In the New State of Israel

I made my first visit to Israel in November 1950, only two and half years after the state had been established, and just over a year after the bloody struggle for its existence had been suspended with a series of armistices. One of my purposes here is to relive my heady experiences in that first of several visits that I have made to Israel and to record the shape that the state was in at such an early stage of its existence. The contrast between Israel then and Israel now is striking.

Like most of my generation of Australian Jews (I was born in 1920), I always supported the Zionist aim for a Jewish national home to be established in Palestine in accordance with the Balfour Declaration (1917) and the terms laid down by the League of Nations for the British Mandate (1922). I was among the millions who applauded the resolution of the UN in 1947 that established the Jewish state, together with a parallel Arab state. Here is a summary of what occurred in the three years between the UN resolution and my visit three years later.

The arrangement for two states was rejected by the Arab League, and five Arab armies invaded Israel, openly swearing to strangle it at birth and massacre the Jews. The invaders included the powerful Jordan Legion, which was British-trained and officered. The Jewish inhabitants managed to turn back the attacks at considerable cost and were able to retain a number of disputed centres such as Tiberias, Lod (Lydda), Acco (Acre), Safat, Beer Sheba and Western Jerusalem. A series of armistices and an uneasy peace resulted which left Jordan in control of territory comprising the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Old Walled City, while Egypt retained control of Gaza. During the war all Jews had been expelled from those Arab-controlled areas, including their traditional home in the Jewish section of the Old City, while between 500,000 and 700,000 Arabs fled from Israel, leaving about 150,000 still living there. The armistices enabled Israel to get on with the urgent task of establishing a new state, of integrating the displaced Israeli Jews, and most importantly of receiving the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were hammering on the doors for entry. By the time of my visit the population was well over a million and growing fast. (It is now approaching eight million.)

My assessment of the prevailing attitude of the Israelis at the time of my visit could best be described with two adjectives: stunned and confused. Between 1950 and 1996 I repeatedly visited Israel and observed it developing from the groggy, uncertain state of its early days into the mature, optimistic and significant country that it constitutes today. Each one of my subsequent visits brought its own impressions of the country’s evolution towards that maturity, but my first one in 1950 brought me face-to-face with its uncertain infancy. At that time the focus of attention in the nation was overwhelmingly on survival; the survival of the refugees who were clamouring for entry into a land where they would be welcomed, and, of course, the survival of the state itself. Through all my visits, survival has remained a constant focus of attention and it is perhaps as significant for Israelis today as it was at the founding of the state.

My direct contacts in 1950 were overwhelmingly with people who could converse in English—a biased sample, although most educated Israelis did speak English due to their having lived in the former British Mandate. Obviously the impressions that I could gain in such a short visit had to be limited. A most valuable source of information about public attitudes came from psychologist colleagues at the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research, headed by the eminent Louis Guttmann who had come from the USA to support Israel during the War of Liberation. This organisation held the Israel franchise for Gallup polls and studied public attitudes during and after the war. I was also privileged to be invited to visit the psychology branch at military headquarters, where a former South African Air Force psychologist was in charge. These applications of psychological science, to the study of public attitudes and to the military services, were examples of the use of scientific methods in the critical emergency of the war. My contacts also included fellow Australians who were then residing in Israel, including a journalist on the Jerusalem Post (Myer Isaacman), an officer of the Hebrew University, a banana grower in a farming village, and others I had known in Melbourne. I also met the Australian Consul in Tel Aviv and the Australian (non-Jewish) manager of the Haifa Water Company who had stayed on. Conversations with all of these contacts provided me with a fleeting but credible picture of public attitudes and other aspects of Israeli life.

The fellow passengers on my BOAC flight from London appeared to be mostly English Jews and, like me, staunch supporters of Israel curious to see the new state. When we arrived at Lydda airport many of the passengers cheered lustily and some kissed the ground as they alighted. There was a swell of euphoria mixed with curiosity among the passengers as the bus ascended to Jerusalem, “The Holy City”, an experience that brought unexpected spiritual stirrings to some of us, including me. Apparently Jerusalem often has that effect.

Near the airport we passed the half-ruined town of Lod, which miraculously had been saved for Israel together with the airport in a desperate and savage battle from which the Arab civilian population eventually fled. As we climbed into the Jerusalem hills we confronted the burnt-out remains of armed vehicles that had been destroyed in the successful fight to break the blockade of Jerusalem. Some of these vehicles still stand, on what is now a byroad, as a permanent monument to that heroic event.

Every day and everywhere during my visit I was faced with reminders of that bitter war which took the lives of such a substantial part of the population, both military and civilian, many of them survivors of the Holocaust. I think time has dimmed the memory of the price that Israel paid to stay alive in its time of birth, a price proportionately greater than that paid in all its subsequent wars. People told me about their recently dead relatives and friends, and former soldiers described the fire fights in which they were engaged to try to save this or that fortified site, a tower or a church, a hotel or perhaps a whole village. I spent one night in central Jerusalem at the Hotel Eden, the defence of which became renowned in the reports of the defence of the city. When I praised Israelis on their amazing courage and doggedness they simply answered with the phrase that became a cliché in Israel’s history, “ain brerah” (no alternative).

In Jerusalem I also stayed in the King David Hotel, where one wing was still a wreck from being bombed by the Jewish Irgun Faction during the British Mandate, with the accompanying deaths of dozens of British soldiers. One night I wandered in the laneways at the back of the hotel and saw a Jordan sentry standing on the wall of the Old City silhouetted against the full moon. I learned next day that an Israeli had recently been shot in the street by a trigger-happy sentry firing from the wall, despite the truce. UN officials in well-marked Jeeps were racing around the streets looking busy, but whether they were very useful in carrying out their task of policing the terms of the armistices is debatable. I had personal evidence of that: I was approved to visit the beleaguered campus of the university on Mt Scopus in a UN convoy but, in violation of the armistice terms, the Jordanians simply cancelled the visit. Similarly, entry to the religious sites in the Old City was simply barred to Israelis.

Which brings me to some vignettes of the new arrivals who were now flooding in, limited only by the logistics of transport and the provision of minimal facilities for receiving them. The facilities for the reception and integration of new arrivals were quite primitive at the time. I still can visualise the utter deprivation of the immigrants huddling close to no-man’s-land in makeshift hovels assembled from the rubble that littered the battleground areas on the borders of the Old City of Jerusalem. Seemingly endless streams of people were wandering the highway beside the Bay of Haifa from their tent cities, going God knows where. As we drove past I asked my driver, a young American who had come to Israel to fight in the War of Liberation, “Why don’t you give these poor people a lift?” His answer was, “If you started that, there would never be an end to it.” Although I was shocked at the time, in retrospect I see his point.

On a more positive note, as our bus was ascending into the foothills of Jerusalem, I saw new immigrants (I assume) clearing the rocks from the ground in the bare, stony fields and stacking them to form windbreak walls. Obviously it was back-breaking work. A decade later these pioneers got their reward when the same Jerusalem hills were filled with verdant farms. I think that we have now largely forgotten what a forbidding land Israel was before the Jewish farmers, with the aid of Israeli agricultural scientists, succeeded in making it the fertile land that it is today.

The hordes of immigrants who poured into Israel in the first years came from a wide spectrum of the ancient world. Priority had been given to the European survivors of the Holocaust, particularly the Jews who had been interned in Cyprus by the British Army when their attempts to enter Israel had been foiled. Others came from Central and Eastern Europe. A considerable number of Jews who were expelled from Muslim countries in Asia started to pour in. (The large inflow from North Africa—Morocco, Egypt, Libya—didn’t reach significant numbers until later.)

One of the salutary effects of my exposure to Israel was to offset my European-centred (Ashkenazi) perspective on World Jewry. For the first time in my life I encountered such “exotic” Jews (to me) as Syrians, Kurds, Yemenites and Iraqis. One Shabat I went on a “synagogue crawl” in the Mea Shearim district of Jerusalem, calling in on such congregations as Bukharan, Yemenite and Baghdadi. These communities were already established before the founding of the state but had been considerably reinforced by the new arrivals. I was intrigued by a side-curled Yemenite newspaper boy, about nine years old, who was adept at giving change, together with appropriate chutzpah. I don’t remember encountering any traditional Ashkenazi dishes in cafes or hotels and I was reminded of my bias when a recent arrival from the Bronx said to me, in Yiddish, “There is no Jewish life here.” How ironic! One afternoon I was driving with an Australian UN soldier in the outskirts of Jerusalem when we were invited to join a Jewish wedding procession that was wending its way through the scrub. The celebrators were dressed in some tribal costume and spoke a strange language. Their origin was a mystery to us.

On a more familiar note, I also visited some Australian graduates of the Zionist Youth movement who had moved from Melbourne to a kibbutz in the north of Israel (Kfar Hanasi) as soon as they could after the state was established. This was a forerunner of the relatively high rate of migration from Australia to Israel that continues today. At Kfar Hanasi I was introduced to kibbutz life as it then existed in its traditional form: a farming community in which there was no manufacturing, no outside employees, no wages or private property, everyone ate in a common dining room, babies lived in a common nursery and the children all slept in the children’s home. Since then, these strict principles have been modified by Israel’s kibbutzim. In Kfar Hanasi I also experienced a rare event for a kibbutz—a strike to protest against the quality of the available working tools. That was a bit of Australian culture that had been transferred to Israel!           

What about Arabs? Despite the exodus during the War of Liberation to which I have referred above, there were still substantial numbers living there. In Jerusalem I saw the occasional Arab in traditional dress going about his—those I saw were invariably male—business in a completely normal fashion. One of the biggest communities of urban Arabs was in Haifa where I met an Arab school principal, a Druze, who was very positive about his future in the new Jewish state. I cannot recall any expressions of hostility by the Israeli Jews against the Palestinian Arabs, although one person I met did volunteer that it was good for Israel that so many had left. No one reported to me any experience of Arabs being forced out by the Jews during the war, but it is clear, in the light of subsequent reports, that such incidents had sometimes occurred. In Haifa I was told that during the fighting the city leaders had appealed to the Arab community not to leave, and many did stay. (This information has been validated by subsequent records.) Actually, I cannot remember any reference to Arabs apart from the account in Haifa. It seems that it was a matter of “out of sight, out of mind” as far as most Israelis were concerned.       

The picture that I have presented of Israel as an infant state needs some important modification. As I moved around the country, I was constantly reminded of institutions that had been established during the British Mandate or even before that. In Tel Aviv, my hotel was on the picturesque Esplanade (at that time almost deserted). Around the corner was the Bauhaus-inspired “White City”, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and includes the famous Moscow-inspired Habima Theatre. On the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa we passed one of the first of the Club Meds. (It was apparently closed a few years later.) In Haifa, two notable institutions were the inspiring Bahai headquarters and the Technion Hochschule, the foundation college for the Technion University. In Jerusalem I saw such organisations as the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, the Keren Hayesod (Jewish Agency) and other buildings that reminded me that Israel was built on foundations that went back many decades. The Mea Shearim Orthodox Section had been established long before but, compared with today, not many Haredi (religious extremists dressed in the characteristic black hats and frock coats) were to be seen outside that area.

In Jerusalem I met a friend of my father from his youth in Russia, a lawyer who had emigrated long before. He lived in a modest house in an unmade lane in Rehavia which not many years later became one of the most fashionable districts in the city. In Talbieh, near my hotel, there were some mansions that had been owned by wealthy Arabs but were now unoccupied owing to disputes about their ownership status. As I had no access to the Old City, I could only gaze at the Damascus Gate, which was blocked off by rubble. I did, however, encounter some reminders of Jerusalem’s religious past that had remained on the Israel side, such as the Russian Church, the Citadel of David, the supposed site of the Garden of Gethsemane and the Monastery in Ain Kerem.

Transport facilities are worth a mention. A railway line built by the Ottoman and British regimes ran from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and then north along the coast. I travelled on it between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in preference to the old rattletrap buses that were the normal means of transport both within and between cities. The other common form of transport was sharut, or shared taxis, a new experience for me. While in transit, spirited conversation between the passengers and the driver was the rule and classical music was usually also provided.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was of special interest to me as an academic. It was founded on Mt Scopus in 1918 and was in 1950 still the only official university in Israel. Unfortunately its physical connection with the rest of Jewish Jerusalem was cut off by the Jordanian occupation of East Jerusalem. Two years before my visit a convoy of academics and medical staff of the Hadassah Hospital had been massacred as they passed through East Jerusalem on their way to Mt Scopus. At the time of my visit plans were being made to build a new campus near the future Knesset and government departments. In the meantime the university took heroic measures to continue its work by occupying various buildings throughout the city and I spent much of my time in Jerusalem at its main emergency site, the Christian theological college, Terra Sancta. At least these facilities provided the basic requirements of classrooms and offices for restarting normal university activities after the interruption of the war. At the university I made a close and lasting acquaintance with the distinguished team of social scientists who were conducting pioneering studies on the integration of immigrants. This research group headed by Professor Shmuel Eisenstadt led the world at the time and influenced much of my own subsequent research on immigrants in Australia.

I am amazed to recall how many contacts I was able to make in a visit of only ten days. No wonder I was so stimulated by it. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to visit the new state so early in its formation and to be able to recount my experiences now. But it is a long time ago, and if I have made any mistakes in my facts I would be happy to be corrected.