By Tobias Buck
Israel turns 60 tomorrow and the government is putting on a brave effort to make the anniversary a joyful affair. Streets are decked out in tens of thousands of blue-and-white national flags. A cheerful television spot shows a boy living through the - abundant - moments of drama that shaped the country's history. As part of the celebrations, Israelis are even able to pick a national bird, from a list that includes the graceful warbler and the Palestine sunbird.
As they plunge into the festivities, Israelis have many reasons to look back with satisfaction and look ahead with confidence. The country is more populous, more secure and wealthier than it has ever been. Through ties with Washington it enjoys a rock-solid alliance with the world's most powerful nation, while its own military prowess towers over that of neighbours and regional rivals. Israel's links with leading European countries are much improved.
Relations between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbours have recently soured again but remain infinitely better than during the war-torn early decades of Israel's existence. At home, Israel has built a robust democracy and welded a disparate collection of Jews from eastern Europe and north Africa, from the Soviet Union and Yemen, from France and the US into a squabbling but cohesive nation. Its universities produce world-class research and its technology companies are among the most innovative.
"Israel today is in a vastly better strategic, military and economic situation than it has ever been in its 60 years of existence. We have peace treaties with two Arab rivals [Egypt and Jordan], we have excellent relations with Europe, China and India. Our economy is flourishing. It shows just how remarkably resilient Israel is: in 60 years there has not been one nanosecond of peace," says Michael Oren, an Israeli historian and senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based think tank.
Yet a distinct air of gloom and disillusionment hangs over the event. As Mr Oren notes, "the mood here is not terrific". Shimon Peres, the country's president and the éminence grise of Israeli politics, puts it differently but comes to a similar conclusion. "The situation", he says, "is better than the mood".
The two men's impressions are confirmed by professional followers of Israel's collective psyche, such as Camil Fuchs, a professor at Tel Aviv University and a veteran opinion poll analyst. What is wrong, then? Prof Fuchs insists the apparent sourness is only half the story. "The fact is that Israelis are today quite content with their lives. They feel their life is good, their standard of living is good," he says. "But if you were to ask, as they do in the US, whether people believe the country is heading in the right direction, a large majority would say the country is on the wrong track. The general mood is bad."
Tom Segev, one of the country's best-known historians and a columnist for Haaretz newspaper, agrees: "There is a feeling that 'I'm OK but the country is not OK'. There is a feeling that the country is going in the wrong direction."
This contradiction between how Israelis feel as individuals and how they feel about their country can be found in many places. While five years of rapid economic growth have made the majority better off, many are concerned at a widening social divide and growing inequality. According to one telling recent poll, Israelis regard the fight against poverty and inequality as even more important than reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Though most Israelis live lives far more comfortable than anything experienced by earlier generations, many bemoan the loss of the egalitarian spirit that marked Israel's pioneering years.
The ambivalence extends to the political sphere. True, Israelis of all ages show a remarkable readiness to serve their country, not least in its cherished armed forces. Although the number who try to evade military service is on the rise, when Israel was last forced to call up its reserves during the 2006 Lebanon war the response was more than 100 per cent - even soldiers who were not on the call-up list showed up to fight. But this individual commitment is at odds with the dismay with which Israelis see their politicians and the country's democratic institutions.
Political polls are exercises in despair, as ministers and opposition leaders vie for the least bad ratings. Public perceptions of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, are a case in point: according to Dahaf, a Tel Aviv-based polling institute, only 10 per cent of Israelis say he has succeeded in his job.
Prof Fuchs says citizens are "enormously disillusioned" with the political system and the country's leadership. "Israelis have no confidence in the government and no confidence in the Knesset [parliament]
The collapse of public trust in political leaders and democratic institutions is hardly unique to Israel. Neither are many of the other worries cited by commentators, such as the brain drain of highly educated youngsters to the US and Europe or the loss of social cohesion. But in a country that faces daunting challenges both at home and from abroad, they inevitably raise a question that crops up with regularity at such anniversaries: can Israel survive?
"How many countries in the world question whether they will still be around in another 20 or 30 or 50 years' time?" asks Mr Oren, only to add that, indeed, "Israel's survival is nothing that we can take for granted." Asked why, he rattles through a list of existential threats ("I stop counting at eight"), including Palestinian violence, a nuclear Iran and the lack of water. More controversially, he also cites the rise of the country's ultra-orthodox community, which he fears will drive out secular Israelis who form the economic and military backbone of society.
Mr Segev likens life in Israel to living under a volcano: "You know it will break out sooner or later but you stay all the same, because this is your home." Unlike other commentators, however, Mr Segev is less worried about internal divisions or the gradual disappearance of a unifying ideology such as Zionism. "I don't know if Israel can survive at all, but I know that its survival doesn't depend on ideology. I think Israel's survival depends on making peace with the Palestinians,
The country's inability to bring to an end a conflict as old as Israel itself is perhaps the most important reason for the gloom surrounding the 60th anniversary. The last vestiges of hope that remained from the Oslo peace accords 15 years ago were drowned in the mutual bloodshed of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, and Israel's furious military response. Now, "the truth is that we feel that no solution is in sight and that we will have to live with wars for a long period of time - much longer than we expected", says Prof Fuchs.
After seven years of recriminations, attack and counter-attack, Israel and the Palestinian leadership last year began a round of peace talks. The aim is to strike a peace agreement by the end of the year that lays the foundations for an independent Palestinian state - though Israel has since stressed that the deal would be implemented only once its security concerns are met. The talks have made little progress and to some they have long taken on an air of unreality.
How, the sceptics ask, can a peace agreement be signed, let alone implemented, when the talks ignore Hamas, the Islamist group, and Gaza, the territory it controls and that accounts for half of a future Palestinian state? And how will Mr Olmert and his chronically unstable government manage to keep Israel's side of the bargain and pull out at least some of the 450,000 Jewish settlers from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem?
In recent years, and mainly because of the rise of Hamas, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has again taken on a sharper edge. From its secure base in the Gaza Strip, Hamas launches daily rocket attacks on Israeli cities and has masterminded increasingly daring assaults on military and civilian targets close to Gaza. Estimated to have about 20,000 men under arms, the group is gaining strength by the day.
In the north, Israel faces a resurgent Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia group that fought Israel's troops to a standstill in a war that devastated swaths of Lebanon in 2006. The group, according to warnings by Israeli analysts and officers, is stronger and better equipped than it was before that conflict began.
Neither Hamas nor Hizbollah is ultimately a match for Israel's armed forces but both have the potential to inflict considerable pain on the country, not least by drawing its troops into a new and costly war. Israel's botched war in Lebanon two years ago underlined just how vulnerable the Jewish state remains to the threat posed by non-state groupings in the region.
Then there is what Israelis describe as the demographic threat - the fear that sooner or later Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will outnumber Jews. Estimates vary about when this will happen but all agree that high Palestinian birth rates and a fall in Jewish migration to Israel mean the days when Jews outnumber Palestinians are drawing to a close.
In the absence of a Palestinian state, the fear among Israelis is that the demographic shift will eventually leave the country with an unenviable choice. Israel could give Palestinians a vote - and risk turning the Jewish state into a state where the Jews are in a minority. Or it could continue keeping several million Palestinians under occupation without granting them equal rights as citizens - a scenario with more than a whiff of the political and moral quagmire that was apartheid-era South Africa.
Until recently, most Israelis would have brushed aside any such comparison. But last year none other than the prime minister raised the spectre of apartheid in an unusually blunt interview. "The day will come when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for voting rights and, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished," Mr Olmert said.
His comment was aimed primarily at shoring up public support for his peace talks with Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Yet to some, his prediction has actually been cause for hope. For the first time since peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians began, they say, Israeli leaders see the creation of a Palestinian state not as a loss of valuable territory but as a way of ensuring that their country can continue to exist and thrive as a Jewish democracy.
For the past 15 years, "Israel viewed its decision to 'grant' its adversaries such a state as a negotiating 'card' that could be 'traded' for Palestinian concessions in other areas, specifically the security field," argues Calev Ben-Dor of the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, in a recent article. "However, recent regional trends eroded these assumptions to the point of irrelevancy, and are turning the establishment of a Palestinian state from an Israeli 'card' into a pressing interest."
Today, he adds, "many Israelis consider the creation of a Palestinian state not as a threat to Zionism, but, rather, as its lifeline".
Will this shift be sufficient to allow negotiations to succeed this time? No one dares to make a prediction. As Mr Segev, the historian, remarks: "Israel is an experiment that has not succeeded and has not failed."
'These were our houses and they came and kicked us out'
Mohammed Rashid sits outside a fruit shop in the Shufat refugee camp north of Jerusalem, chewing an apricot with the few teeth he has left. Aged 75, Mr Rashid remembers the day in 1948 when he and his family were expelled from their house and their lands in Ein Kerem, a village outside Jerusalem that is today favoured by wealthy Israelis and expatriates. "The Haganah [Israel's pre-state army] came and kicked everyone out. They were like gangsters," he says.
For many decades, he held on to the deeds to his family's house, hoping that one day he could return. Eventually, one of his sons threw the old papers away. Mr Rashid looks sad and puzzled as he contemplates his fate. "This was our land, these were our houses, and they came and kicked us out."
For Israelis, Independence Day commemorates the moment David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel. For Palestinians, 1948 was the Nakba, or catastrophe, when 700,000-800,
This year, Palestinians will be left to wonder again how much longer the wait for their own state will last. That question, say Palestinians, is intimately linked with how they see Israel.
"Palestinian attitudes towards Israel changed a lot through the 60 years," says Ghassan Khatib, the director of JMCC, a Ramallah-based think tank, and a former minister in the Palestinian Authority. While Palestinians started out with "complete refusal and denial" of the Jewish state, they progressively moved towards accepting Israel as part of a two-state solution that would also give them their own sovereignty.
"Now, however, the Palestinians are a bit confused," says Mr Khatib. "When we accepted the state of Israel, it did not change anything about the occupation. The Palestinians are facing the reality that there are no signs of increasing Israeli willingness to allow for a Palestinian state."
Indeed, numerous polls show that the lack of progress towards achieving statehood has radicalised the Palestinian population. More and more are turning to Hamas, the Islamist group. Increasingly, there is talk both in Israel and among Palestinians that the current round of Middle East peace talks may present the last chance for secular Palestinian nationalism.
This year's anniversary will be particularly hard to swallow for people in Shufat and the other refugee camps scattered around the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. While world leaders are descending on Israel to take part in the festivities, none is known to have made plans to visit a Palestinian refugee camp or show public sympathy for their plight and their cause.
"The leaders are coming to honour the celebrations of an atrocity against the Palestinians. It is incomprehensible,
Mr al-Bess says he still believes Palestinians will one day have a state of their own. Until then, he adds, Israel should not hope for Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish state: "As long as Israel does not respect our rights, we are not going to accept them."
Published: The Financial Times, May 7 2008
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