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Israel: 60 years of hope and despair

As the anniversary of its independence approaches, Israel remains haunted by conflicts of the past and is split along racial, religious, economic and ideological lines. Terrorist attacks are commonplace. But there is also pride mixed with self-criticism, and a yearning for a fresh start on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide.

Sam Kiley in Tel Aviv

Sunday April 20 2008

Jewish survivors of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp arrive at Haifa port in 1945

Uri Ben Ami washed down a mouthful of squid with a Maccabee beer and sighed as he sank into the folds of a padded deckchair on Tel Aviv's beachfront while Lycra-clad women sprang past on the wet sand. 'This,' he said. 'Is as good as it gets.' He chose to ignore the thrumming approach of two Apache helicopters returning from a sortie over Gaza to the south where dozens of Palestinians have died in attacks by their Hellfire missiles over the past months. Uri, a graphic designer, wanted to enjoy the modern wonder that is Israel. 'The fear and violence I'm ignoring. It's always been there. Today it's good to be in Israel,' he said.

It is very nearly 60 years since Israel's birth, six decades of a controversial, violent, bloody history. On 14 May, 1948, 250 Zionists gathered in the Tel Aviv Museum to attend one of the century's most important meetings. At 4pm precisely David Ben Gurion - who would in a few moments become Israel's first Prime Minister - brought his gavel down for silence and, after a spontaneous rendition of 'Hatikva', the national anthem, began reading Israel's Declaration of Independence from handwritten notes. Twelve leaders of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, were unable to attend because they were already besieged by Arab forces in Jerusalem in a conflict which had erupted the year before when the United Nations voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine into Arab and Israeli zones. As the ink dried on the independence scroll, the armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt threw themselves into a battle to wipe out the Jewish state. And it is a war which continues, in the view of many, to this day.

Last week at least 22 people, including five children, three Israeli soldiers and a Reuters journalist, died in fighting between Palestinians and Israelis. The journalist and several Palestinians were killed or injured when an Israeli tank fired a flechette shell, containing thousands of darts, at the Reuters team.

Yesterday Hamas militants rammed a bomb-laden car into an Israeli border crossing, killing three of the militants and wounding 13 Israeli soldiers. It was the third major attack in less than two weeks on crossings used to transfer limited supplies of humanitarian goods and fuel to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million people. These were the latest attacks in a conflict which has been fed by Arab nationalism, Islamist hostility to Israel and its allies, and the threat of a nuclear Iran.

The 'Zionist entity', as its enemies call it, remains an object of awe and envy. 'Israel makes us Arabs feel bad. It has no oil, no resources, no nothing, but it wins wars and, if we're honest, looks like a nice place to live. It exposes our own failings and that's why so many of us hate it,' says Ibrahim Rajoub, who was visiting Palestinian relatives on the West Bank last week from his home in Jordan.

By the time the armistice was signed in the 1949 fighting, the 29,000 men, women and children of Israel's disparate militia and settler groups had grown into a force of 110,000. By then Palestine's Arabs had suffered the Naqba (catastrophe); 250,000 of them were driven from their homes by Israeli troops, sometimes using selective massacres and intimidation, into exile in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Their descendants still dream of returning to the fields and villages seized when Israel increased its land area by 50 per cent in under 12 months from what it had been allotted in the UN's 1947 partition plan.

It violated the spirit of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, said the government viewed 'with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', but added: 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine'.

The Zionist founders of Israel were in no mood for compromise. The Holocaust had driven home their desperate need for a safe haven - even if it meant fighting to hold on to it for generations. 'You cannot underestimate how important it was to us, and is to us, to have a National Home after being persecuted the world over,' says Meir Lau, former Chief Rabbi of Israel and now Tel Aviv's chief rabbi.

Lau arrived in Palestine in July 1945 with his 19-year-old brother, Napthali, on a chartered Australian fishing boat straight from Buchenwald. He was the youngest boy among 200 survivors of Hitler's exterminations on the boat. 'When we landed at Haifa trains were waiting for us. They were cattle trucks, just like the ones that took people to Auschwitz, metal boxes with wire-covered slits for air. We were being interned by the British, who were trying to stop Jewish immigration into Palestine. When we arrived in the Atlit camp I saw men in uniform with guns and pistols. I said to my brother, "I thought you were bringing me to the National Home for the Jews - are we going to be killed?" It was months before we got out, but the lesson was that no one, not even the British, would help us. We would have to do this on our own.' Tel Aviv was then no more than a few jerry-built blocks and huts, filled with the frequently starved and broken shells of humanity who had made it through the death camps. Today it is a thriving metropolis, part of a coastal belt which has the second highest number of internet start-up companies after the US, great beaches, and heaving night clubs amid some of the finest Bauhaus architecture in the world.

Israel has risen from almost nothing. There was no industry to speak of in 1948. Today Israel is a nuclear power with an economy still growing at 3 per cent, in spite of the costly 2006 war with Hizbollah in Lebanon. But above all the self-analysis and self-criticism of Israel, within what is the closest thing to democracy in the region, have given the Jewish state its greatest strength. It is hard to conceive of a British commission of inquiry daring to hand out the sort of drubbing given Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his top generals by the Winograd Commission, which accused Olmert of incompetence and knee-jerk strategy in the last Lebanon war.

But Israel is still defined by religious or racial parameters which mean that the Arabs who remained after 1949 found themselves subjected to military law for 18 years, were constantly harassed, and stripped of most of their land before being included as, almost, full Israeli citizens with a vote. Among them was the family of Sayed Kashua, 33, an Israeli Arab, one of Israel's leading Hebrew authors with two novels and a successful TV sitcom under his belt. 'My family stayed on, and didn't become refugees, because the armistice was signed just as the Jewish forces were approaching our village, el-Tira which sits on the 'green line', the armistice line of 1949 separating Israel from the West Bank. They had already shot my grandfather and uncle dead in the fields where they worked.'

The unfortunates who became refugees from the 1948 war still keep the keys to the homes they fled as symbols of their 'right to return' enshrined in UN resolution 194. That right has been flatly denied by Israel, adding fuel to the Arab world's general desire to destroy the Jewish state. But Rabbi Lau is delighted by the success of the national home for the Jewish people. 'We have absorbed people from 140 countries. We have revived Hebrew as a living language, which is now a national tongue. We are a noisy democracy and there are six million Jews living in a country which is their home as promised to them in the Torah. That is most definitely a success'.

Israel expanded again in 1967 when it launched a pre-emptive assault on Egypt, whose ramshackle coalition of Arab armies was routed in just six days. Ironically, just as in 1948, the fighting provided the excuse for a second wave of land seizure by Israel, including East Jerusalem, Syria's Golan Heights, the Sinai peninsula (later returned to Egypt) and Gaza, as Israeli troops burst through the green line to take over the West Bank of the Jordan river. Although the Israeli cabinet originally discussed trading the newly occupied lands for peace with the Arabs, degrees of occupation have continued to this day, despite the Oslo accords and evacuation of Gaza.

As a paratrooper in 1967, Avishai Margalit, a Zionist intellectual with no qualms about defending the country he had seen being born during the fighting in Jerusalem in 1948, took part in the Israeli capture of Jerusalem from Jordanian forces, then marched on Hebron to the south. Hailed as Zionism's final great achievement - establishment of a united Jewish capital in Jerusalem - Margalit (now a professor of philosophy at Princeton and the Hebrew University) saw things differently - even then.

'I knew then we were marching into a trap of our own making. Being an occupying power would be, and has been, the greatest threat to our survival and to the health of the country,' he says. 'Now we are struggling to figure out how to get out of this trap we've been in for 31 years.

'Worse still, while everyone sane recognises that we're going to have to get out of the West Bank and establish an independent Palestinian state, Israel is still building settlements on West Bank land taken from Palestinians, sowing the seeds of yet more hatred and violence.'

Since 1967 Israel has, illegally under international law, settled an estimated 250,000 people in the occupied West Bank and made it clear that only the smallest populations would be removed as part of a peace deal. And the Israeli Defence Forces have erected a vast 'security barrier' of concrete and wire slicing off yet more Palestinian territory.

And today, with the 60th anniversary of independence fast approaching, there are a significant number of Israelis on both left and right asking whether in the intervening period the Israel declared by its founding fathers as a largely secular, communitarian project has not somehow lost the plot.

Israel's 1.7 million Arabs are these days seen as a 'demographic threat' to the Jewish nature of the state in a country where some politicians have begun to talk openly of 'transfer' of ethnic Arabs to Palestinian areas, or of slicing off Arab villages in Israel and handing them over to Palestinian control.

'This kind of talk has started to make me feel frightened, where in the past I only felt like a second-class citizen. We relive the Naqba of 1948 every day I have been an Israeli Arab. For how long I don't know,' says Kashua, whose home village, like most Arab-Israeli towns, is scruffier than nearby Jewish areas.

'I cannot buy a flat in a Jewish neighbourhood - not even me, who is pretty well known and writes in Hebrew. There is probably greater resentment between the Jewish and Arab Israeli communities now than ever before. We're seen as a problem, not as citizens,' he says.

If Israel sees its Arabs as a threat, there is an even bigger problem closer to home. It is a familiar scene all over the world. A farmer passes down the line of stalls filling buckets with fodder, raising appreciative cries from his animals. Except that the farmer is Shlomo Kimschi, he's Jewish, this is the Holy Land, and the grunting creatures are pigs, destined for a slaughterhouse in Israel's booming pork industry.

Such an unforeseen and, for many Jews and Muslims, abhorrent scene has its roots in Israel's first war. The village of Iblin was annexed in 1948. Tiny numbers of Christian Arabs who chose to remain were given dispensation to rear pigs in what the Ministry of Agriculture now calls 'red zones'. Spotting an opportunity in the 1960s, Kimschi's secular parents rented land from Christian Arabs, about 20 miles east of Haifa. It was a smart move. In the 1990s a million new immigrants flooded in from the former Soviet Union, many devoted to guzzling pork. They created a boom in the market and Israel is now home to some 150,000 breeding pigs in northern Galilee.

'Those were good times for us. Ironically our industry is protected by Israel's kosher laws, which forbid the importation of meat from abroad. So we have the market to ourselves,' says Kimschi.

• But for many Israelis this is a sign that the Zionist enterprise has gone badly awry - on top of the threats from the Arab world and Palestinian terror, Israel is losing its Zionist soul. Some of the most important institutions are coming under pressure. The army, once at the heart of the Zionist enterprise, is today beginning to take its toll on conscripts amid the burden of fighting in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Historian Michael Oren, of the right-wing Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, points to a 'reluctance to join the army' as a sign of a general 'collapse of the Zionist principles of self-sacrifice, probity and collectivism which have built and protected Israel'.

• A quarter of the men and women called up for national service now slide out of it, claiming mental problems or religious exemption. And a growing number of seasoned soldiers from elite units and the air force are refusing to fight on moral grounds.

Zohar Shapira spent 15 years as a member of the Special Forces, the Sayeret Metkal, ending as a warrant officer in charge of 13 other highly trained men before he decided Israel's occupation beyond the green line was bad for Israel as well as the Palestinians.

• 'I didn't kill anyone, thank God. But when you're kicking down doors and shooting live rounds over the heads of young children in their own homes, you have to question what you're doing. For many years I believed that the missions I went on were defending the Jewish state, but the immorality of what we did on the West Bank endangers the Jewish state. A country with no moral flags can become barbaric - it becomes a question of the laws of the jungle,' he says in a coffee shop in Raanana. 'If things go on like this, with violence feeding violence - I'm not sure I want to bring up my children here.'

Since the huge Russian immigration of the 1990s, there are at least 300,000 non-Jewish Israeli immigrants in addition to the 5.7 million Israeli Jews. The aggressive recruitment of immigrants means that Israel now has its own neo-Nazi movement. Last week three Russian immigrants in their late teens and one adult were sentenced to between 18 months and four years for assault and racism after filming one another beating up ultra-Orthodox Jews and homeless people. Four more members of the gang, Patrol 36, including the leader, Arik Bunyatov (known as Arik the Nazi), face similar charges after shocking videos were found on a Russian neo-Nazi website. A fifth, an IDF sergeant, has fled to Russia, where neo-Nazi websites hosted the group's videos.

Zalman Gilichenski, himself an immigrant from Moldova, who monitors extremist anti-Semitic groups in Israel, says these are not isolated incidents. 'I get at least four calls a week about the desecration of Jewish graves, fascist graffiti and lots of personal attacks. Graffiti says things like "Death to the Yids, Heil Hitler". There have been 500 incidents of attacks and abuse in the last two years and there are several hundred neo-Nazis in Israel. People who came in the 1990s, a lot of them did not feel Jewish or want to be Jewish but were in fact anti-Semites getting out of Russia. They've passed their ideology on to kids brought up here. You have to ask what's the point of Israel if this goes on,' he says.

Meanwhile, if Jesus Christ were alive today among his earliest miracles would be to survive his own baptism, because of the profligate use of the River Jordan's waters for irrigation in Israel and the kingdom of Jordan. At the site attributed to St John's baptism of Christ, the Jordan is no longer a river. Thick, green, about 2ft wide, Israel's government calls it an 'effluent channel'.

• 'It's mad,' says Mira Edelstein. 'Israeli farms who get subsidised water use 70 per cent of all water in the country and produce 2 per cent of the GDP. The mountain aquifer on the West Bank is getting polluted, the coastal aquifer is getting salty, and our rivers are poisonous. We might have greened the desert, but at what cost? The state will collapse if it has no water.' So, facing an enemy within, a demographic 'time-bomb', chronic water shortages, and a dwindling level of patriotism in defence, one might think things look bleak for Israel at 60.

Isaac Herzog, the Social Services Minister and son of the late Chaim Herzog, Israel's sixth President and a former British army officer, complains of a lack of 'serious partners for peace among the Palestinian leadership'. Even so, 'Israel had only enemies in the region when it was born. It had no international supporters, we were under siege, and no Arab country spoke to us. Now we have diplomatic relations with Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and part of a coalition that wants a two-state solution for the Israelis and the Palestinians. We have forged a country together from a mosaic of people from everywhere. Israel is a success. We survived and thrived in the toughest possible conditions. That has to be something of a miracle.'

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