Recasting the Crucible

On the eve of Israel's tenth anniversary celebrations, the Israelis scheduled a Jerusalem military parade so big and bristling that some diplomats, notably Britain's Ambassador Sir Francis Rundall, declared that it would embarrass them to be invited: to bring large numbers of troops and heavy equipment so close to the border would be a violation of the Jordanian-Israeli armistice agreement. "If Jordan doesn't mind our bringing heavy stuff up here for one day," huffed an Israeli Foreign Office spokesman, "why should the diplomats worry?"

Diplomatic niceties did not much disturb a proud little nation that in a decade has fought continuously for its right to exist, and in the process has more than doubled its population, absorbing 915,000 Jews from 20-odd other nations in its proclaimed "ingathering of the exiles."

Radical Villages. This ingathering process has brought Israel its worst headaches and heartaches, but at last ten-year-old Israel thinks it has found a few answers. Faced with a babel of tongues, and infinite degrees of sophistication between skilled Rumanian surgeons and ignorant Yemeni shepherds, Israeli officials were in trouble no matter what they did. If they put all Poles in one village and all Moroccan Jews in another, the newcomers failed either to learn Hebrew or to become part of the Israeli pattern; when they were mixed together in one village, there was perpetual conflict.

The new plan, tried first in the Lachish and Adullam areas along the Jordan border south of Jerusalem, is to create regional communities, clusters of small villages set up radially round a rural center where schools, health clinics, assembly rooms and tractor garages are concentrated. Each village has 50 to 60 families--all Hungarians, all Iranians or all Poles. But the children all go to the same school in the rural center. All villagers are treated at the same clinic, attend the same movie, sit in the same cafe.

Builders' Pay. At Adullam, not far from where David battled Goliath, busloads of Hungarians and Iranians arrived last week. Israeli soldier girls, led by Lieut. Yael Dayan, daughter of the former chief of Israel's armed forces, helped them move their belongings into the neat, three-room concrete cottages on the spring-green Judean slopes. There was still the familiar hard readjustment: "I lived in a third-floor apartment--and now look," exclaimed a clerk from Budapest, thrusting out hands blistered by operating a pneumatic drill with a road-building crew. But now newcomers are guaranteed 250 days' work at regular wages instead of the old immigrant's dole, and promised their own individual plots to cultivate as soon as they reclaim enough land. And to get them further used to what life in Israel is like, police units taught them how to guard against Arab infiltrators, who have long been a security worry along this hitherto unsettled portion of the frontier.

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