Israel Celebrates to Sounds of Triumph--and Discord

Bearing the laugh lines and crow’s-feet of middle age, Israel on Thursday faced its 50th anniversary with the joy and conflicts that have characterized its first half-century.

Israelis flocked to parks on a glorious spring day with flags and full picnic baskets to hail the many achievements of their self-made state. They watched their military display its ample might, their Jewish children compete in a nationally televised Bible quiz and their top entertainers perform in a lavish Jubilee Bells gala.

“Fifty years ago, it was not clear that the Jewish people would survive,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an anniversary interview with Israel Radio. “Our achievement and our struggle, what we have accomplished, is nothing short of miraculous.”

But at the same time, Israelis continued their relentless self-examination and engaged in the religious and political tug of wars that have them fretting about the future of the Jewish state.

The golden anniversary began at sundown Wednesday when the nation moved seamlessly from a Memorial Day remembrance of the thousands killed in Israel’s conflicts to a two-day celebration of the country for which they died. The wail of 50 rams’ horns launched the festivities, followed by fireworks and dancing in the streets through the night. (Israel declared its independence May 14, 1948, but celebrated April 30 this year, the anniversary according to the Jewish calendar.)

Thursday dawned bright. But the sun also seemed to illuminate Israel’s deepest divisions. At the Old City’s Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest place, police moved worshipers from the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements to a remote balcony overlooking the plaza to avoid clashes with Orthodox Jews who reject the liberal streams of Judaism and have attacked them before at the site.

“This is not where I wanted to pray,” said Lisa Gann, a member of a group that lets men and women worship together in violation of Orthodoxy. Gann, an employee of the Jewish Agency, added that she had just returned from Russia with a planeload of new immigrants.

“Independence Day,” she noted, “is the Jewish state for all Jews, whether they were born here or are from the former Soviet Union, whether they are Reform, Conservative or Orthodox. . . . I am very concerned about where this country is going. The great challenge is to develop a culture of tolerance.”

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis, meanwhile, put religion and politics aside for a day. Lugging barbecues and lounge chairs outdoors, they played with their children in the grass as military jets raced in formation overhead.

“The state has turned 50, and this is cause for celebration,” said Rahamim Shukroun, a Jerusalem picnicker. “I try to live by the motto of ‘Live and let live.’ ”

But not so far away, left- and right-wing demonstrators held competing protests at Har Homa, a hill in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem that Palestinians call Jabal Abu Ghneim. Government plans to build a Jewish housing project there have helped to bring the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to a standstill. Police kept the two groups of Jews apart, while soldiers at checkpoints imposed a closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, preventing Palestinians from entering Israel during festivities.

About 500 activists from Israeli peace groups--which had to go to court to be included in the official jubilee--gathered beside a giant, inflated dove at the foot of Har Homa to demand that Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and religious parties drop the project and make progress in peacemaking. “We have to do everything to stop the people who are trying to stop the peace process,” businessman Emmanuel Spielman said. “If other people come to Har Homa to celebrate [Jewish development], then we had better come and demonstrate.”

Up the mountain, about 10,000 religious nationalists laid a symbolic cornerstone and demanded that the government not delay the project. Roads and other infrastructure have been put in place, but housing construction has yet to begin. “Today, with the laying of this cornerstone, a new neighborhood will be built called Har Homa. . . . It will be the country’s 50th birthday present,” read the declaration that demonstrators put into a buried tube. Around them were slogans painted by peace groups: “Hill of Blood,” read one, and another said, “Har Homa Equals War.”

Shifra Adler, a demonstrator in the “nationalist camp,” said, “The point is that this part of Jerusalem belongs to Jerusalem, that Jerusalem belongs to Israel and that Israel belongs to the Jewish people.”

Shaul Tzion Ben-Ivri, from the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, added: “We came here to reclaim our land after 2,000 years. We could have had a barbecue, but we figured we would do something important besides eat. . . . The people who are here are people who live Torah in the land.”

The two groups spoke openly of their animus for each other and the seeming impossibility of discussion between them. “We have nothing in common with them,” Yisrael Friedman, 25, an ultra-Orthodox Hassid, said of the peace camp. “These people hate us more than the Arabs. We can’t talk with them. They would rather make peace with the Arabs than with us, so there’s nothing to talk about.”

Even the main, evening jubilee event was not controversy-free. After failing to press their case in court, ultra-Orthodox legislators threatened to disrupt the gala if modern dancers of the Bat-Sheva company performed a number, as planned, stripped to their underwear. President Ezer Weizman mediated between the devout, or haredim, and the dancers all day and thought he had arrived at a compromise: The dancers were to wear flesh-colored leotards beneath briefs. But just before the production began, they withdrew from the program to protest limits on their artistic freedom by the religious.

U.S. Vice President Al Gore, guest of honor at the celebration, broadcast to Jewish communities in 16 countries, won a standing ovation when he spoke to Israelis in Hebrew--even if it was to say that he did not speak Hebrew. Gore also spoke of the long friendship between America and Israel, reminding the crowd that the U.S. government had recognized this nation 11 minutes after it declared its independence in 1948.

Netanyahu told Gore that, although the United States was a beacon of hope for millions of people, “Mr. Vice President, this is the real Promised Land.” He also spoke of hope and of the national anthem, “Hatikva,” which means hope. But Netanyahu offered no blueprints for the future except to say that Israelis had reunited Jerusalem after the 1967 Six-Day War and that “the city will never again be divided.”

Weizman, known as one of the bluntest speakers in Israeli politics, raised uncomfortable issues at the party, saying, “We fought for the first 30 years and spent the next 20 trying to make peace”--which still eludes Israel, at least with the Palestinians and neighbors Syria and Lebanon.

Weizman also urged the crowd to remember the 1 million Arab citizens of Israel. “We were meant to live together, and we must find a way to live together because Israeli Arabs are the way to the Arab world,” he said. “We must also examine our own deeds.”

Discussing Israel’s chances of negotiating a peace with the Palestinians, he observed: “I estimate there is a great chance of achieving this. The sooner we reach this, the better.”

But for Palestinians, with the process stalemated and Israel quashing their hopes for a state of their own with its capital in East Jerusalem, the jubilee events--harking back to Israel’s founding, which they call the nakba, or catastrophe--were a bitter reminder of their loss of land and their flight as refugees.

These “have been five decades of continuing tragedy and bleeding wound, of displacement and refugees, of injustice and oppression,” Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official, said of the half-century of Israel’s existence. “There is no way this bleeding wound can heal unless we have an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Fearing attacks by radical Palestinians, Israeli officials turned the gala into the most heavily secured event in the Jewish state’s history.

And yet, despite the fears and schisms exposed on Israel’s 50th birthday, its citizens sounded a note of optimism. A poll commissioned by Haaretz newspaper found that 82% of Israelis expect their country to celebrate its 100th anniversary.