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THEN & NOW: THE STORY SO FAR

Independent, The (London), May 8, 2008 by DONALD MACINTYRE

It was created from the ashes of the Holocaust, and grew into one of the most confident (and controversial) nations in history. Today, as Israel turns 60, its people's hopes for a peaceful future are as delicately poised as ever

You get the clearest sense of it in Tel Aviv. Swinging in on the Ayalon highway past the 50-floor Azrieli towers, joining the entrepreneurs in their open-necked shirts and jeans tapping at their laptops at a cafe off the Rothschild Boulevard, lunching among the families and fashionistas at the beachside Manta Ray, or wandering through the elegantly renovated lanes of Neve Tzedek, where Jews in the 1880s first started spreading north along the coast from Jaffa, the still-mixed neighbouring Arab port town that secular, hedonistic, Tel Aviv grew out of, you quickly begin to see how much Israel has achieved in the last 60 years.

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And certainly there will be much for the country to celebrate on Independence Day today, the holiday that begins a week of high- profile anniversary events, reaching their climax with President George W Bush's traffic-stopping, TV network clogging, second visit of the year next Tuesday. It was here, on a Friday afternoon in mid- May in the main hall of the Tel Aviv Museum, that David Ben-Gurion, with the other signatories, to the accompaniment of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, put their names to the Declaration of Independence which marked the end of the British mandate and the beginning of the state of Israel. Since then, it has built a formidably strong economy, world-class science and medicine, some of the world's most advanced agriculture - making, in the words of the old Zionist mantra "the desert bloom" - and revived, to an astonishing extent admired even by the state's most strident critics, the Hebrew language. It absorbed with remarkable success one million Russian-speaking immigrants after the fall of the Soviet Union; it has a vibrant cultural scene, a vigorous and often highly critical press, and, with all its faults, a viable parliamentary democracy.

Yet amid the celebrations - from a Jewish astronaut sending greetings from space to Israel, to an attempt to set a world record for the number of people singing the national anthem, Hatikva - Israel approaches its 60th birthday with some ambivalence. More, perhaps, than it did its 50th - and more even that it expected to, a few weeks ago. Having survived an excoriating inquiry into a war in which, unlike the many others Israel has fought from 1948 on, it failed to be victorious, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert might have expected to bask in the attentions of world leaders over the next week with a relative sense of political security. Instead, he finds himself the focus of a new police investigation over corruption allegations. Some commentators are dancing around a temporary gagging order to imply that it may be the most serious yet, triggering fresh speculation about how long he can last in office.

But the sense of uncertainty has its roots in something more fundamental than that. Olmert is not, to coin a phrase often used by both Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, a prophet. And even if he were, he would probably not be believed by an increasingly cynical public. But however long he lasts, one of his abiding legacies may well be the stark observation that the state would be "finished" if prospects of a two-state solution collapsed and Israel was to remain in control of the occupied Palestinian territories. His argument, more familiar in the past from Palestinians themselves and the Israeli left, was that the demise would trigger a demand from Palestinians for equal votes in all the territory now controlled by Israel, a demand that the international community could not long ignore and would mean the end of the Jewish state. If Olmert is to be believed, therefore, at a time when it is natural to think ahead to the next 60 years, the fate of the state itself may yet be nearing a decisive turning point.

Certainly, it is a sobering thought that, 60 years after Ben Gurion signed the declaration, Israel remains a state without agreed or defined borders. The declaration itself came in the midst of a bloody war - on both sides - of course. Or, rather, two wars, the first between the Jews and Arabs of the Holy Land, and the second between Israeli forces and the Arab national armies. In the non- Jewish calendar, 15 May is the actual date - the day after Ben- Gurion signed the declaration - of the end of the British mandate, and it is that which will be marked by most Palestinians as the anniversary of the Nakba, or disaster which saw 700,000 forced out or flee their homes in what is now Israel. A month earlier, 250 mostly non-combatant Arabs, including many women and children in the mainly peaceful village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem had been murdered in a massacre carried out jointly by the Etzel and Lehi militias. It is a reminder of the savagery of warfare on both sides that the counter killings in the wake of Deir Yassin took the lives, six days later, of 77 Jewish doctors, nurses and patients travelling in armoured buses to the Hadassah Hospital in Mount Scopus. But that did not diminish the role of the Deir Yassin massacre as having "probably the single most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the flight of Arabs from Palestine". These are the words of Benny Morris, who said the massacre was accompanied by cases of "mutilation and rape" and was one of the first Israeli (as opposed to Arab) historians - 20 years ago - to challenge the myth that Palestinians left merely because they were ordered to do so by Arab leaders. Morris documented expulsions by Jewish military forces in many parts of the country.

THEN & NOW: THE STORY SO FAR

Independent, The (London), May 8, 2008 by DONALD MACINTYRE

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