ISRAEL: The Second Decade

• Share

In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the festive celebrations are over. The tiny state of Israel (pop. 2,000,000) observed its tenth anniversary with more confidence than seemed warranted back in May 1948, when independence was audaciously proclaimed amid invading Arab armies. Now

Israel is in its second decade, and discovering that some of the old war cries are no longer quite relevant.

The New Jerusalem that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion proclaimed sprang from Zionist and Socialist dreams in 19th century European ghettos. In their idealistic zeal the pioneers of the new Zion tilled the desert and made it blossom like Isaiah's rose, filled the cities with factories until they hummed like Ezekiel's wheel. In the first decade of independence they brought 915,000 immigrants from Europe, Asia and Africa in a visionary "Ingathering of the Exiles" that more than doubled the tiny republic's population, and made it a dynamic and orderly body politic in sharp contrast with its Arab neighbors.

The Ranchers. Today this Massachusetts-sized land still confronts the problems of its progress. It cannot stand still. It has built homes for people from 80 different lands, coming, as Ben-Gurion once said, from several different centuries. Its new pioneer town, Elath on the Red Sea, had only 500 residents in 1955. now is a booming seaport of 4,000 frontiersmen—half of them fresh from Tunis and Morocco, and a thousand more from Hungary—building piers and unloading cargoes in the hot dry wind, living on tax-free double pay to encourage settlement. The Crusader city of Acre is now a steel mill town. In Abraham's Beersheba the smells of Bedouin camel saddleries and Turkish coffee are giving way to the smoke of a ceramics factory and the fumes of vans trucking Ethiopian hides up the new road from Elath. Settlers whose Spartan waves often do without even a dress-up blouse for the Sabbath have opened up nearly 500 new farm communities, and Israel now grows two-thirds of its food. Behind the orange groves of the Philistine coast spread huge chicken ranches where Israel's No. 1 meat fare is fattened for the platter on wire-decked runs as up-to-the-minute as New Jersey's.

Not even so vital and pertinacious a people could have built this country without the two unique institutions that guided them: the army and the big trade union organization known as Histadrut. Israel's tight little army creates the indispensable security, but it also is the nation's most forceful educator. It takes immigrant boys for 30 months' compulsory duty, and girls for 24. Jewish youngsters from Yemen and Iran have learned from top sergeants not only how to launch a rocket but how to use a toilet, sleep in a bed and eat from a table. The army teaches them Hebrew, the indispensable unifying language. From the army's machine shops. Moroccan, Tunisian, Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian and Iraqi conscripts emerge as the sort of technicians in greatest demand in Israel's cities.