The Second Decade

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.

The Sabras. Histadrut is a trade union whose membership (plus families) includes more than half of all Israelis. But it is much more. Together with the government, it owns and operates at least 60% of the nation's business. It invests in iron foundries, textile mills and shipyards, factories from Dan to Beersheba. When the army's victories made Israel safe beyond these scriptural bounds, Histadrut reopened King Solomon's (copper) mines and built a luxury hotel to attract tourists to Elath. Denounced as monopolistic (its grandiose Tel Aviv headquarters is known as the Kremlin), Histadrut has lately agreed to invest jointly with private enterprise.

Even though the old Zionist. Socialist and religious ideals still rule, their appeal begins to fade as Israel changes. Youngsters growing up on the desert feel more at home with shish kebab and Arab bread than with mother's gefuellte fish and apple strudel. Half the newcomers of recent years are Oriental Jews who never shared the peculiar Zionist and Socialist vision of Ben-Gurion's generation, and not even the old lawgiver can keep half their young folk down on the farm for more than the first year or two. The Sabras, the native-born Israelis who led the Sinai war, show signs of wanting to look out for themselves as their more communal-minded parents never did. In the burgeoning cities, university-trained top civil servants complain that the $175 to $225 a month salaries allotted them in Ben-Gurion's egalitarian state barely top a hod carrier's pay.

The Scientists. "Zionism," says a tutor at Jerusalem's handsome new Hebrew University, "is no longer a dynamic concept because it has done what it set out to do." Young Israelis in general seem to be moving from their fathers' ideals toward a more matter-of-fact Israeli patriotism, with the solid goal of making a place for their country among the other Semitic states of the Middle East. Many Sabras look for leadership to former Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan. 43, who recently left his army command to study history at the Hebrew University and is regarded by all, Ben-Gurion included, as a political comer. General Dayan has been stumping the country this month urging that it is now more important to develop industry and irrigation than to bring in more settlers, and proclaiming that Israel (one-third of whose income still comes from foreign subsidies) must slash its living standards if it is to live as an independent nation-state.

Ben-Gurion himself, though he shows a canny capacity for shifting with newer trends, still proclaims the "Ingathering," and talks of absorbing 2,000,000 more Jews (what is mostly left around the world are Jews in Communist countries, who can't get out, or American Jews, who don't want to leave). Such expansionist talk excites Arab fears that the Israelis will sooner or later burst out of their narrow borders and head for the Jordan River. The way out, says a Ben-Gurion adviser, is "to expand scientifically, not territorially. Once, if you wanted to grow more vegetables, you had to get more land. Now, with the aid of science, you make land more productive. For expansion, we'll use the scientist, not the soldier." So far, however, Israel shows no sign of wanting, or being able, to live without the soldier. It lives, an unwelcome neighbor among Arabs who outnumber Israelis-20 to 1, by the memory and presence of its might.

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