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The First Generation
17,569
Israelis were born in 1948. They were born to a generation that had
just finished a war of survival, many were Holocaust survivors, and
most of them were trying to put down roots in a new country. The
generation of 1948 grew up in a period of austerity, came to
maturity during the Six Day War, and went through three more wars
before they were released from reserve duty. As they reach sixty
most of them feel that something in the spirit of Israel, has been
lost.
I was born on the day of the first population
census in Israel,15 November 1948. The country was put under curfew
as teams from the Central Bureau of Statistics went from house to
house counting the people of the new state and giving them identity
numbers.
My generation was born into the state. We grew up with it. Our
history corresponds with the story of Israel. We were definitely
baby boomers, but we grew up in a country that had just gone through
a terrible war for its very existence, and was fighting for economic
survival while absorbing more than its own population in new
immigrants. We grew up in a period of austerity. Food and
commodities were rationed with coupons and the Israelis learned to
cope with a budding bureaucracy. For decades, my mother forbid us to
buy food in the grocery store at the end of the street. "He sold
food on the black market" she used to admonish us years after the
grocery had turned into a computer store.
With less than a quarter of the population than the country has
today, the geography was different. Bigger, more open. Empty lots
surrounded the house that I grew up in and from the back verandah
you could see the sea. To get to my high school, I had to cross the
Ayalon River, at that time still called by its Arabic name, Wadi
Musrara, In winter it turned into a raging torrent of water, that
overflowed through the eucalyptus groves, planted on its banks to
drain the swamps. Today, from the house that I grew up in only the
surrounding buildings are visible, the Ayalon is a highway, and the
Israel Diamond Exchange stands where the eucalyptus groves used to
be.
We were a motivated bunch of kids. Zionism was part of the school
curriculum, and the teachers, mostly men, took a personal interest
in our education. My history, Hebrew, Bible, geography, art,
economics, and chemistry teachers all had a PhD. in their fields.
Our Hebrew teacher was a poet, our Bible teacher had written study
books on the subject, our geography teacher was the author of the
"Atlas of Israel", and our gym teacher had won the Israel Gymnastics
Championship. It was mandatory to be a member of a youth movement,
and after the 10th grade, you were encouraged to be a counselor in
the youth movement.
Israel, before the Six Day War, was still a huge country. Driving to
the Negev for a hiking trip took a day. We would set out with our
youth movement group, on the back of a truck, in the morning, and
arrive towards evening at the trail head. The drive to Jerusalem
took three hours, the hike from the Mediterranean to the Sea of
Galilee four days. We hiked a lot during high school, getting to
know a country that was very much pristine. My parents owned a car
which was rare and my uncle on the kibbutz used to come once a
week with the fish truck from the Galilee, and give my mother three
or four live carp, which would swim around in the bathtub until
their turn to be eaten came around.
The 1967 Six-Day War was the crossroads of my generation. Some of us
were already serving in the army; others would be drafted
immediately after the war. I was in the middle of my matriculation
exams. For my generation, this was our third war. We were born
during the War of Independence, were eight years old during the
Sinai Campaign, and now were old enough to understand what was going
on.
For the first time we met Palestinians. We arrived with ideals,
moral standards, a belief in human rights. The army moved its bases
into abandoned Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian Army camps and we came
face to face with the realities of ruling over another people. I
remember one military exercise in Samaria, at that time still called
the West Bank, when we were supposed to charge across a ploughed
field. We refused. The Palestinian farmers watched with awe, as a
group of soldiers stood arguing with their commander that they would
not trample over a field that had just been ploughed. The ploughing
itself was done with a donkey and an old wooden plough. For us it
was amazingly Biblical. The Bible came alive during those early days
in Judea and Samaria. My base camp was in the Dotan Valley were
Joseph had been sold into slavery, a little further on was Tirza,
Samaria and Shechem places that I had learned about in so many
classes in school.The poison of ruling over another people would
seep in slowly, together with the breakdown of the unity that had
kept our society together.
In the south we discovered the Sinai; a huge empty desert peninsula.
Three times the size of Israel with hardly any roads and very
inaccurate maps. I, like many of my generation, fell in love with
this land of the exodus, burning bushes, and wandering tribes. It
was a land to be discovered hidden valleys, waterfalls,
unchartered paths and places that were not marked on the map. As my
military career flourished I got to know the Negev and Sinai like
the back of my hand. Tracking down Bedouins trying to smuggle
Palestinian terrorists, hashish, or arms from Jordan, into Israel,
on training maneuvers in this vast empty land, or just hiking around
the mountains and enjoying the miles of undiscovered beaches.
My wake-up call was the War of Attrition on the Suez Canal. 721
Israelis fell in a war that started in March 1969 and ended in
August 1970. Most of my generation served in the IDF during that
period. While a few of us battled it out with the Egyptians on the
Suez Canal, Israel was busy with a blossoming consumer economy. The
generation of 1948 ended their compulsory military service in 1970
some later, and some a few months earlier. Three years later they
were at war again.
I remember well that Yom Kippur morning in 1973. As a company
commander, I was called up at noon, before the war actually broke
out. This is no exercise, I was told by the driver of the Jeep that
picked me up. The company itself was called up in the afternoon. Our
supply and equipment base was a mess. Scrounging together vehicles,
weapons, and equipment we raced to the Southern Front. There we took
part in the first counterattack on October 8, which misfired
completely. We eventually crossed the Suez Canal and encircled the
Egyptian Third Army on the other side of the canal. My unit, all
young reservists, remained enlisted for six months when we got
back home we had to put our lives together again. Businesses had
collapsed, jobs had been filled by non-combatants. For me, as a
student, I had to face missing a semester that had started without
me. The gap between those that serve and those that dont was
beginning to rear its ugly head.
In the meantime the government began to pour money into settlements
in Judea and Samaria, taking it away from infrastructure, education,
and social services. Politicians were busy buying their way to
power, and the growing Ministry of Finance bureaucracy was setting a
capitalist agenda that was making the well-off and well-connected
rich, while the condition of the poorer part of society worsened.
The middle class majority paid for it all. Nine years after we came
back from the Yom Kippur War my generation went to war again 1982
in Lebanon. Again my unit was called up another six months of
our lives were spent at war with many months to come in additional
years, spent in patrolling Southern Lebanon and Judea and Samaria.
Israel today is seemingly a success story. From a bankrupt country
with no resources whatsoever, we have managed to create a world
class western economy with a GNP that has made us part of the
industrialized nations of the world. We have weathered 7 wars with
our neighbors, two intifadas, and hundreds of terror attacks, we
have created a vibrant Hebrew culture, and a super modern and highly
technological society. But the country is coming apart at the seams.
Something is very wrong in Israel. It is not only the economic gap,
or the breakdown of solidarity. It is not the crisis in the
educational system, or academe, or the growing violence in the
streets. Israelis always believed in their ability to make things
happen against all odds. Miracles if you want. A belief that if we
try hard enough, we will be able to make the impossible work. It
seems that along the way we have lost faith in these abilities, in
the belief that we can make a difference.
David Ben Gurion did not understand anything about the economy,
money, or organization. He was a man of vision; a man who set goals
for his people, and for the people working with him and made them
live up to them. Somewhere along the way we lost our Ben Gurionism
our ability to set common goals for society.
Sixty years is not a lot for a nation. But after sixty years we are
facing a very grave crisis. We have to regain our will to put
society to work again for a common cause. We have to get rid of the
bureaucratic government mess that we have created, find new
leadership that is not interested only in its own survival, and set
an agenda for diminishing the gap between rich and poor, periphery
and center, get the educational system and the health system
working. If we set this agenda we can still make the impossible
work. The generation of 1948, is the generation that has to lead the
way.
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