Troubled Land of Zion
By Mayo Mohs
COVER STORY
Amid military tensions and internal problems, Israelis face a crucial choice
At precisely 11 a.m. one day last week, air raid sirens across Israel sounded a single, high-pitched "all clear" blast for two minutes, and the country came to a standstill. On Jaffa Road in the heart of Jerusalem, pedestrians froze in their tracks. Lounging border troops sprang to attention. Vehicles braked to a halt in the middle of intersections. Bus passengers rose to their feet--as did people all across the nation. In stores, restaurants and offices, conversations stopped, forks were put down, typewriters and business machines hushed. It was Israel's Memorial Day. In the silent vigil, Israelis remembered the dead of the five wars they have fought since the creation of the state in 1948.*
Then, at sunset, the next day's observance began, this one in joy rather than sorrow. The day of mourning was followed by the festive Independence Day, this year marking the 33rd year of Israel's existence as a state. Jerusalem's King George Street was closed to traffic as young people linked arms to dance the hora and began the celebration. Some of the merriment lasted through the night with springtime abandon.
Israel, at 33, had some reasons to celebrate. The country had enjoyed nearly a decade of peace since the 1973 October War. It had signed a historic peace treaty with Egypt, the largest and most powerful of its Arab neighbors. It had achieved a fair measure of prosperity and a high living standard for its 3.9 million citizens. Yet beneath the surface gaiety Israel's mood was troubled. The once exuberant young democracy, the land of gardens in the desert and triumphs on the battlefield, showed signs of age, uneasiness and uncertainty. In many ways it seemed a nation at odds with itself, with its past, with its values. The vision of the future once so boldly defined by its leaders seemed somehow out of focus. Faced with a world more complicated than the one into which it was born, it seemed to lack direction.
There was ample cause for Israelis to be concerned. The country was beset by internal troubles and a burning foreign crisis. Concern about a possible new war with Syria was on everyone's mind. Prime Minister Menachem Begin's transitional government, charged with guiding the country until the June 30 elections, found itself embroiled in a growing campaign controversy over Israel's actions in Lebanon. On Independence Day Begin declared in a broadcast that it would take a "miracle" to induce Syria by diplomacy alone to remove the SA-6 antiaircraft missiles it has placed in Lebanon. The Israeli government, he added dourly, did not believe in miracles.
Israel's economy, unfortunately, seemed in need of a miracle. The Independence Day celebrations were almost dimmed--quite literally--by a threatened walkout of the country's electrical workers, who were demanding higher wages. They relented only in the face of the national holiday. Their threat was typical of the endemic labor troubles that have been engendered by the country's hyperinflation, which has been running at 130%. At the same time economic growth was stagnating, and the foreign debt deepening.
Beyond the fear of a new war and the squeeze of a chaotic economy, social problems old and new are tearing at the fabric of Israeli society. Ethnic differences, exacerbated by social inequalities, strain relations between the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe and the Sephardi Jews of the Mediterranean and the Muslim world. Religious quarrels set observant Orthodox Jews against the secular values of less pious Israelis. Lawlessness in general has risen sharply in a nation unused to it, and a small but flourishing Israeli "Mafia" has become an embarrassing new entry in international organized crime. A restive younger generation has shown growing dissatisfaction with the lack of job opportunities, the disruptive effects of compulsory military service, housing shortages and the political process.
The most dramatic manifestation, to some observers, is a disheartening exodus. Each month fully 2,000 Israelis leave for other lands. While demographers explain that this is a normal outflow for a free society, the trend runs counter to Israel's very reason for being. The emigrants' motives are mixed, but their departure suggests a loss of the visionary strength common to the pioneers of an earlier generation, who often risked their lives to get into--and stay in--Israel.
All of these problems are reflected, some more bitterly than others, in the current election campaign, which will culminate in a vote for a new Knesset--and with it a new government. The shifting public opinion as the campaign built up was itself a significant measure of national uncertainty about the country's direction. Last January, when the Likud coalition government was forced to call early elections after a protracted period of infighting and noisy public walkouts by key Cabinet ministers, a Labor election victory under Party Leader Shimon Peres seemed almost assured. Polls showed, in fact, that Labor might obtain a genuine majority in the 120-seat Knesset, more than it has ever managed to do before. Last week, however, a new poll showed Labor and Likud each taking 41 seats, with a scattering going to minor parties, and a number undecided.
The startling recovery of Begin and his Likud coalition was due in part to Labor's overconfidence and failure to mount an aggressive early offensive. The departure from Begin's Cabinet of such prickly individualists as Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman and Finance Minister Yigal Hurvitz helped to give the coalition the illusion of unity, even if some critics saw it more properly as a vacuum. Newly appointed Finance Minister Yoram Aridor had added an undeniably popular move by reducing excise taxes and import duties on luxury items like color television sets and autos. The "Aridor effect," as it promptly became known, sent Israelis on a crazy buying spree. Laborites angrily charged that it was a shameless attempt to buy votes for which the country would have to pay later. Some middle-of-the-road opinion was also scandalized. "The Israeli government has suddenly evaporated," commented Columnist Amnon Dankner in Tel Aviv's daily Ha'aretz. "It is hovering over the earth like some pinkish cloud out of which there rains down on us every week Aridor's latest portion of manna." Nonetheless, the manna was fattening the average wage earner's buying power and providing for goods that were previously far too expensive.
Complicating the race for both major parties were the twists and turns of Old Soldier Dayan's political maneuvers. Early last month he announced the formation of his own Movement for National Renewal. As an independent candidate Dayan appeared to be a possible spoiler in the campaign, able to attract as many as 20 or 25 seats in the Knesset. But by last week the latest poll showed him taking only four seats. One possible explanation for his rapid slippage: voters' memories of a comparably idealistic third party in 1977, which generated high hopes but quickly split into bickering factions.
On the campaign trail, Begin pressed home his vision of Eretz Israel, the "land of Israel" with its extended biblical boundaries, as a necessary bastion of strength in a hostile world. As he had in 1977, Begin, an Ashkenazi originally from Poland, was skillfully using his hawkish posture to retain the support of lower-income Sephardi Jewish refugees from Arab lands who shared his distrust of Arabs. Two weeks ago, at a festival in Jerusalem's Sacher Park attended by some 50,000 North African Jews, Begin so charmed his audience that bodyguards had to protect the frail candidate from his listeners' affection. Later, when Peres tried to mount the same podium, he was greeted with a shower of tomatoes and oranges thrown by jeering young men and was forced to retreat from the rostrum without uttering a word. Labor charged angrily that the Likud had orchestrated the demonstration.
Begin was on the offensive again last week, recklessly linking old horrors to current problems. He issued a scathing denunciation of West Germans in general and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in particular for dealing with Saudi Arabia and for supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization. Ignoring decades of attempted reconciliation and restitution, Begin charged in his diatribe that the Germans, in effect, were still Nazis at heart and had forgotten the Holocaust and their penitential obligation to Israel (see box).
Peres' Labor Party has been slow to fashion its own offensive. For most of the three months after the campaign began, his party acted as though the election were already won and set about choosing who among them would be the winners. That, in Israel's complicated proportional representation, involves elaborate wheeling and dealing to dole out ranks on the party list, the 120-candidate roster from which the voters will select the new Knesset members. Because the percentage of the popular vote determines how many on the list will be elected, places at the top are the prizes. The jockeying for position can be fierce. One party heavyweight, Abba Eban, a former Foreign Minister, was previously No. 2 after Peres; now he is No. 3. To soothe his feelings, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Peres' bitter rival, was moved from 20th position to fourth.
In the No. 2 spot Peres last week placed a new name: Shoshana Arbelli-Almozlino, 55, a hawkish Knesset member and teacher, who went to Israel from Iraq. It was a shrewd choice, designed to give Labor more appeal among women and non-European Jews and to counter Peres' own relatively dovish image. In a meeting last week to hammer out the key top half of their final list, Peres sounded oddly hawkish himself. He accused Begin of inconsistency in regard to the occupied territories. "I don't accept Begin's statements," he said at one point. "He says he won't give up Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. Who then gave up the Northern Sinai and Sharm el Sheikh without asking anybody? Did we?" Added Peres sarcastically: "Who betrayed his ideals more than anyone else?"
Few Israeli leaders could be more different from one another than the aging, pugnacious Menachem Begin, 67, and the vigorous if sometimes reticent Shimon Peres, 57. Begin was forged by the Holocaust, and carries his fury like the harpoon of Captain Ahab. Peres escaped the scar. The difference is crucial. Begin, looking backward to the genocide, vows with other Israelis: "Never again." But he seems to have little patience with the grievances of the Arabs or understanding of their rights, and too often he shapes a policy that invites attack. Peres, who observes the vow less flamboyantly, seems more open to Arab concerns. He tends to look forward to construct Israel's future in ways that defuse such attack.
The Likud coalition, built around Begin's Herut Party and its Liberal allies, is in most ways the polar opposite of Labor. Likud is more sympathetic to Orthodox Jewish strictures in Israeli law; Labor is not. Likud subscribes to laissez-faire economics; Labor has built Israel's welfare state. Labor's supporters include unionists, kibbutzniks, professionals, the Likud's entrepreneurs and nationalists.
The two parties' philosophies clash most sharply in their vision of what Israel is and what the place of the occupied territories should be in Israel's future. At the heart of the issue are the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Tellingly, most Israelis refer to the West Bank by the biblical regional names that Begin made fashionable: Judea and Samaria. Begin, in fact, would like to add them to the permanent map of the country, as part of the state of Israel. According to its official policy, the Likud would offer "full autonomy" to the Arab population. The hyperbolic formulation gives lip service to the Camp David agreement but little else. The "autonomy" would include administrative control over police, taxation and urban administration, but would not, for example, extend to such matters as water supplies, land use, immigration and security. Theoretically, ultimate sovereignty could follow further negotiations, but Begin's own position is clear. Visiting a West Bank settlement on Independence Day, he vowed that "as long as I serve the nation as Prime Minister, we will not leave any part of Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights."
The Labor Party, on the other hand, is committed to a negotiated withdrawal from most of the West Bank, although so far it has found no one with whom to negotiate. Peres' plan calls for Israel to return to Jordan about 80% of the population and 70% of the land of the West Bank, retaining 30% of the territory, including some Labor-founded settlements. Jordan has so far publicly refused to discuss the plan. Former Foreign Minister Eban, speaking for many, points out the pragmatic virtue of avoiding "the need to exercise coercive rule over a million and a quarter people against their wishes and the will of the world." Adds Peres: "What makes Israel a Jewish state are the number of Jews who live in it."
The cost of that Jewish state has risen sharply over the years. If Labor returns to power this summer, it cannot entirely blame Begin for the runaway economy it inherits. In Israel's first two decades, of course, Labor Party leaders from David Ben-Gurion onward were glad to claim credit for the ebullient growth of a prospering new society: with an average 10% annual growth in the G.N.P., the pioneers were making more than the desert bloom. The Six-Day War of 1967, which thrust Israel out to the Red Sea and the Jordan River, complicated this glowing picture.
While the economy still grew, the country had to build up its arsenal in an arms race with Egypt and Syria, acquiring an increasingly burdensome foreign-trade deficit. Still, with a touch of the hubris typical of the time, Yitzhak Rabin declared in September 1973: "Golda [Meir] has better boundaries than King David or King Solomon." A few weeks later Egyptian armor pierced those boundaries and collapsed the illusion. Israel resisted invasion, but at a steep price.
As Prime Minister after the October War, Rabin presided over a demoralized country. Israel counted 2,552 dead, 7,500 wounded--casualties that touched virtually every household. The economy was a casualty too, as Israel had to begin replacing an estimated $10 billion in war equipment lost in the conflict. That enormous outlay was deepened by the oil crisis and worldwide cycle of recession and inflation in 1974 and 1975. When the Labor Party went down to defeat in 1977, it was at least partly for economic reasons: inflation then was running at an "unhealthy" rate of 39%.
A fervent advocate of free enterprise, incoming Prime Minister Menachem Begin tried to inject new life into the economy by exposing it more directly to international competition. He gave Israelis for the first time the right to hold up to $3,000 in foreign currency. The 1978 budget increased both public spending and government credits to exporters. The efforts to stimulate the economy succeeded all too well. Israelis went on a buying binge with their new foreign cash, and inflation went skyward. Before the end of 1978 it stood at 48%; in 1979 it hit 111% and last year briefly reached 200%.
The potentially crippling effects of this hyperinflation, terrifying from the outside, have been cushioned inside Israel by one of the world's most sophisticated systems of economic indexation. It shields the wage earner by linking most significant money transactions to the inflation rate. Wages must be automatically adjusted by an employer to compensate for 80% of the current rate. Similar adjustments are made for personal savings, pensions, life insurance policies and mortgages. Indexation, however, did not prevent some painful constraints, nor deter those trying to anticipate the next round of price rises. "I have doubts whether indexation can continue to be the answer," says Arnon Gafny, governor of the Bank of Israel. "The faster the inflation rate, the less effective indexation may be."
Because of inflation, most Israelis could no longer afford to purchase ever more costly consumer goods--until Aridor stepped in as Begin's Finance Minister in January. His cuts in excise taxes and prices triggered an avalanche of voracious buying. Just in the first month of the new policies, Israelis bought 100,000 television sets, mostly color models, and 200,000 other major appliances. A parade of 747 cargo planes has descended on Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv laden with luxury goods from the U.S. and West Germany; one El Al jetliner from Western Europe even bumped some passengers to add appliances.
The euphoria of the spring shopping spree contrasts sharply with Israel's sorely strained finances within the world economy. "Our real crisis," says the Bank of Israel's Gafny, "is the fact that for the past seven years the economy has not been growing. Our G.N.P. is almost static." In 1980, in fact, the rise in G.N.P. was a mere .9%, a disaster for a nation that must pay ever higher import bills. Israel's energy bill alone, a relatively tiny $200 million in 1973, had increased tenfold by 1980, to $2.2 billion. Foreign debt stood at a chilling $17.5 billion--an awesome 83% of the G.N.P. --$4,500 for every man, woman and child in Israel.
Israel's exports, from armaments to oranges to wine, have grown from $1.4 billion in 1973 to $10.2 billion last year, but not enough to offset $13.9 billion in imports for 1980. Israel's swelling deficit is reflected in its shrinking currency. The depreciated Israeli pound was renamed the shekel 14 months ago and was worth 25-c-; last week the shekel was selling at an embarrassing 10-c-.
Heavy outlays for defense spending, in addition to the cost of energy and debt repayment, have fueled Israel's economic crisis. In 1980 the country's military security cost $5.4 billion, fully 31% of the $17.7 billion budget--and that does not count $1.4 billion in military aid from the U.S. to allay losses from the peace treaty with Egypt. Israel's war machine is formidable. The Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) has grown immensely since the traumatic weeks of the 1973 October War. The armed forces now number 169,000, with 252,000 reservists ready to report on 24 to 48 hours' notice. The I.D.F. possesses 481 planes, with 90 F-15s and F-16s on order, and 3,050 tanks--many of them highly sophisticated.
Some of the sophistication is home grown, the product of Israel's fast-developing and innovative defense industry--the seventh largest in the world. The weapons have been designed for Israel's own needs: the lightweight, high-powered UZI submachine gun, which has become a symbol of Israeli arms technology; the heavily armored and sharpshooting Merkava (Chariot) main battle tank, which can carry five infantrymen; and the highly maneuverable Kfir-C2 fighter-bomber. But Israel also sells increasing quantities of these and other weapons on the world market. At least 750,000 UZls have gone to 40 countries, and last week a new mini-uzi, much smaller but nearly as high-powered, went on public display for the first time. Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico, among others, are considering purchases of the new Kfir-C2. In all, Israel's weapons sales have gone up 40% in the past year, to a total of $1.3 billion.
Advances in weaponry development have been matched by changes in strategy and supply. Sobered by the lessons of 1973, when crucial time was lost in getting units and their armor to the front, the I.D.F. has since concentrated on quick response and mobility. Emergency stores of equipment that were kept in the central sector of the country before 1973 have been moved to the fronts. The amount of armor available at the fronts has also been heavily reinforced. Most important, perhaps, is the development of a new kind of self-sufficient fighting force known as the Ugda. Smaller than an army, larger than a division, the Ugda : possesses all of the needs of an independent battle unit: armor, air and intelligence capabilities.
Another lesson of the 1973 mechdal ("failure," in Hebrew) has prompted an entirely new strategic assumption. Before the October War of 1973, I.D.F. commanders had depended on their intelligence network to assess Arab threats, then deployed forces accordingly. Now they assume that an attack can come from anywhere--and have forces permanently deployed on all borders. Even the Egyptian front is covered, although more lightly than before the 1979 peace treaty. Dispatching intelligence teams to the frontline units also is part of the attempt to move fast if necessary.
Morale in the I.D.F. is a source of both pride and problems, owing to the fact that Israel demands basic military service from virtually every young person--two years for women, three years for men. Elite volunteer units are more popular with the public than ever before. Young Israelis still yearn to be jet pilots, but they also apply enthusiastically for the paratroopers, naval commando units, and groups like the crack Golani brigade, which has carried out many of the recent raids into Lebanon. Women, once rare in field forces, now work as tank and plane mechanics, serve in artillery and communication units and are sometimes posted to duty as drill sergeants.
The everyday maintenance tasks and other humdrum assignments facing new draftees, however, are not as easy to fill as when the forces were smaller. To help staff the jobs, the I.D.F. has begun to accept young people with criminal records, whom it once rejected. That has served to aggravate a decline in discipline, which bothers army commanders. Israeli troops have always been informal, but at the core they were tough and ready to fight. The new disregard of discipline has prompted the I.D.F. to emphasize symbols of obedience. Signs have gone up on military bases: SOLDIER, IMPROVE YOUR APPEARANCE.
If society has contributed to the military's problems, that is because the two are so intimately linked in Israel. One sign of the military's pervading influence always startles foreign visitors. Weapons seem to be everywhere. When two 18-year-old female soldiers turned up for dinner recently at a Jerusalem home, they said, "Shalom," and casually handed their host their two uzi submachine guns. Youngsters learn to use firearms in training camps during high school.
Service in the I.D.F. is still the great integrator of Israeli society, fusing new immigrants and the native-born sabras, future brain surgeons and semiliterate country youths. It is also the required entrance card to the corridors of success. Those who somehow avoid military service are branded as dropouts, stymied in their careers, refused promotions, even shunned in friendship.
Yet service itself can also truncate careers. After their two or three years of basic duty--usually between 18 and 21 --some young people report that they are no longer interested in the college education they once planned. The urge to return to study, after such a long break, is totally sapped. Some who have tried say that after a week or two of classes they find their minds drifting and the desire to learn simply gone.
There is an economic price too. After active duty, each Israeli male must serve four to six weeks of reserve duty every year until the age of 55 (unmarried women serve until 34). The obligation, in a nicely egalitarian way, affects everyone, but it exacts a toll. Shops slow down; restaurants stand half-empty as chefs depart; gaps must be filled on assembly lines. As former Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin once put it, "Every Israeli citizen is on eleven months' leave from the army."
Some of Israel's other troubling social problems are simply current manifestations of longstanding tensions, notably the antagonism between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews and the often violent clashes between Orthodox and more secular Jews. The differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are ancient and real. The original Sephardim were the powerful Jews of Moorish Spain, who were expelled from the country in 1492 and dispersed to North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and Asia. (A smaller, later wave, who had taken temporary refuge in Portugal, later migrated to The Netherlands, Britain and the Americas.)
Ashkenazi Jews, the Europeans who dominated the Zionist movement in the 20th century, originally were a tiny community on the Rhine. The Ashkenazim founded modern political Zionism and brought to Israel Western values, education, technology and tastes. The problem lies in the fact that often they look down on Sephardim, and the Sephardim on them, a phenomenon fed by ethnic differences. Sephardim tend to live in small towns, raise large families, and to eat foods that even now reflect their Spanish heritage. Rice, for example, is permitted during Passover. Ashkenazim tend to make their homes in the city or the kibbutz, and are often lighter in skin, eye color and hair than the Sephardim. The two groups' religious rituals differ markedly.
Recognition of these distinctions is institutionalized in Israel's Chief Rabbinate: one Ashkenazi, one Sephardi. Elevation of certain Sephardim to high positions--President Yitzhak Navon is a Sephardi--represents a triumph of talent over prejudice, even though more than half of Israel's population are Sephardim. Economic inequities mirror the prejudice. Explains Daniel Shimshoni, director of Israel's neighborhood rehabilitation program: "Most of the residents in depressed neighborhoods, or their parents, came from Middle Eastern or African countries. Of the lower income groups, those of Asian and African origin form the majority."
It may be easier to reconcile Israel's Ashkenazim and Sephardim than to bridge the chasm between the country's powerful Orthodox Jews and those who hew to more liberal religious views, or simply to secular values. The state is secular, but in personal matters the strict judgments of the Orthodox Rabbinates rule, a hangover from the years when the British, following Ottoman Empire custom, left such powers in the hands of local religious leaders. Thus marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption--all are under the jurisdiction of the religious, not civil, courts. The 250,000 Orthodox Jews wield a political clout out of proportion to their numbers. Part of that influence is due to the swing-vote power of the National Religious Party. It has been enhanced in recent years by Begin's own sympathy for the traditionalists, which has helped them score new legislative successes.
Shortly after the government called for new elections, the traditionalists won approval of a law sharply restricting the performance of transplants and of autopsies, which, the Orthodox believe, desecrate the dead. On the day after the passage of the autopsy bill, ultra-Orthodox students from Jerusalem's Mea Shea'arim quarter raided a medical school and forcibly halted an autopsy, heavily damaging medical equipment. When the attackers were arrested, their supporters in Mea Shea'arim went on a rampage, burning garbage cans, breaking water mains and assaulting city employees.
Jerusalem's administration is taking great pains to appease the Orthodox. Plans for a new and larger municipal stadium have been scrapped because the best site was near an Orthodox community --and its inhabitants abhor Sabbath soccer. A bypass has been built around the Kiryat Zanz district in the northern part of the city to circumvent a longstanding, almost ritual, conflict: violent clashes that erupt almost every Saturday between secular neighborhood bands and militant vigilantes, who are so strictly Orthodox that they do not allow cars to drive on their streets on the Sabbath.
Such religiously motivated vandalism is not so worrisome to Israelis as a newer challenge to the law: organized crime. The infection has spread in the wake of the industrialization and urbanization of the 1960s. It appeals particularly to those who could not fit into a modern, Western-style society. At its core are several Mafia-like family gangs whose ethnic roots are in Yemen and North Africa. Beginning as petty criminals, they are now said to be engaged in counterfeiting, extortion, illegal money transactions, black market operations and even drug smuggling from South America to the U.S.
The organized gangs' operations probably involve no more than a few hundred criminals, including accomplices. But there is a rise of random crime as well. Once, before the state was founded, the late Zionist Poet Chaim Nahman Bialik used to say that he dreamed of the day when Jews could live like ordinary people, and "I will see a Jewish thief." In that sorry sense, a Zionist dream has been fulfilled. Armed robbery and burglaries are on the rise: an auto is stolen every ten minutes. Worse, there were 74 murders in the country last year, up from 58 in 1979.
Israel has a growing drug problem, too, though it is a minor disease compared with the plague in many other countries. There are about 6,000 known addicts, and over the last five years 53 Israelis have died from hard drugs, 23 in 1980 alone. Though the government says that only 2% of the country's high school youths have tried hashish, it is taking no chances; it is a crime just to be present at a gathering where drugs are used.
To most Israelis, the crime statistics are less troubling symptoms of social malaise than the emigration figures, which seem to fly in the face of Israel's very purpose. Deputy Prime Minister Simcha Ehrlich somewhat hyperbolically described emigration last December as "the most important national problem." The Zionist goal of "ingathering of the exiles" was for decades complemented by the exiles' dream of aliya --"going up" to the homeland. The opposite phenomenon of yerida -- "going down" to the outside world -- was deemed so despicable that those who left were viewed as near traitors. But emigration is now so commonplace that the stigma is fading. Says Hebrew University Freshman Ayala Broide, 22: "For me, it's good in Israel, but there are those who want an easier life. If Israelis want to emigrate and live abroad, I don't see why they shouldn't." Israel's young can be more flexible than their elders on other issues, too, and are both questioning and speaking out on them. Yael Maschler, 22, a mathematics and linguistics major at the university, is sympathetic toward the Palestinian Arabs. Says she: "If they want a state, I can understand that. It is not only I, as a Jew living here, who am right. They should also have something for themselves."
For all the recent ups and downs of the national mood, the public's friendliness toward the U.S. has remained fairly constant. If anything, feelings toward the U.S. have grown warmer of late simply because Reagan is seen by many as being more pro-Israel than Carter was. While no Israeli actually welcomes a situation in which the country is dependent on the U.S. as its major source of economic and military aid, no one would seriously suggest cutting the umbilical cord. "Ideally, of course, we'd like to be free and independent of everybody," shrugs Haim Marantz, 40, a philosophy lecturer at Beersheba's Ben-Gurion University, "but we're not that much worse off than England or Italy in this respect." Part of the reason for the relative ease with which the Israelis accept their dependence on the U.S. is the enduring cultural love affair most Israelis have for everything American. Young sabras still snap up American rock records and jeans, rush to any American movie, and pull every available string to travel to the U.S.
Sociologist Louis Guttman, whose Institute of Applied Social Research has been monitoring Israeli morale since the 1967 war, finds the national mood to be periodically exasperated but basically resilient. In a poll early this year, only 13% of Israelis considered the nation's economic and political position to be good, but fully 76% were certain that they could cope nonetheless. What is striking, according to another social analyst, Rafael Gill, the director of Public Opinion Research of Israel, is the way the public has lost faith in the politicians and the political parties. Gill reports that most Israelis are unconvinced that things would be any better under Shimon Peres than they have been under Menachem Begin.
Labor's Peres nonetheless has been shaping a campaign strategy that calls for a sweeping national redirection. It aims both at an economic turn-around and at a revitalization of Israeli spirit. Peres would begin his attack on inflation by cutting government spending in a significant area: slashing funds for settlements in the occupied Arab territories. He would reduce Israel's bureaucracy by 10% over the next four years. He would call for a voluntary agreement among unions, industry and government to freeze wages, salaries and taxes, but only for a cooling-off period of several months.
Peres' longer-range goal is to renew the country's economic growth. "Inflation is a beginning issue," he declares. "Development is a basic issue." He thus wants to redirect more investment capital into industries that have shown outstanding performance, notably the high-technology electronics and advanced military sectors. He would like to reimpose tight currency restrictions to curtail the flight of money abroad. And, to reignite a sense of purpose in young people, he would ask for legislation to require that all university students combine a half day of study with a half day of manual or social service work. Says Peres of his grand scheme: "We are going to revolutionize the whole administration of the country."
Israeli voters will decide whether they are ready to accept such strong medicine on June 30. The headlong plunge into euphoric consumerism in the past few months suggests that many may have to be convinced that self-sacrifice is still a useful virtue. But considering their dismal economic statistics, they may conclude that it is time to reimpose on themselves a sense of the discipline and purpose that have made the country strong.
Throughout its brief history, Israel has beckoned the sturdy and inspired the strong with the prospect of a great horizon. But in the day-to-day struggle for security, that horizon has remained largely unfocused. Political Scientist Hertzel Fishman, considering this, observes that Israel must now forge "a national character out of its many cultures, political backgrounds and ethnic origins. Israel has a basic instinct for survival. What the country needs is a sense of destiny." Defining that destiny cannot be accomplished on one election day. Nor can greatness for Israel ever be merely a matter of territory. One of the many visions of Israel is the idea, so important in the long centuries of exile, that it is more than anything else a geography of the soul, where the horizon is limitless. Despite its current troubles, Israel certainly has the ability -- if only it can summon the will -- to make that moral horizon, the Jewish people's timeless strength, the ruling priority once again.
-- By Mayo Mohs.
Reported by David Aikman and Marlin Levin/Jerusalem
* The 1948-49 war following independence, the 1956 Suez war, the Six-Day War of 1967, the 1969-70 war of attrition, and the 1973 October War.
With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN, Marlin Levin
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