Middle East: Israel's Other War

SINCE the Middle East cease-fire went into force last August, Israel has enjoyed a rare interregnum of peace. Thus it came as a shock to Israelis when Premier Golda Meir recently warned them to brace for quite another kind of war, "an internal war that would be rooted in social problems and would be more frightening than any war on the borders." Israel's Premier was alerting her 3,000,000 citizens to domestic crises that have been deliberately set aside during the 23 years since independence, while Israel concentrated on securing its borders. Now, with the cease-fire ten months old and holding, the first skirmishes are being fought in the internal war that Golda prophesied.

Much of the difficulty grows out of the fact that Israel is not really one Jewish nation but an uncertain amalgam of Ashkenazic (European) and Sephardic (Oriental) Jews. The Sephardim (literally "Spaniards," though most are from North Africa or Asia) represent almost 65% of the Jewish population. The generally better-educated Ashkenazim ("Germans," in Old Hebrew), many of them descendants of the Polish and Russian Jews who founded Israel, rule the country. The Sephardim feel discriminated against because of their cultural shortcomings. Only 3% of all top government officials and 20% of the Knesset, or Parliament, are Sephardim. In the 18-man Cabinet, only Iraqi-born Police Minister Shlomo Hillel is from an Arab-speaking country. Fully 60% of Sephardic children drop out of high school; at the college level, 95% of the student population are Ashkenazim.

Such statistics invite a protest movement, and it fell to a long-haired, slim, intense youth named Saadya Marciano, 20, to organize it. Born in Marseille while his wandering father was in transit from Morocco to Israel, Saadya is one of nine children and a product of a Jerusalem slum called Musrara. He entered the army at 18, spent nearly half his seven months of service in jail, and was finally discharged as unfit. Since then, unable to get a job because of his service record, he has spent his time idling with other Arab-speaking Sephardic youths in Musrara, and he has been picked up by police on suspicion of various crimes.

"One night," Saadya told TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin last week, "we were sitting around in the room of my friend Charley Biton when we decided to form an organization. I suggested the name Black Panthers. We asked the police for a permit to demonstrate against lousy housing conditions. The police helped us a lot: they locked us up when we said we were going to demonstrate without a permit."

The demonstration was held anyway earlier this spring and, though police soon broke it up, Israelis were jolted by the sight of Jew fighting Jew. Since the first protest, the Panthers ("Madison Avenue couldn't have picked a better name," says Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek) claim that they have signed up 9,000 members.

Three Fronts. The Panthers have helped spark a long-overdue debate in Israel on the problems that bloom with peace. It was Police Minister Hillel, the Iraqi Jew who made good, who defined the danger most clearly. In Tel Aviv recently, he told a Labor Party rally: "Israel is faced with a struggle on three equally important fronts--security, economic and social. It cannot afford to lose any one of them."

On the social and economic fronts, the problems are serious:

> The economy, geared to war, is deceptively bullish. The rate of annual growth is 7%, but Israel's foreign debt now totals $2.6 billion, including a $1.2 billion trade deficit for this year alone. Defense spending gobbles up 60% of the budget and makes Israeli wage earners the world's most heavily taxed. A 45-year-old banker who earns $15,000 a year ends up with $4,500 after paying income, municipal, property and service taxes and handing back money for compulsory government loans. Nor does the remainder stretch very far. He pays 75-c- a gallon to gas his English Ford car (which sells for $7,000 in Israel v. $2,880 in Britain), and his black-and-white television costs $600 (plus an annual tax of $25).

> A shocking 20% of the population lives on or below the poverty line. According to Israeli guidelines, a family is poor if the monthly income for eight falls below $145. Moreover, 80,000 families live in substandard housing.

> Crime is soaring to levels that upright Israel has never known. In greater Tel Aviv (pop. 800,000), robberies are up 125% since last year, murders have doubled, purse snatches have become common and 400 prostitutes are on the street.

> Employment is at record levels, but even with more than 40,000 Arabs from the occupied territories in the work force there are not enough hands to go around. Says Transport and Communications Minister Shimon Peres, the government's leading technocrat: "Onefourth of our men are busy on defense. That leaves a labor force of only 750,000. How can you run a modern society on so small a number of hands? Construction is lagging, educational services are not satisfactory, and industry cannot make a real breakthrough. We need one million more workers now."

Immigrant Priority. Because the government wants to get as many new workers as possible, immigration is second in priority only to defense. The population target is 5,000,000 by 1981, nearly double today's total. To lure immigrants, the government has earmarked for them most of the 66,000 housing units being constructed this year, and will continue to give preference to new arrivals in coming years. "If we don't build for immigrants," says Social Welfare Minister Michael Hazani, "they won't come."

Oriental Jews are scarcely enthusiastic about such favoritism toward Ashkenazic immigrants while longtime Israeli residents continue to live in slums. Last week, to point up the disparity, Saadya Marciano led other Black Panthers and Hebrew University students in resettling a Sephardic family of eleven in a new three-room apartment that is twice as large as the family's previous slum quarters. THIS IS THE OTHER ISRAEL, Said a sign tacked up on the apartment's wall for the benefit of the TV cameras.

In a sense, the government has been caught philosophically off guard by its current troubles. The old Zionists, who have always controlled Israel and have been determined to reshape the land, have concentrated from the first on agricultural kibbutzim. Today barely 3% of the people live on kibbutzim, and only 14.5% live on other rural farms; 82.5% of Israelis are citydwellers. At a recent Histadrut meeting, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, 63, secretary-general of the powerful 1,100,000-member union, raised the issue within the very councils of the Establishment. "All that old Zionist propaganda about pioneering is true but it is irrelevant now," he said. "It has no validity for the social situations of the '70s."

The government response so far has been tortoise-like. After the first Sephardic demonstrations, alarmed municipalities did scurry to find funds for slum clearance and urban renewal. But on the national government level, Mrs. Meir met with Panther leaders and took an instant dislike to them. "Perhaps they were good boys once," she commented after the meeting, "and I hope they will be good in the future. But they are certainly not good boys now."

In a Knesset debate last month, Housing Minister Ze'ev Sharef blamed the poor--meaning the Sephardim--for part of the problem--meaning that they spent money they could not afford on bar mitzvahs, weddings and TV sets, instead of hoarding their savings for housing.

The degree to which the government shifts policy on housing priorities may indicate how quickly and how well it intends to face such other problems of peace as crime and poverty. It may also indicate how open the entrenched government is to changing forces. "There has not been enough long-range planning in Israel, not enough attention paid by the government to the gap that had been growing between rich and poor, not enough pressure put on the government," says Hebrew University Professor Sol Kugelmass. "Now the Panthers are putting on the pressure." And the government, despite its preoccupation with defense, will have to respond soon to these opening shots in the other war.

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