10 | MAY 11 • 2023 

essay
Israel At 75: A Richer, Stronger Nation
T

oday’s Israel is much 
different from the 
Israel of my youth. It 
is richer, stronger and much 
more diverse. I grew up in a 
seemingly egalitarian Israel, 
where our economy rested on 
socialist principles. The kibbutz 
(collective farm 
community) was 
the symbol of our 
society’s success 
well into 1970s 
and beyond, and 
it produced most 
of our military 
and political lead-
ership. Capitalism was almost a 
dirty word, yet Western culture 
permeated much of our urban 
life in the state’s early decades.
Growing up in the shadow 
of the Holocaust made Israel 
determined to overcome the 
odds against it. In its first 
war for survival, the 1948 
War of Independence, Israel 
prevailed over the combined 
Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, 
Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, who 
openly declared to the world 
their world intention to destroy 
us. George Marshall, President 
Harry Truman’s secretary of 
state, didn’t think the nascent 
Jewish state could survive. He 
cautioned Truman against rec-
ognizing the Jewish state. 
The early years were bleak. 
Between 1949 (immediately 
after the War of Independence) 
and 1951, the country absorbed 
more people than it previously 
had on May 14, 1948, when 
David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s 
founding father and first prime 
minister) declared the indepen-
dence of the Jewish state. 
The absorption of over a 
million Jews, Holocaust sur-
vivors and Middle Eastern 
Jews expelled from Iraq, 

Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, 
etc., necessitated an auster-
ity program. This era in the 
early 1950s was called Tzena. 
Families received coupons for 
basic foods such as milk, eggs, 
potatoes, etc. Meat was scarce 
and expensive. Private cars 
were rare, and such essentials 
taken for granted today, includ-
ing refrigerators (we used ice 
boxes), telephones and tele-
vision sets were the property 
of few. Those individuals who 
owned a TV could only receive 
broadcasts from the Arab states 
and Europe. Israel launched its 
TV broadcasting in May 1968.
Another dramatic rise in 
Israel’s Jewish population came 
in the early 1990s with the 
influx of Jews from the former 
Soviet Union and Ethiopia. 
Almost 1.5 million arrived and 
impacted the demographic 
balance between Israelis and 
the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat’s 
threat that “Palestinian-Arab 
wombs would bury Israel” 
didn’t materialize. 
Israel’s population grew 
from around 806,000 in 1948 
to about 9.7 million in 2023, 
with the Jewish population 
numbering 7.1 million (figures 
given by Times of Israel). Today, 
Jewish birthrates in Israel are 

in parity with the Palestinians. 
Most remarkable has been the 
nation’s many decades of suc-
cessful integration of people of 
widely diverse backgrounds. 

TECHNOLOGICAL 
ADVANCES
Not long ago, Israel was 
energy-dependent and water-
starved. But with freedom of 
thought and creativity encour-
aged, the discovery of signif-
icant gas deposits off Israel’s 
shores are making the country 
a potential energy exporter. Its 
desalination plants, a model for 
the world, makes Israel water 
self-sufficient. 
Still, lacking natural resourc-
es, Israel’s brain power and 
ingenuity have made it a world 
leader in the crucial areas of 
medicine, water technology, 
desert agriculture and environ-
mental protection, recycling as 
much as 90% of its wastewa-
ter. Israel has been sharing its 
important advances and con-
servation practices with nations 
rich and poor throughout the 
world, enhancing our parched 
planet. 
The country has become 
known globally as the Startup 
Nation, being the next country 
after the U.S. in companies 

represented on the USA Stock 
Exchange.
For decades, the Arab League 
economic boycott of Israel 
aimed at stifling its growth and 
causing its people to abandon 
the country didn’t succeed. 
The privatization policies of 
Benjamin Netanyahu in the 
21st century propelled Israel 
into becoming a major eco-
nomic success story. It resulted 
in the Arab boycott disap-
pearing and Israel’s growing 
acceptance among its hitherto 
enemies in the Arab world. 
This ultimately translated 
into the Abraham Accords 
of September 2020, when 
Bahrain and the United Arab 
Emirates signed a peace treaty 
with Israel, to which Morocco 
and Sudan (still pending) also 
joined. Egypt and Jordan, 
acknowledging Israel as a for-
midable neighbor, signed peace 
treaties with Israel in 1979 and 
1994, respectively.

TODAY’S CHALLENGES
Domestically, Israel has some 
challenges, as do all nations. 
Constitutional issues that in 
Israel are referred to as Judicial 
Reform have sharpened 
some divisions in the country 
between left and right, secu-
lar and religious Israelis. Yet, 
democracy and free speech 
have been on full display. 
In the foreseeable future, 
Israel is facing a gathering 
storm. The Islamic Republic 
of Iran and its proxies are 
threatening to attack Israeli 
population centers from mul-
tiple fronts. Saudi Arabia, until 
recently a major prospect to 
join the USA-backed Abraham 
Accords, has instead turned 
and reached a rapprochement 
with Iran via Chinese media-

Joseph 
Puder

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