Israel Celebrates 50

After a day of mourning, Israel gave way last night to two days of festivities marking the expiry of the British mandate in Palestine…

After a day of mourning, Israel gave way last night to two days of festivities marking the expiry of the British mandate in Palestine, Israel's declaration of independence and the birth of a new state in 1948.

Earlier this week, after returning from Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, hailed Israel's birth in the wake of the Holocaust, and its survival in the face of a circle of Arab enmity, as a defiance of the laws of history. "Fifty years ago it was a question of whether the Jewish people would exist at all," he said.

Israel's very survival is a success story in itself. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the hopes and dreams of finding a Biblical homeland for scattered Jews were realised, and today Israel is home to one in three of the world's 15 million Jews.

Israel's survival is also an economic success: with GDP per head now at $17,000, the Israeli economy is within striking distance of many West European countries. But the sense of achievement among Israelis, who beat off an assault by five Arab armies in the first days and months of the State's existence, has been accompanied by a mood of introspection. Religious, ethnic and social divisions are clouding the celebrations, and the unfulfilled promise of peace hangs over today's festivities.

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Arab and Jew continue to live in a state of permanent tension that has threatened regional stability and global peace in each decade. In the 1950s, the Suez expedition brought the conflict into the cockpit of great power rivalries. In the 1960s, the Six Day war was a part of the Cold War. In the 1970s, the Yom Kippur war saw a brief exchange of nuclear threats between the US and the Soviet Union.

Today, Israel's conflicts are no longer part of a global cold war. But the search for peace continues to elude Israel inside and outside its borders. Israeli troops remain in south Lebanon, the dispute with Syria over the Golan Heights drags on, and relations with Egypt and Jordan have cooled considerably, if not turned sour. And yet Israel's neighbours no longer seriously challenge the permanence or legitimacy of the State; today's quarrel is about the final dimensions of the Israeli State, and about the Palestinians' demand for an equal recognition of their right to statehood.

The internal conflicts within Israeli society have divided Jew against Jew. Ashkenazi Jews of European origin are pitted against Sephardic Jews of African and Middle East descent - a bitter conflict that divides political, social, military and religious life. Secular and liberal Jews feel so threatened by Jewish Orthodoxy that a recent opinion poll found Israelis were more worried about the internal conflict between secular Jews and the religious ultra-Orthodox than by Israel's conflict with its Arab neighbours.

This week Mr Netanyahu has shown little willingness to demonstrate the flexibility needed to reach a lasting peace with the Palestinians and has tried to pin all the blame for the impasse in the peace process on the Palestinians and their President, Mr Yasser Arafat. The world wishes Israel and all of her people well on this anniversary date. But if the country is to enjoy the same prosperity and goodwill in the coming 50 years that it has enjoyed for the last 50 years, it needs political leadership that can have a fresh sense of vision and find new definitions and goals for Israeli society that allow it to live at peace with itself and with its neighbours.