Howard Epstein – LETTER FROM ISRAEL: Present Overview of our Current Situation
In an excellent article recently in another Jewish weekly, Colin Shindler wrote that the founder of the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, “was greatly intrigued by the idea of a socialist experiment in Palestine. Zionism … not simply the creation of a homeland for the Jews, but also … of a new society unlike the ones that existed in the countries that they had left behind”. Never was a truer assertion made about Israel, not merely in 1954, when Bevan visited the six-year-old state, but more importantly today, two years short of its 75th birthday.
There is a rare consistency, and an invaluable positive sense of purpose, running through the Jewish psyche, like “Blackpool Rock” through pink sticks of sugar. Jews do not have a monopoly on persecution; but they may have a monopoly on a tenacity for survival, despite oppression, over a longer period than any other ethnic, religious or socialised group in Western and western Oriental lands. Over the millennia, civilisations and empires rose, prospered and disappeared. Egypt, Greece, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, where are they now? And who watched their rise and their fall? The Jewish people. Like cork, repeatedly, Jews undeterred by their long, dark immersion, rose again to meet the daylight. But, unlike inert cork that merely bobs along on the surface, they go on – through merit – to occupy, with an impressive consistency, positions of influence, and to prosper, wherever they emerge.
There is other evidence of this, too. When Chaim Weizmann, Simon Marks, Israel Zieff and others were asked to produce a vision for a Jewish homeland (not The Jewish Homeland) in the Holy Land, for the government of David Lloyd George, this is what they wrote, in the spring of 1917:-
democratic; rooted in the rule of law; a thrusting ambition to develop infrastructure, industry and agriculture; locally autonomous; supportive of institutions, existing and projected; and a right of citizenship for Jews from all over the world.
Now, who would deny that that is a fair description of Israel today? Is there not a rock candy message, a golden thread – that any self-respecting start-up today would call its “mission statement” – discernible back through104 years? Again, consistency.
Through almost three quarters of a century without strong government, the Israeli people have – consistently – shown an unspoken determination to build on the mission statement that culminated in November 1917 in the Balfour Declaration, mostly by seeking to improve mankind’s lot. Many spin-off benefits have resulted. In the past week alone, Israelis saw a whole fresh slew of multi-billion dollar investments announced; the revelation that the latest war forced on us, against Hamas in Gaza, was almost entirely conducted by a fully integrated, comprehensive information technology system, surveying and controlling the battlefield on land (and under it), sea and air (no other military in the world is so advanced; and their first embassy inaugurated in a Gulf country, Abu Dhabi.
Expect to see the order book for Israeli technology grow massively in the near future.
Truly, if Bevan is looking down on us, he will be gratified to see, throughout the land between Metulla and Eilat, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, “a new society unlike the ones that existed in the countries [such as Poland, Russia, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Hungary, Rumania and the others] that they had left behind”. In the place of central and east European gentility and stuffiness – and cruelty in pogroms when there were ambient Jews – there is a thrusting desire to produce sufficient children to drive society forward, to succeed no matter what the odds and to counter each challenge with a solution.
Case-in-point? Researchers at Tel Aviv University just unveiled “the world’s tiniest technology” capable of storing information on the thinnest unit known to science. At two atoms thick, one fiftieth the thickness of current storage devices, this is a path to previously unimaginably-faster computing and storage. A few days later, we read of a breakthrough Israeli technology for the treatment of acute migraine headaches among adolescents, many times more effective than standard-care medications.
After luxuriating in the reflective genius of Israeli society, take a look at our near neighbours. Ask yourself for how long the Palestinian leadership will take its benighted people down a dark and narrowing alley, as opposed to partnering with the start-up nation that keeps delivering solutions to the whole range of problems of our world – that the Gulf Arabs find irresistible.
How long? Much depends on the leverage the West exerts over the poisonous schoolbooks of Palestinian kids, taught to hate Jews from the nursery, funded by the UK and the EU. Will they be withdrawn? Not if the nihilistic mindset persists in Judea and Samaria, and Gaza, indulged by their Western patrons against all decency. This is the point at which the rose-tinted spectacles portraying the rich beneficence and optimism about life in Israel slip.
As the head of the Palestinian Authority enters the 17th year of his four-year term, at the age of 86, there looms the unpalatable prospect of his successor, and the successor to the PA: the expectation must be Hamas, the nihilist, murderous force that has subjugated Gaza, and has a constitution committed to destroying the Jewish state and its Jewish people. Just how much will things deteriorate then?
This week then I leave you on that sombre note. Next week I will address it.
Shabbat shalom.
© Howard Epstein July 2021
