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Seashore Thoughts

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The third danger may be the worst: that growing numbers of young, well-educated, talented Israelis will emigrate to the US and Germany, leaving behind the less-educated, more primitive, less productive population. This is already happening. Almost all of my friends have sons and daughters living abroad.

By the way, distance seems to increase "patriotism" -- indeed, Netanyahu is working now to confer voting right on Israelis living permanently abroad, obviously believing that most of them will vote for the extreme right.

And what about the future of the globe? To hell with it.

VERY FEW people talk about these dangers. They silently agree that "there are no solutions." So why "break our heads" about them?

But there is another danger, about which everybody talks endlessly: the breaking apart of Israeli society.

When I was young, before the birth of the State of Israel, we were determined to create a new society, indeed a new nation, a new Hebrew nation. We shunned the appellation "Jewish," because we were different from world Jewry -- earthbound, territorial, national.

We consciously celebrated the "Sabra" prototype. Sabra is the Hebrew word for the cactus plant, which we considered native to our country (though actually an immigrant from Mexico). The appellation was given to the new generation born in the country. The Sabra was supposed to be practical, matter-of-fact, far from Jewish sophistry. Unconsciously we assumed that the new type was Ashkenazi, blue-eyed, of European descent.

Under this banner we created what we considered a new Hebrew culture. This culture consisted, for us, not only of literature, poetry, music and such, but also of military and civilian norms, everything.

There was a lot of conceit in this, but we were proud of creating something completely new. It helped us to stand on our own feet, win (albeit barely) the 1948 war and found the state.

We brought in a huge wave of new immigrants, and that's where the trouble started. At the "outbreak of the state," as we say jokingly in Hebrew, we were around 650,000 souls. In a short time, we brought in more than a million new immigrants -- not only the remnants of the Holocaust in Europe but also almost all the Jews from Muslim countries.

Those who hesitated were helped along. In Iraq, Israeli secret agents planted bombs in some synagogues to convince the Jews that they must leave.

We expected the new immigrants to become like us, if not immediately, then in a generation. It did not happen. The "orientals" had their own culture and traditions, they had no desire at all to become "Sabras."

The hope of people like David Ben-Gurion that the problem would solve itself within a few years came to nought. It didn't. On the contrary, resentment and mutual antipathy grew with time. Today, a third and fourth generation is conscious of it more than ever.

THEN THERE is the "national-religious" camp, those who wear knitted kippahs.

When the state broke out, everyone expected religion to die out. Hebrew nationalism had taken over, the Jewish religion belongs to the Diaspora and will disappear in this country together with the old people who still cling to it. They were treated with benign contempt.

The opposite happened. After the 1967 war, which brought Israeli soldiers to the ancient biblical sites, religion revived in leaps and bounds. It created the settlers' movement, took hold of the rightist camp, and is now a dominant force in Israeli life and politics, slowly taking hold of the all-powerful army.

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Uri Avnery is a longtime Israeli peace activist. Since 1948 has advocated the setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1974, Uri Avnery was the first Israeli to establish contact with PLO leadership. In 1982 he was the first Israeli ever to meet Yassir Arafat, after crossing the lines in besieged Beirut. He served three terms in the (more...)
 

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