entire world. She lost it all the day Israeli soldiers surrounded the dwelling, set explosives among its rooms and blew it to bits. She watched dry-eyed but uncomprehending. "I got scared when the soldiers slapped my mother and started to beat people," says Etaf, now 37 and still living in the Palestinian town of Halhoul. "They accused me of inciting the people," says her mother Hessen, now 55. "But I was angry, I wanted to fight them."

Etaf's family has been fighting the Israelis for a long time. Their house was demolished as punishment after her cousin, an officer in the military wing of Fatah, was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. One of Etaf's four brothers was jailed twice for anti-Israel provocations; another was wounded in the early days of the intifadeh. A cousin was shot dead by soldiers during a protest eight years ago. The villagers in Halhoul eagerly embraced the Palestinian uprising, and Etaf's family was in the thick of it. "The army was here every day, everywhere," Etaf says, even frisking her children as they went to school.

The destruction of her home that day cost Etaf more than a roof over her head. It took years for the three families who lived there to recoup their financial losses. They were constantly under suspicion, subject to regular searches, interrogations, harassment. "We were always afraid, under psychological pressure, because they would never leave us alone," says Etaf.

Two years after she completed eighth grade, Etaf's marriage to a cousin was arranged by the family. A construction laborer, he has worked only sporadically, cut off from jobs in Israel by the intifadeh, curfews, closures. Now that Halhoul has come under Palestinian civil control, he does better, working for a local carpenter. "But the tension is the same," says Etaf. "The soldiers still make our lives terrible, and the Palestinian Authority does nothing about it."

The demolished stone house has been rebuilt now, and Etaf's Fatah cousin, released after serving 10 years of his term, lives there. But Etaf does not believe the future will be any better for her six children. "Everyone hopes we will have a state, have independence," she says, "but there is always a big 'but.' I pray my children will not witness what I witnessed, but..." Houses are still sometimes destroyed when a Palestinian is convicted of terrorism. According to Halhoul sources, more than 300 Palestinians younger than age 11 were slain by Israeli soldiers during the intifadeh. "The story of the Palestinian child," Etaf adds, "is still a story of tears and suffering."

Amid the purple and gold wildflowers and the soft lowing of cows at Kibbutz Bet Alfa, it is hard to imagine war. Like the other young sabras doing their military service in the Golani Brigade, Leah Nehorai thought the army was just another rite of passage. She was 19 when a coalition of Arab states suddenly attacked Israel on the holy day of Yom Kippur. "All the guys jumped for joy," she recalls. "'Finally,' they said, 'action.' We had no idea what war was really about."

While the boys in the brigade marched off to battle on the Golan Heights, Leah, the unit's social-affairs clerk, volunteered to help out at the hospital. "In the beginning, all the blood was a terrible shock," she says. "But the mind soon immunizes itself. We joked to overcome the fear." Something more profound struck Leah, though, when one particular soldier was brought in, a dressing taped to his scalp, his uniform ripped by shrapnel holes. "He had a look in his eyes that said, 'Don't leave me to die,'" she recalls. "His eyes told me how scared he was. So I stayed with him all the way to surgery." The man survived, and Leah tracked him down a few weeks later in a Haifa hospital. "When I got to his room, I saw this guy sitting up, surrounded by four beautiful girls. I just stood at the door, said, 'Hi, I'm the girl who took care of you,' and left." She does not know what happened to him after that.

Leah came back to green, sunny Bet Alfa, married Eran, the kibbutz native she'd "made eyes at" since age 14, bore six children and lived happily ever after. "Yes," she says, nodding her head in vibrant affirmation, "my life is even better than I thought it could be." She teaches gymnastics and dancing, gives Shiatsu massage, paints furniture, runs the kibbutz cable-television channel. "Raising children is creative," she says, with a broad smile at her look-alike 16-year-old daughter Sahal. "Another creation every time you have one."

Bet Alfa is the serene center of her life, but it was not always so. "I wanted it to change," she says, wearied by the intense communal life. "There was such stress in being always together, trying to show we were all one." She especially did not like being separated when her young ones were sent to live in the traditional children's house, as her husband had been brought up. The family left for a few years, but was drawn ineluctably back. Now, says Leah, the kibbutz is more like a charmed village, a "safe, wonderful place" where families stay together in their own homes with their own cars and lives and dreams. Eran manages a herd of 500 cows, but Bet Alfa must also run three factories to support its rural life-style. "This kibbutz is barely surviving," says Eran, who regrets the passing of the old socialist ideology. "Now to be a kibbutznik is no big deal."

Leah's placid days at Bet Alfa are rarely shattered by larger worries. "I prefer to see the world small," she says, peering through the circle of her thumb and forefinger. "Here, you can live as if the Arabs are not there." Yet in six months her eldest son, named for her husband's brother, who died at the hands of Arab villagers on the east side of the Jordan River when his plane was shot down in 1968, will begin his mandatory military service. "This is what Israel can be," she says, waving her arm at the gentle farmlands. "I want peace with all my heart, so there will be no more war and no more army for anyone."