Israel At 66 Years: A Senior Citizen of the World

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                         

                                                   

Einstein and Ben Gurion

"Difficult things we do quickly.  The impossible takes a little longer." 

...............David Ben-Gurion 

David Ben Gurion (1886 Poland-1973 Sde Boker, Israel- a kibbutz on the Negev), 1st Prime Minister and Defense Minister, Father of the Nation

Sixty-six years ago on May 14, 1948, the state of Israel's birth  was announced on the radio and five minutes later it was attacked by all the surrounding nations who tried to drive her into the Mediterranean Sea.  Their enemies didn't succeed and haven't for the past 66 years and Israel is still here, alive and well.  The hatred of her begrudging neighbors trying to take her life only invigorates her will to survive.  It's just the reflection of the Jews' lives for the past 2,000 years.  Good Lord, what would happen to Israel if suddenly nations started to appreciate her instead of bringing on BDS (boycotts, divestments, sanctions) in trying to bring her down?  

It should happen.  No?  Israel shares its many inventions with the world.  Israel has helped to make the desert bloom.  About 2/3 of the Middle East is a desert.  More than 60% of Israel is a desert.  The Jews, especially those at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Desert have been working on reclaiming the desert wasteland by turning rock and sand into land that is productive.  They are bringing water to this parched earth.  This act alone is worth making peace with Israel, one would think.  Their programs are going on in over 40 countries that are benefiting.  Their water program is working with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the PA. 

Another Portlander made aliyah in 1981,  a year after I did and has an article about Israel in our Portland magazine, Oregon Jewish Life; called "Israel at 66.-changing the world through technology."  In it he recalls the book about Israel by Saul Singer and Dan Senor called "Startup Nation, the Story of Israel's Economic Miracle" that they wrote in 2009.  

By 2009 Israel had 63 companies listed on NASDAQ.  This is a teeny state of 10,762 square miles which includes land controlled by Israel, the disputed territories.  The pre-1967 land area is 8,019 sq. miles.  This compares with the USA's 5th smallest state, New Jersey which is 7,787 sq miles in size.  Israel has a population of 8,012,400 of which 6,037,700 are Jewish.  That means that the Arabs are about 20% of the population of Israel.  Sixty-three companies are more than any other foreign country found on NASDAQ.  Today, only China, who has about 1.3 billion people, has more than Israel.  China, by the way, has the highest population in the world.  

What makes Israelis different from other people?  For one thing, they are constantly being attacked.  No other nation that I know of is living under bombardment of missiles, rockets and mortars and neighbors lined up with missiles pointed at them.  Also, they live with such threats as coming from Iran to be exterminated at any moment.  This sort of life causes most all of the population over 18 years of age to be a part of the IDF;  Israel Defense Force, or in the service.  Arab civilians do not have to participate unless they choose to do so.  Many are starting to join up.  This gives them the advantage of learning  creative thinking skills.

 In Israel's army, the soldiers are treated differently than in other countries.  The situation has been so on-going that they value creativity and intelligence more than muscles.  Israeli soldiers have little guidance from the top brass, and must learn to improvise, even if they have to break rules sometimes.  Only in cases that just happened where Arab gangs ganged up on a lone soldier in Judea/Samaria who was a guard and taunted him so badly that he felt forced to point his rifle at them---at a time when they were video-taping him, which put him in big trouble with the  top brass.  He may have to do time in jail for this great offense.  Israeli soldiers must live up to the highest standards like those we have for kashrut; perfection in the treatment of others.  In Israel's army, the junior officers call their bosses by their first names.  If you as a soldier see them doing something wrong, you can speak out and say so.

 That is a common thing that happens in all walks of life in Israel anyway.  Once  I was on a bus when I was a new immigrant and couldn't speak Hebrew,and  the bus driver forgot to let me off at the stop I had painfully asked for, and when he whizzed by it, the whole bus occupants yelled at him about it!  It's part of the culture. Speak out!  

Being a part of the IDF is a big thing.  Women must join, too.  About 50% of Israel's population join up.  After serving their 3 years, they are still a part of it by serving their milueem month every year until they are at least 50 years old.  When I lived in Israel from 1980 to the end of 1985, I was in Safed during the 1982 Lebanon crisis and  experienced the whole city's population suddenly becoming a part of the IDF which left people like me and some wives in charge of the city's functions.  I witnessed a whole unit marching by on the street made up of men with white beards, reserve forces who know what to do in case of such emergencies. 

 I automatically trotted over to my junior high which was across the street from my high rise apartment building where I taught English and just taught.  No one had to tell me or ask me to come.  The subject was never discussed.  I found then that all the men teachers were now soldiers and a woman teacher was acting as principal.  It was strange teaching that way with students huddled up in the corners of the room, afraid for their family members as the helicopters landed on the hospital up the street bringing in wounded.  When I stopped talking, the students called out, "Keep going, Nahama,"  They needed my prattle to feel something of normality.  

Israel's IDF is tech driven.  Their IDF experience produces such behaviors as loyalty, a tough as nails attitude which starts at a young age anyway, an alumni network, future partners who create founding teams that come out of the same army unit.  The army is like a fraternity, and they rely on each other when they are not serving this way.  

Israel has smart people.  Jews have had to rely on their brains in order to survive a very harsh climate of people ever since Jacob parted with his brother, Esau in about the 2nd millennium BCE.(2,000 BCE)   This shows up in such things as Nobel prizes.  Israel won 3 in recent years in chemistry.  They've created such things as optics, the smallest video camera and the PillCam.  In biotech, there is the nanowire -even human hair is thicker than this.  In computing,  the USB flash drive and a laser keyboard.  In software they created ICQ, Babylon, and Viber.  Other innovations are in physics, agriculture, economics, theoretical computer science, energy, consumer goods and defense.  They invented the Iron Dome missile defense system, but need the USA to help  with its upkeep.  There are more defense inventions they've come up with as well and they've shared many with the USA. 

Who is the world's leading patent producer?  Israel is.  It's #1 in the Western world.  The surprise is that the UN's Intellectual Property Organization gave Israel the status of a World Patent Center.  Now they are one of fifteen other nations who hold this honor.  

So many people have a cell phone.  Everyone of them is made of some components that were thought up or developed in Israel.  In a recent gathering in Barcelona, almost 200 of the 1,700 exhibits were from Israel.  That's about 1/8 were made in Israel.  

The beauty of all this is that most Israelis come from immigrants. Immigrants were kept out of Palestine at the beginning of WWII after the Jewish Homeland was to be developed-by the British themselves who held the mandate.  Therefore, Israel was deprived of more creative minds who could have developed even more inventions that would have helped the world such as the cure for cancer, possibly, for these immigrants were forced back to Germany and were slaughtered.    An Israeli faces compulsory military service well into the foreseeable future unless the Moshiach is soon to arrive, and according to orthodox figures, isn't due to arrive for another several hundred years.    

As I read Mylan Tanzer's article who is a Portland native, I laughed when I read his last paragraph about the "balagan" going on in Israel.  Balagan means chaos or mess.  I experienced a lot of it, too when I lived there.  Then I felt better since he described my house here in Gresham as he described a rather messy house, but it was owned by creative geniuses, the Israelis.  They don't have time to organize, clean or remodel but only have time to succeed through work and they create to pay the rent.  I'm not  exactly the creative genius, but I am too busy to clean and organize and lack the moola to remodel.  Now I have an excuse other than "Old Age."   

So, I see  that Israel hasn't changed much at all since I left in 1985, 29 years ago.  The time has whizzed by and it seems like it was only yesterday that I was there, teaching beautiful students without any silly hairdos, or metal things stuck into their faces, and nary a one with tattoos. I presented a lesson of how to play baseball to my suddenly interested students on my first day of teaching.  It was brand new to them!   Beautiful children looking like they were when they left their mothers' wombs, as described in our Torah were then interested in English!  They weren't much different than Americans of the same age.  .    

I had to return to the states, a fallen Yored, but Mylan Tanzer, who made aliyah in 1981,  stayed and became a founding CEO of the first Israeli cable and satellite sports channel.  From 2005 on he has launched, managed and consulted for channels and companies in Israel and Europe.  He lives in Tel Aviv.  Thank you, Mylan for staying and writing such a lovely article that I have used to relate some of the facts above.  I'm so proud to be an Israeli and proud to know that you are from Portland!  .

Update: 5/7/14: Population today is 8.18 million. Israel has grown in population from last year by 137,500 people.  The Jews make up 75% of Israel's population.
Update: 5/31/16:  Population is now 8.522 million and is 68 years old.  This is 10 times more than at its founding in 1948.  .  

Resource: Hadassah magazine, June/July 2013-Alice Hoffman on cover

Magazine: Oregon Jewish Life; May 2014, Israel culture spawns innovation for the world, by Mylan Tanzer

 https://www.google.com/search?

http://www.iris.org.il/sizemaps/new_jersey.htm

q=israel+size+compared+to+us+state&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=1aJnU_mVBZXroATN24CgDg&ved=0CCgQsAQ&biw=982&bih=636 on size compared to USA states

Start-Up Nation, by Saul Singer and Dan Senor

http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2011/07/comparing-israel-with-oregon.html

http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2013/06/demographics-of-jews-in-israel-and.html

http://www.biography.com/people/david-ben-gurion-9207132#awesm=~oDp6CJhXMBzstR

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/ben_gurion.html

Sealed Deal for Jewish Homeland from League of Nations

Nadene Goldfoot

Jews began immigrating (making aliyah) to Palestine in large numbers in 1882.  At the time fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there.  Mark Twain visited earlier and saw very few.

WWI was fought from July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918 and Woodrow Wilson and others said they had fought to make the world safe for democracy.  They had a Paris Peace Conference and later, in the League of Nations, France and England were given mandated powers over the region held by the Ottoman Empire to prepare it for self-government of the Middle East.

At the beginning of the war, part of Palestine's land was owned by absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut.  Almost 80% of the Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads and Bedouins.  It was proposed that since the natives of the Fertile Crescent were not yet prepared to govern themselves, Britain and France would be given these mandatory powers over the region in order to get it ready for self-government.

We can see that today, Palestine is dependent on donations from their neighboring Arab states.  They cannot pay their electric bills to Israel.  They have no economy.  All their resources and talents have gone into bomb-making.

So back at the end of WWI, Jews did not care to purchase land in areas where Arabs might be displaced.  They bought land that was uncultivated, swampy, cheap and without tenants.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was written by Lord Balfour agreeing to a Jewish Homeland.  What he promised was eventually reduced to 20% of the original piece which the Jews accepted.  Palestinians did not.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of September 1919 involved Britain and France.  It concerned "Palestine" which had been held by the loser, the Ottoman Empire which was Turkey.  The problem was settled in the San Remo Conference on April 24, 1920 when Britain was given the mandate over Palestine.  They implemented the Balfour Declaration declaring a Jewish Homeland.

Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having separate identity.  When the First Congress of Muslim-christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace conference, they said, "We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at anytime.  We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds."

In 1920, Labor Zionist lead David Ben-Gurion was concerned about the Arab fellahin, someone he thought was the most important asset of the native population.  He said that under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to them or worked by them.  He wanted to liberate them from their oppressors.  "Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement," he added, "should we offer to buy his land at an appropriate price." David became the first Prime Minister and Defense Minister.

Arabs wanted to sell to the Jews because of the migration to coastal towns and because they needed money to invest in the citrus industry.  By 1944, Jews paid from $1,000 and $1,100 per acre in Palestine or arid or semi-arid land when in Iowa land was selling for $110 per acre.  Transjordan's King Abdullah wrote that Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping.  Jewish holdings in Palestine amounted to about 463,000 acres.  About 45,000 of these were from the mandatory government; 30,000 were bought from churches and 387,500 were bought from Arabs.  Many leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including the Muslim Supreme Council, sold land to Jews.  Arabs entered the land from neighboring lands in the past 90 years in order to find work.  When the Jews came, they followed.

Eighty-five years later, in a 2002 interview with The New Statesman, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past. .. ..The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis – again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one.

It is now, today, that Arabs call Jews "transplants" among other ugly adjectives.  They didn't think of nationalism and state-building until 1967 when they lost a mass attack against Israel and they lost face as well as land.  They forget that the land has always had Jews in it living among the Arab villages.  Not everyone was taken away as slaves, transplanted by rulers or were driven out by 70 CE.  .  A remnant of our past remained for a reminder.  We cannot forget Jerusalem because of giving our word to the one G-d that we wouldn't.  Though international law clinches when we regained our land again, our religious law had us take the land with instructions from Moses as to just how much and where and why.

International lawyer Prof. Eugene Kontorovich on youtube below explains how law gave the Jews land legally if you missed my write-up on blog previoiusly.  .

Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2x5UvjUs4 Internation Law
Textbook:  Middle East Past & Preseent by Yahya Armajani and Thomas M. Ricks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
Book:  Myths and Facts: a concise record of the Arab-Israeli conflict by Mitchell G. Bard and Joel Himelfarb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/ben_gurion.html
"The Legal Case for Israel Video by Professor Eugene Kontorovich-words copied from youtube.  

Another great International Lawyer who investigated this subject for over 20 years is Dr. Jaques Gautier who concludes that not only is Israel in accordance with International law but that the International community is in direct violation of it's own Agreements and Charters they have themselves formulated

Another great Attorney who came to the same conclusion is Howard Grief who wrote the book "The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law"

The Conclusion is all the same: the Jewish people have been betrayed many times over by the Nations of the world who do not abide by their own agreements that they have themselves formulated while continuing to do so and them being the reason behind many baseless wars where so many innocent live were lost

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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GOLDFOOT by Nadene

We're now living in a Chelm-like state. So much of the world is against Israel that it's like we're back in the 30's in Germany again.

Here's where's Chelm comes in. Israel has been fighting in wars and terroristic attacks since its rebirth in 1948. When it tries to protect itself, even while using far more restraint than many other nations would, its condemned, even by a few of its own fellow Jews living safely in the diaspora!

Right now it was just embraced with a 9 ship flotilla of media mischief makers bent on giving Israel a bad name again, and they managed to do so easily. It's gotten to the point of no matter what we do to defend ourselves, we get a bad rap. That isn't all that's going on. In the North in Lebanon sits terrorists ready with chemical weapons to shoot into Israel causing the government to arm each citizen with gas masks, just in case. Besides that, Iran has said so many times I've now lost count that they will destroy Israel and all the Jews. They already have the makings for two atomic bombs. Guess where they might want to drop them. Besides that, rockets keep on coming in from Gaza. They haven't stopped!

We have a country where the government is not backing Israel as previous people have. In fact, they're treating us in a shockingly disrespectul manner while saying at the same time we are friends. I don't think Israelis feel that friendship anymore at all. The climate has changed 180 degrees, I'm afraid.

USA is even training some of our unfriendly neighbors in warfare!

In our own USA there is a campaign to deligitimize Israel. Several large denominations of churches have been campaigning to boycott and divest from Israel and have voted on sanctions against Israel. They will not buy any goods from Israel and encourage others not to do so. We're the scapegoats for the ills in the world once again. Not only has this entered the realm of churches but it's permeating on campuses of universities, and in our civic, corporate, labor and cultural world as well.

What hurts me the most is to see so many of our own Jews throw their hat into the ring of these accusers and hurl more insults than others. Instead of reading and studying and learning about the issues they simply give up and have joined the pack. They've turned their back against this one in a 2,000 year opportunity to have our own state back again and not be wanderers on the earth anymore who have gone through the cycles of being invited and then disinvited into countries as well as extinction of the holocaust .

If you care at all about Israel's existence and do not care to be a part of the whirlwind that's killing it, you can do the following:

1. Confront boycott campaigns by buying Israeli goods.
2. Respond swiftly to false or distorted media statements about Israel. Become informed! Speak up! Be brave!
4. Educate professional and lay leadership and students in high school and college about the nature and dangers of this BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. It isn't just a matter of replacing items on the shelf. It's harming! Makes me angry. We've invented and shared so much with the world in our short period and this is the slap in the face we get.
5. Be vigorous in combatting slanderous attacks, including the anti-Semitic fabrications levied against Israelis that are reminiscent of the ancient blood libel. Whatever, arm yourselves with knowlege. It's time to learn about our history.

Remember when David Ben Gurion commented that it was nice to meet the American preident who was president of 30 million people. His job was very hard, though. He was prime minister of 3 million presidents. We all have answers to the problems and think only our answer is the best solution. Let's get together. This has become a life or death situation. We Jews are less than 1% of the total population on earth. We're a family. We've got to support this family or it's existence will be no more.