Next week, Israelis will celebrate their country's 60th birthday. But even with one the world's strongest armies and a remarkable high-tech sector, their society is fragmented and fragile
SITTING IN HIS meticulously tidy, air- conditioned office in Yehud, not far from Tel Aviv, Uri Engelhard enthuses about how an algorithm developed by his company can prevent a terror attack, protect against loitering and even increase economic efficiency.
The world, he explains, is filled with cameras, along borders and in airports, parking lots, malls, banks and shops. The problem is that the people watching the video monitors which receive the feed from the cameras often don't catch what is happening on the screen in real time.
"Take Jerusalem's Old City," says Engelhard, a brigadier-general in the Israeli reserves who, like many of Israel's high-tech entrepreneurs, served in an elite computer unit. "There are 300 surveillance cameras there. You simply can't watch all the monitors all the time. People lose concentration, they get tired. It's human."
But Mate, the company of which the 50-year-old Engelhard is president and chief executive, has developed video analytics that use sophisticated algorithms to compare images from the camera, analyse the objects in them and pick out those that shouldn't be there. If an unwarranted change is detected, then an alarm is tripped, alerting security personnel to an intruder who has entered an unauthorised area.
Mate has become a worldwide leader in its field. Its sophisticated video surveillance system has been employed already in a mall in Japan to stop children from running up the down escalator, in a wealthy neighbourhood in Italy to prevent theft, below the bridges in a major US city for security purposes, and in retail chains in Israel so that shop-owners can count how many customers are frequenting their stores.
Just an hour's drive away, Haim Boaganim stands on the roof of his home in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, surveying the damage from a rocket fired by Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip. Bouganim is fortunate - his neighbour's home has taken the brunt of the blast.
Twisted steel rods protrude from a metre-wide hole that has been gouged in the roof. Peering through the hole, one can see the concrete blocks that have plunged into the bathroom down below. Water trickles from a severed pipe on the roof. The acrid smell of explosives fills the air.
No one was in the house when the rocket struck, but a few people suffering from shock have been taken to a nearby hospital.
"Hamas has decided to turn Sderot into a symbol of Israel's soft underbelly," says Boaganim, referring to the fact that more than 4,000 rockets have been fired into southern Israel, many of them at his home town, since Israel withdrew from Gaza in August 2005.
Further north, some 20 minutes' drive from Jerusalem, Amos Safrai recounts, with a quiet determination, his vision of a Greater Israel.
Sitting in an armchair in the living room of his home in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut, Safrai says that the entire region from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea - an area that includes all of the West Bank and Gaza - should be part of sovereign Israel.
He envisions the Palestinians living in a tapestry of cantons with a high degree of autonomy, but with overall control of the area - especially security control - in the hands of the Jewish state. But first, he says, they must abandon their desire to wipe out Israel and accept that they are living under Jewish rule.
"My belief is that the Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel," says Safrai, a religious Jew who in the early 1970s was one of the founders of Alon Shvut, which is now home to 800 families, including some of his four children and eight grandchildren.
In many ways, the lives of these three Israelis tell the story of the Jewish state at 60. It is the tale of a country with remarkable achievements, despite the hostile neighbourhood in which it resides. But it is also the tale of a country still desperately in search of normality in the face of existential fears.
Despite having fought a war in almost every decade since its inception in 1948, Israel has a modern, developed economy. Per-capita GDP growth in recent years has been an impressive 3 per cent and more, despite the intifada uprising and the Lebanon war in 2006. The country has absorbed one million Russian immigrants who arrived in the space of just 10 years.
The country's hospitals are highly modernised, it has a functioning legal system and its press is both free and robust.
Israel also has a world-renowned high-tech sector and boasts the highest number of computers per capita in the world. ICQ, the first internet-wide instant messaging service, was developed in Israel. So was the firewall programme for computer protection. Israeli companies are today among the leading innovators in cleantech.
The number of start-ups in Israel is second only to the US. The area of Tel Aviv and its environs, where much of this start-up activity is concentrated, has been called "Silicon Wadi" and is considered by many to be second in importance only to its Californian namesake.
"Israeli daring" partly explains this stunning high-tech success in a country with not much more than seven million people, according to Engelhard. Israel is a small, young state, he explains, where decisions are often "the product of instinct rather than the type of deep-rooted, more defined processes that exist in older, more established countries. People are not scared to throw out ideas. The system encourages them to do that."
But Israel's high-tech success cannot mask the fact that it is a country still struggling to define itself. Israelis are asking what Zionism, which served as a highly effective state-building ideology, means in the 21st century. Secular and religious Jews still argue over the place of Judaism in the Jewish state. Many of Israel's 1.2 million Arab citizens, feeling alienated and marginalised after years of being treated as second-class citizens, don't want the country to be defined by its Jewishness at all. Wealth gaps are becoming dangerously wide.
SIX DECADES ON, Israel still does not have permanent borders. Israelis have built one of the most powerful armies in the world, yet they are unable to take their very existence for granted. Peace with the Palestinians remains elusive and their prime minister has told them that failure to reach an accommodation with their neighbours will spell the end of the Jewish state.
Just three generations after Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews of Europe, many Israelis fear they are again facing the threat of annihilation, this time in the form of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been quoted as threatening to "wipe Israel off the map", though the line is disputed. Iran's nuclear programme, Israel argues, is aimed at providing him with the doomsday weapon required to do just that.
When it comes to state-building, Israel has been a "colossal success story", says Daniel Ben-Simon, a reporter at the daily newspaper, Haaretz, who is about to leave journalism for politics. "We have fought seven wars, most of them successfully, because we have built institutions to protect Israel from its enemies."
But when it comes to "society-building," as Ben-Simon calls it, Israel's report card is distinctly less impressive. "Our society is fractured. You have the ultra-Orthodox state, the state of the settlers, the Russian state, the Arab state and the state of the poor periphery. We are a federation of six or seven states within one small state. We have built one of the strongest armies in the world and we have a remarkable high-tech sector, but we are one of the most fragile and fractured societies in the world."
That fragility is nowhere more apparent than in Sderot. The rockets being fired into southern Israel have killed 11 people, several in Sderot, but their real impact has been psychological. At least one-third of the town's 25,000 residents have fled their homes. Those who remain are the ones who cannot afford to leave. They talk of how their children, traumatised by the ongoing rocket attacks and the sirens that wail every time a rocket is launched in their direction, wet their beds at night. Or of how they no longer use the upstairs floor in their homes because it is more vulnerable to a rocket attack.
For Boaganim, who was born four years after the creation of the state, Israel's 60th anniversary celebration on Thursday will not be a happy, unreserved one.
"Sixty years on," he says, "we still aren't truly independent. Being forced out of your home in your own country is like being a type of refugee. The moment I have to flee from place to place in my own country, I can't say I have really won my independence."
For many Israelis, Sderot is grim evidence of why an agreement with the Palestinians seems increasingly unattainable. Three years ago, a clear majority of Israelis gave almost unqualified support to Ariel Sharon's plan for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. They were enchanted by a plan that would enable them to withdraw from a Palestinian area without having to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians.
Today, most Israelis consider unilateralism to be a dismal failure. The incessant rocket fire and the fact that the Islamic Hamas movement, which is committed to Israel's destruction, now controls Gaza, have left them in little doubt. Prime minister Ehud Olmert's plans for a unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank are in tatters.
Israelis may despair of ever reaching an accommodation with their neighbours, but opinion polls regularly show that most still believe a two-state solution is the best way to unlock the conflict with the Palestinians. Successive Israeli governments have supported a two-state solution, yet they have also continued to build homes in the settlements.
This is testimony to the tenacity and ideological commitment of the settler movement and its ability to impose its agenda, even on unwilling governments. It is also testimony to Israel's fractious and unstable political system - there have been five elections in the last 12 years - in which political leaders have to cobble together multi-party coalitions, often with divergent ideological beliefs. The result: Israeli leaders are only able to think short-term, are obsessed with day-to-day political survival and are susceptible to the demands of special interest groups such as the settlers.
But Israel's long-term survival could well depend on its ability to extract itself - and many of the 275,000 settlers - from the West Bank.
LIKE MANY DOVISH Israelis, Ben-Simon views the settlements as the greatest obstacle to ending Israel's four-decade occupation of the Palestinian territories. After Israel's astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, he says, Jews for the first time "had a sense that they could protect themselves. But Israel has since abandoned all other aspects of life here and has poured enormous amounts of money and energy into building another Jewish state next to itself. The key to Israel's future survival lies in finding a way to put an end to this colony, this monster that we have been building for 40 years."
As the conflict lingers, Israelis have become increasingly unsettled by what they call the "demographic threat". Simply put, higher Arab birth rates will lead to a situation in a decade or two in which Arabs outnumber Jews in the geographic space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Ehud Olmert describes this scenario, in which Jews become a minority ruling over an Arab majority, in apocalyptic tones. If a Palestinian state is not created alongside Israel, he warned late last year, the country would slide into an apartheid-like situation.
"The day will come when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights," he said. "As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."
Safrai is unimpressed by the the prime minister's dire warnings. He points to the immigration of one million Russians in the 1990s as a dramatic illustration of how demographics can change. And he has not lost hope that many American Jews, who constitute the biggest Jewish community outside Israel, will ultimately end up in the Jewish state.
"I have not despaired of them," he says. "We know how delicate the fabric of Jewish life is in the diaspora."
But with Israel's conflict with its neighbours continuing to fester, and with Israelis feeling threatened by an Iranian bomb, it is difficult to convince Jews in the US that their lives are more precarious in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles than in the Jewish state. With Jewish cultural life also flourishing in the US, a growing number of Jews there have begun to view Israel as just one centre of Jewish existence, not the focal point of Jewish life.
Safrai remains optimistic. He fought in a tank in the 1973 war and was part of the successful counter-offensive Israel launched after being caught off-guard by a surprise Egyptian and Syrian attack. Having witnessed Israel prevail against great odds, he gently berates those Israelis who adopt a "short-term" view.
"We are a generation that wants to see immediate results," he says. "Yes, we have problems. But there is no other example in the world of a country that has done what we have done in the last 60 years and under the conditions we have done it. If we were to tell our grandparents that Israel at 60 is a country with the most sophisticated army in the world, that we are leaders in high-tech and agriculture, they would have said, 'What are you complaining about?'"
Ben-Simon is less sanguine. He sees a country that is convinced of the "justice of its cause" but is "tired and pessimistic".
"Most of our energies in the last six decades have gone into protecting ourselves against outside enemies," he says. "So we have neglected the society from within. We are now a country searching for a new raison d'être. That is crucial to our social solidarity, and without social solidarity you can't win a war or make peace."
Carla King reviews If I am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jewby Mike Marqusee - see Weekend Book reviews
PROTEST VOTE WHY YOUNG ISRAELIS LINED UP WITH
PENSIONERSWITH THE VOTES
counted in Israel's last election in 2006, pundits
were left scratching their heads as to how the Pensioners Party,
which in successive elections had consistently failed to pass the
electoral threshold, had suddenly grabbed seven seats in
parliament.
But as they dug deeper, a curious pattern emerged: the party's shock success had little to do with pensioners and everything to do with young Israelis who had voted in large numbers for a party with which they seemed to have no connection.
The answer to this electoral riddle is that young Israelis, disillusioned with the country's political leaders, had found a stunning way to register a protest vote. What had angered them was an ever-increasing number of corruption scandals involving politicians, leaving them with the feeling that politics had simply become a method of lining pockets.
The fear is that next time the young might choose to stay away from the polls altogether. For Israel, whose most precious resource is its people, keeping young Israelis engaged - and in the country - is critical.
Israel's youth are still clamouring to get into elite combat units in the army. But more than ever before, they are also trying to find ways to escape compulsory military service. Telling an army psychologist that you suffer from emotional problems is often enough nowadays to earn an exemption.
If emigrating from Israel was once taboo, that is no longer the case, especially for young Israelis. D, a 38-year-old doctor who has just qualified as a surgeon, was awarded a medal of honour by the Israeli army last year for extracting injured soldiers under fire during the 2006 Lebanon war. He considers himself a Zionist in the classical sense. "I believe in Israel and in the need for an Israel," he says. "Let me put it to you bluntly: we have to make sure there isn't another Auschwitz. If someone decides to start killing Jews again, this time they will know they could get nuked."
But next year he will go abroad to specialise further in the US, and he is doubtful he will return any time soon. "If I get offered a serious job there, I will stay. The pay is simply much higher than in Israel," he says.
Israel, he adds, will always be home, "but I don't have to live in Israel every second of my life to be Israeli".