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WSU's President Bonner Evaluates Progress Made by Israel

By DR. THOMAS N. BONNER

President, Wayne State University

(Editor's note: In an impressive ad-
dress April 14, Wayne State University
President Thomas Bonner evaluated
the progress recorded in Israel's 32-
year history. He went into detail de-
scribing the accomplishments of the
universities in Israel. Dr. Bonner deliv-
ered the principal address at the local
celebration of the first anniversary of
the signing of the peace pact by Israel
and Egypt at the White House on
March 26, 1979. The local peace cele-
bration was arranged by the Jewish
National Fund Council of Detroit. The
major portions of Dr. Bonner's address
are incorporated in this article.)
Only yesterday, millions of persons
around the world joined in the solemn ob-
servance of things past — the Yom
Hashoa, the Remembrance Day of the
Holocaust of four decades ago.
Tonight, in this center of Judaic culture
and community, we celebrate a Day of
Peace, the signing of an historic agreement
at the White House between two ancient
enemies, and the hopes that the event ig-
nited things that are yet to be.
Between those two events lay 40 years of
strife and hope, of violence and suppressed
dreams, of collapsing empires and the
emergence of new nations. At the vortex of
both dream and hope lies the new nation of
Israel.
The nation of Israel, in the words of a
contemporary Israeli geographer, lives not
in three dimensions but in four. The fourth
dimension is time; and it affects every di-
mension of life in modern Isarel. Standing
atop the Mount of Olives, 40 minutes from
modern Tel Aviv, one sees the magnificent
panorama of the ancient walled city, the
plains of David, the modern city, the
churches of three world religions. The vis-
itor for the first time gets the sense and the
feel of history, a nation that stands at the
convergence of history, religion, world
politics and social change. There is nothing
like it in the world.
Twice now, I have had the opportu-
nity to visit Israel and to see in brief
compass the interaction of the past
with the political and strategic realities
of the present, and the impact of social
and economic pressures on the system
of higher education in Israel.
With an architect from the Hebrew Uni-
versity, I had a close look at the magnifi-
cent excavations south of the Western
Wall. It has taken more than a decade of
painstaking uncovering and reconstruct-
ing of ancient plans to reveal the origins of
the early Temple, the appearance of the
city in the Herodian period, the Roman and
Byzantine influences, the long tenure of
the Turks, and the unmistakable turrets of
the Crusaders' battlements. Three reli-
gions, the imprint of a score of nations, and
several thousand years of history have
made this the most remarkable archeolog-
ical site in the world.
I have seen, too, the mingling of past and
present at Masada where Roman legions
found the 976 bodies of Jews who took their
own lives rather than surrender to alien
rule. Our historian guide repeated with
obvious pride the story of the Israeli offi-
cers who, before crossing into Egypt, vis-
ited the site and vowed that Masada will
never happen again.
Everywhere, the past, the present, and
the future — the overriding dimension of
time.
At Yad Vashem, the memorial to the
Holocaust of recent memory, Minister
Gabriel Hausner, the state prosecutor
of Eichmann, stressed to us the impor-

tance of remembering the past so that
future generations will never forget
the discontinuity of history that sent, in
this most modern of centuries, six mil-
lion Jews to a violent death. He traced
the implacable hatred of the Jews, the
apathy of the rest of the world, and the
Jewish lack of preparation for the
most ignominious treatment ever in-
flicted on a helpless people.
We were guided through the exhaustive
archives of death camp records and told of
the methods used to recapture evidence of
Nazi atrocities. The exhibitions them-
selves are stark and sobering, befitting
their theme. The memorial to the dead is in
the shape of a chimney and contains ashes
taken from the death camps. As I stood in
the semi-darkness, a small man beside me,
noticing that I was affected by the
enormity of the event, quietly rolled up his
sleeve to show me the unmistakable mark
of his concentration camp number. Later, I
saw for myself at Auschwitz and Bergen-
Belsen the shattered relics of a generation
of Jews.
Again, the past, the present, the future
— the omnipresence of time and history.
In the political and military briefings in
Israel too, there was concern for the chang-
ing historical scene. The unchallenged
American superiority at arms that for two
decades kept an unstable peace in the Mid-
dle East had given way to a new faith in a
diplomacy that has sought an incremental
peace for Arabs and Jews.
America's national interest in that
part of the world has become less clear
as the nation has become locked in dis-
agreement, a new national election is
in the offing, and America has contin-
ued to wallow in a post-Watergate and
Vietnam malaise of disillusionment
and distrust. Realpolitik, we were told
by Israeli friends, dictated a strong
American commitment to Israel, quite
apart from sentiment but still — what
was this strange new mood in this
country that provoked so much inse-
curity abroad?
On top of these major concerns, Abba
Eban told us in a private meeting of his
own growing difficulty of interpreting Is-
raeli policy abroad while Israeli troops
occupied an alien territory whose inhabi-
tants were daily growing more militant.
How much easier it had been to portray
Israel as an open, democratic nation com-
mitted to peace and self-determination, he
said, when his nation did not hold others
under its control at the point of a bayonet.
On the Golan Heights an army officer
related the history of the area to the pre-
sent political and strategic conflict in that
crucial entryway to the shores of Galilee.
The slope of the land, the natural fortifica-
tions in the ring of hills moving southeast
from Mount Hermon joined to the heights
to the south, and the swiftness of modern
armor make it critical in the avoidance of
surprise attack. More than 2,000 Syrian
tanks battled initially with 700 Israeli
tanks in this tiny area entirely visible to
the eye in the Yom Kippur War.
When it is remembered that the great
tank battles of World War II in North Af-
rica and Europe involved only 400 or 500
tanks spread over hundreds of miles, one
gets a sense of great armies clashing by
night in a new Armageddon.
The critical economic and social
changes of modern Israel — the de-
velopment of the desert, the immense
national irrigation project, the
flourishing of the kibutzim, the de-
velopment towns — all too have their
roots in the geography and history of
that remarkable region.

But it is in the universities that we had
the chance to see the meeting of the old and
the new, the traditional and the experi-
mental, in a state devoted to learning and
things of the mind and spirit, as well as to
defense and national growth.
The two national universities — The
Technion in Haifa and the Hebrew Univer-
sity in Jerusalem — are rooted in the
European university tradition and serve
the scholarly and scientific and engineer- •
ing aspirations of the new nation. The
quality of scholarship and research is high
and many Israeli professors are interna-
tionally known for their studies. They were
founded before the establishment of an in-
dependent Israel, however, and have emu-
lated the German and European models of
devotion to scholarship and learning in
their development. This is especially true
of the Hebrew University, the greatest of

DR. THOMAS N. BONNER

the institutions of higher education in Is-
rael.
The later universities" — the so-called
"regional" universities at Beersheba,
Haifa, Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan and the Weiz-
mann Institute — have used the older uni-
versities as models.
Yet much of the college-age popula-
tion in Israel, which is much older be-
cause of army service, is not prepared
for this kind of education. Almost two-
thirds of recent immigrants now come
from North Africa, the Middle East and
Asia. They are generally much poorer,
have larger families, mostly illiterate,
and have little knowledge of the Euro-
pean and Western culture that is do-
minant in modern Israel.
We found nothing like our land-grant
university systems, no great network of
community colleges (though there a few),
and little emphasis or importance given to
adult or continuing education in a society
that has real needs to bring much of its
population abreast of the rest in education
and opportunity.
In actual fact, much of this concern we
encountered also among Israeli academics
and public figures alike. Former President
Katzir, himself a profeSsor, referred to the
Jewish respect for learning and the exist-
ence of universities before practical appli-
cations were needed. Professors in Israel,
he said (at which many of us smiled), "live
in an ivory tower." The dynamic mayor of
Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, complained that
the Hebrew University had been of no help
to the city in dealing with its mammoth
planning problems and social tensions.
But this is only part of the story. We in
America have found how difficult it is to
educate the culturally disadvantaged and
we have dealt with much smalller num-
bers. Almost all the universities offer a
pre-academic year which is aimed at bring-
ing students to university standards.
At the University of Haifa we saw a
determined effort to recruit and work
with non-European students and to
promote Arab-Israeli dialogue. I found
this to be one of the most exciting and
intellectually alive universities in Is-

rael — one in many ways like Wayne
State here in Detroit — that may point
the way to correlating a part of the
higher education effort with the na-
tional mission. For it is clear that in the
long run there can be no satisfaction
for the few if there is not opportunity
for the many.
A year ago, I was proud to take a small
place among those who saw Prime Minis-
ter Begin, President Sadat and President
Carter initial the peace accords reached at
Camp David. The process of healing and
accommodation has been well begun.
A colleague of mine returned from
Tel Aviv the other day had a chance to
see the newly-established Egyptiki
Embassy in its temporary quarters
the Hilton Hotel. What struck him
most, he said, about its operation was
that it was so entirely unremarkable.
People were going in and out, transact-
ing their business, and while security
guards were much in evidence (as they
are at many official buildings in Israel),
the embassy looked like any other in
that young and embattled country.
Equally to the point, I have with me
today a copy of the Jerusalem Post of
March 29, 1980 which reports some highly
promising developments. I quote from the
lead paragraph: "In a dramatic turn of
events, Israel and Egypt last night ap-
peared to be moving towards reconciling
their conflicts over the thorny issue of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip autonomy
amid signals of willingness on both sides to
overlook controversial aspects."
While this news of course, as we know,
does not indicate a resolution of the many
problems that separate the two countries,
there does seem to be a reservoir of good-
will to reconcile differences and to lay the
cornerstone for a peaceful future.
These are astounding developments, if
viewed from the perspective of the very
recent past -- what am I saying? — if
viewed from the vantage point of even two
years ago. Animosity, hostility, warfare
and distrust then marked the relationship
of the two countries. Now there is talk of
joint projects. The turn-about is as drama-
tic as the famous biblical adage of swords
turning into plowshares.
Let me add two other anecdotes that
have come in the wake of last year's
agreement. A friend of mine, shortly
after the ceremony, was visiting Egypt.
She is the wife of one of my staff mem-
bers, but a political scientist in her own
right. Even she was astonished at the
rapidity of the ensuing developments.
She walked into a souvenir store, and
simply did not trust her eyes and ears
when she saw four men, all wearing
yarmulkes in a Cairo store, completely
absorbed in a friendly conversation,
half-Arabic, half-Ivrit.
She asked the tourists, who were buying
up much of the store, what they were doing
in Cairo. They explained that they were
part of an advance party from Israel,
charged with setting up the preliminaries
for the establishment of diplomatic rela-
tions. As they left the store, one of them
turned and called out, both to the
storekeeper and to the visitor fro'
America: "Shalom, shalom — do visit us _
Israel."
And one more possible symptom of a new
era in the Mideast. The aforemention , "
colleague, walking through the streets
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, saw posters at,
various travel agencies, which were reas-
suring by their very triteness. They said,
simply, "Visit the Pyramids."
Ladies and gentlemen, I attended a
Seder service many years ago, probably
very similar to yours this spring. I recall
that the service includes the pious wish
that the next Seder service be held in
Jerusalem. Well, it now looks as if, on the
way to next year's celebration in the Holy
Land, you can take in Cario as well — and
thus retrace the route of the historic
exodus. I won't mind at all if you should
invite me along!

