Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash
Howard Epstein – THE UNIQUE PRIVILEGE OF BEING NUMBER ONE HUNDRED
photo Robert Bye
According to convention, the Common Era (“CE”) is counted from the birth of a Jewish boy in Bethlehem, in the Land of Israel, on a date …. not quite fixed in history. Of two things we can be sure: he was not born on 1st January nor on 25th December, and nor was it two thousand and twenty (or twenty-one) years ago. For a start, the date was believed to have been coincident with a rare, not to say stunning, astronomical event in the western sky – the apparent fusing of Venus with Jupiter – of a June evening two years before the commencement of the Common Era. Interestingly, that phenomenon may be observed by us this coming Monday evening, 21st December, close to, but not quite, upon Christmas eve 2020. It would seem that the first western celebrations of the birth on that day were held in Rome in the year 336 CE; but in the geographically more authoritative Middle East, Egypt, Eastern and South-eastern Europe and Asia Minor, the birth of Jesus Christ, for that was his name, has traditionally been celebrated on 6th January.
Irrespective of the true date of the birth of Christ, whilst most of mankind prepares to welcome 2021, the Jews have already been in their new year for several months and for them it is, counting from the creation of the world, 5781. In parallel, the modern Jewish state, Israel, approaches its somewhat less extravagant 73rd birthday on the Hebrew calendar anniversary of 14th May 1948 – when it will also count one hundred and one hundred and fifty.
Now there’s a conundrum. What can that mean? Simply that there are 99 more populous nations in the world. With less than 9 million souls, Israel is not only young (one might regard the UK as being 832 years old, counting from “time immemorial”, 1189), it is also not abundantly populated. It is tiny in another way, too, with a land area of a mere 22,145 sq km (8,630 sq miles), it sits at 150 in the table of the largest countries on earth. (The USA, at 9,525,067 square kilometres (3,677,649 square miles), is 430 times larger. The state of New Jersey alone is bigger than Israel.) Size-wise, Israel sits at the top table only of the world’s smallest countries.
Israel may, therefore, be seen to be miniscule in at least three metrics: age, population and area. And yet. And yet.
As Israel was formed in May 1948, the ovens of the Holocaust not quite cooled, five Arab armies on their way to join with a Palestinian Arab population three times larger than that of the local Jews, it appeared that Hitler’s work might yet be finished for him in absentia. So certain did it seem to the Americans that the Jews would perish, that they shrank from sending in the Marines to save them. As 1948 opened, US secretary of state, George C Marshall, was preparing a resolution for the United Nations, that had just weeks before voted in favour of a state for the Jews, to revert to trusteeship, until the Jews and the Arabs resolve their differences. Two men saved the embryonic state from the work of the abortionist: former Zionist Organisation president, Chaim Weizmann, and American president, Harry S Truman. At Weizmann’s urging that without independence the Jews would surely perish, but with it they might prevail, Truman countermanded the State Department’s wishes and, when the British left at midnight on 14/15 May, taking everything with them they could carry, down to the last light bulb, there took effect the declaration of Jewish independence. It had been pronounced by David Ben Gurion a mere three hours earlier to a packed hall in Tel Aviv, accompanied by the uplifting strains of the old/new national anthem – HaTikvah/The Hope – led by an orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Enough emotion to warm the heart, but hardly sufficient of anything calculated to keep the Egyptian army, 20 miles south of Dizengoff Boulevard, from pushing the Jews into the sea. On Shabbat, 15 May 1948, few were certain of salvation.
Now almost three quarters of a century later, the world may judge: was The Hope realised or dashed? Social engineering was in motion that year, when we were all young or not yet conceived. The Ashkenazi remnants of the Displaced Persons Camps on the Jewish-blood-soaked soil of Europe, bereft of their murdered families, let alone any material wealth, arrived, in their few hundreds of thousands. They were to be compressed together, in the 25% of the land that appeared habitable, with the Sephardi exiles of Arab lands – some 850,000 of them. Was this not a social experiment without equal?
In the famed melting pot of America, most of the supposed diversity emanated from a common European background. In the incipient Israel, the diversity was significantly starker. How would a country built in no small measure on the communist (not-for-profit) ethos of the kibbutz movement, bereft of capital, forced from day one not only to prevail in war but also always having to prepare for the next one, create a modern, multi-faceted economy? Almost unheard of levels of GDP commitment to military expenditure would be required, while the greatest imperative was to move almost a million traumatised people (over half the population by 1951) from tented accommodation to proper housing, while feeding and educating them, teaching them a common language, Hebrew, and creating employment for them – all competing for limited resources.
Yet this people, who in the West had not tilled the land, save as peasant subsistence farmers on the Russian steppes, who otherwise could aspire only to be usurers, but unused to managing their own affairs, save for providing lists to the Gestapo for the next Aktion, beset with antagonism from all sides, was confronted with the task of melding peoples of every variety – from Austrian philosophers to Yemeni goat-herds – into a nation.
How did they do? Let’s fast forward to today and disregard the five wars, the two intifadas, the incessant terrorism and the pariah nation status that had to be ignored, in order to remain sane on the way.
From Morocco to Bhutan, a distance of some 9,000 kilometres (5,575 miles), there seems to be forming a new zeitgeist for the Jewish State: formerly estranged nations wish to “normalise” relations. Already we have seen the five Emirate states and Bahrain signing to the Abraham Accords, with the enticing prospect of their acquiring – for hard cash – Israeli technology and know-how across the whole range of some two dozen fields in which Israel is a world leader. Shelter beneath Israel’s nuclear umbrella is a quietly-whispered motivation too. Yet, was all this not supposed to await the arrival of “Peace”?
Disastrously led by revanchist, superannuated leaders with maximalist and nihilistic demands, the poor Palestinian people continue to languish, all too aware that their Syrian Arab cousins are murdered wholesale by their totalitarian leadership, while their Israeli Arab cousins enjoy full civil rights and societal benefits alongside all other Israelis. The benighted Palestinian people, meanwhile, sit on their hands and await the passage beyond the River of Lethe of the disappointingly healthy, octogenarian Abu Mazen (the nom de guerre of their PM), 15 years into his four-year term. (To be fair to the Palestinian premier, he does have a proper name. He is Dr Mohamed Abbas, PhD in Holocaust denial. His nom de paix remains to be discovered, unlike the Palestinian capital which, according to the widow of Yasser Arafat, is located in the Swiss bank accounts of Abbas and his henchmen.)
Pity the Palestinian people. Somehow, the Sunni Arabs of the Gulf and Morocco have overlooked the small issue of the long-outstanding “Two-State Solution”. (They have opted for a two-stage solution: first the Gulf and later the Palestinians.) With their astronomically high rates of youth unemployment, they did not look to the Palestinians for answers (tunnelling and suicide‑vest technology not being so much in demand these days), but to Israel, whose economy was widely diversified two generations before anyone thought of oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.
Now, diners in the undersea restaurant of the Burj-al-Arab six star hotel in Dubai, have a wider choice of meals, with Kosher food a permanent option. There, as the fish swim in the sea that surrounds them, they can rub shoulders with the seasoned Israeli tourist, no longer identifiable so much as a kibbutznik as a likely customer for a heavy gold bracelet, “and a lady’s Rolex Oyster for Mrs Goldstein, please”, and speculate on how long it will be before Saudi Arabia (from whom Bahrain needs permission to brush its teeth in the morning, let alone sign international treaties with the Jewish state) joins the party and signs up for some Israeli water conservation, counter-desertification or just down-and-not-so-dirty waste management technology. (STOP PRESS! Pakistan, too? You cannot be serious!)
Reading the runes is not all fun, however. Europe cannot kick its bi-millennial obsession with Jewish persecution. Hitler, and the little business of the six million martyrs, appears not to have been the final cathartic expulsion of Europe’s anti-Jewish racism from its bosom. Only last week the European Court of Justice ruled against Jewish ritual slaughter of animals, possibly hastening an exodus from the deeply-inimical Belgium, significantly Moslem-settled France and the morally-skewed Scandinavian countries to Israel. In what used to be known as the Golden Medina, the comfortable life of the American Jew is uncommonly threatened from both right and left. Sending a Jewish student to an American university today means a crash course in self-abnegation, and possibly verbal self-flagellation. The UK had a lucky escape last year but the luck of British Jews is not guaranteed to last into and beyond the next financial crisis.
So, to return to the original question: how did Israel do with its unique and challenging social experiment. Given it has one of the strongest currencies in the world and foreign reserves per capita that other nations can only muse upon, something must have worked out well – and that something is almost everything. Those sound fiscal metrics for a tiny country with a tiny population and a short modern history do not come from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, serried ranks, or banks, of Rothschilds, a visitation by Three Wise Men or a murmuration of angels. They are the product of compressing millions of Jews into a small space and telling them to improvise to survive.
Had not there been for many years challenges from the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces, the Israel Air Force would not have had to force itself to become the most capable in the world, with unmatched intra-sortie capabilities. Had there not been unremitting terrorism there would not have had to be developed intelligence proficiency equal or superior to those of the British GCHQ and the American CIA. Had there not been showers of rockets, there would be no Iron Dome.
But there is also something quite sublime about Israel in 5781. There was no guarantee that people who, or whose parents and grandparents, arrived from Arab lands, or all the Russias, where democracy is unheard of, would themselves be deeply democratic, devoted to the rule of law, to participating in as many national elections as are demanded of them and hungry for the political criticisms of unrestrained media. Yet all that and infinitely more has happened in Israel, an island of civility and civilised life in a vast ocean of human depredation from Libya to Afghanistan, Russia via Turkey to Iraq and (how could one omit it?) Iran.
Not for nothing did Faisal al-Qassem, a journalist with Al-Jazeera, tweet at the start of 2020 that “Israel is the most successful project of the last 150 years”. It was not lost on him nor on our new friends in the Gulf, the Maghreb, Sudan, Bhutan and – who knows? – possibly Pakistan.
There is an irony in two of the most criticised political leaders in the West, US president Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, bringing home the bacon, as it were. The chances of their being rewarded with Nobel Peace prize laureate status seems as remote as Jupiter and Saturn will be as their orbits kiss next Wednesday, but historians will record it that Israel lost its pariah status and started accumulating friends on their joint watch. Something else for their detractors to grind their teeth over, as Israel goes, in 5781 and 2021, from strength to strength.
© Howard Epstein December 2020
