Tel Aviv
WETNG
i
CRciv LL
CO li typfiTE
TERRORAS
R it'S
PRO LIM.
40
n my first years in
Israel, during the
late 1980s, I used to
think that I came
here too late, about
three or four decades
too late. I'd missed
the heroic period of
nation-building, that
sepia-toned time
when shirtless men
labored in the sun to
carve out new roads
and farm the fields,
when women in coarse
cotton dresses milked
the cows, when Israelis
were hopeful and idea-
listic, when everything was new.
Now, after 10 years in this country,
I've decided I was better off missing it.
For all the spirit and optimism of those
first years of statehood, the people lived
a primitive life, with little knowledge of
(or interest in) the rest of the world. They
were so full of themselves, so bristling
in their Israelihood, marching along in
lock-step conformity, led by the all-
powerful David Ben-Gurion. I still wish
I could have been here right before and
during the 1948 War of Independence
— who wouldn't want to live through
his people's revolution? - but after that,
if I could pick any time to be living in
Israel, I'd take the 1990s.
We're going through a period, if not
of revolution, then at least of fairly
oceanic social change. For the first time
in 100 years of Zionism, most of the Jews
here have money. For all the glitzy crap
that Israelis are buying with it, money
and surging economic growth mean that
men and women now have choices in
their lives. For the individual with am-
bition — professional, intellectual, what-
ever — Israel isn't such a little pond
anymore.
The collective life is contracting, the
personal life is expanding. In the words
of Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-
Eliezer, Israel is finally becoming "a
country that exists for the sake of its cit-
izens, not the other way around."
The other sweeping change is, of
course, the peace process. So far it hasn't
exactly panned out the way we'd hoped,
and there is reason to fear for the future
(not to mention the present), but it is
still possible to believe that this bloody,
agonizing ordeal will come to a decent,
livable end.
But when I try to look ahead, to imag-
ine what it's going to be like here in an-
other generation or so, I'm left mainly
with misgivings. I think we're heading
into something completely different from