Israel

ON OCTOBER 12, 1964, the Premier of Israel, Levi Eshkol, told the Knesset — the Israeli parliament — that his country was confronted by “a combination of blind Arab hatred with the murderous efficiency of Hitler’s days.” Eshkol was referring, in the first place, to the declarations of President Nasser of Egypt, made with increasing frequency during recent months, that he would annihilate the state of Israel. In the second place he was referring to the work done for Nasser by German scientists in developing rockets and other weapons of destruction. Roughly two dozen of these scientists, along with hundreds of German, Austrian, and other European technicians, have been making a major contribution to Nasser’s preparations for war for the past two years.

The issue of the German scientists, linked as it is with the wider issue of West German-Israeli relations, has become very important in Israel’s internal as well as external politics. For the primarily socialist government of Premier Eshkol has had to withstand a barrage of popular criticism, on the grounds that it has not shown sufficient “firmness” with West Germany by demanding the withdrawal from Egypt of the German scientists, some of them unrepentant exNazis. The emotions of the two million Jews in Israel were brought to the boil by the vague and dilatory performance of the West German government and parliament. Some of their anger has been directed against their own government.

The Bonn government was informed two years ago of the sinister activities of the German scientists in Egypt. It took Bonn a year to table legislation before the Bundestag which would have discouraged service by Germans to any foreign government if such service threatened the maintenance of peace and friendly relations anywhere in the world. The draft bill was referred back to committee. Then, at the beginning of October, the West German Chancellor, Professor Ludwig Erhard, produced the statement that “no practical possibility” existed of framing effective legislation. The statements of official spokesmen in Bonn that German actions are dictated by solicitude toward Israel and that Bonn will not adopt a course “in which Israel would have as little interest as we” are regarded in Jerusalem as claptrap.

German recognition of Israel

Such phrases have been used before in Bonn. The argument against establishing diplomatic relations with Israel has been that this could hurt Israel rather than help it. The Arab countries would recognize the East German Republic, the reasoning goes; this would in turn strengthen latent anti-Semitic forces in Germany because of possible trade losses. Under the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, West Germany will sever all relations with states which recognize Ulbricht’s puppet regime in Berlin-Pankow.

Both the Adenauer and Erhard governments have insisted that they have done no more than apply the valid Hallstein Doctrine by not establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. In fact, they have been pre-empting that doctrine, whose validity is in any case doubtful since West German trade missions have been set up in Poland and Czechoslovakia. They have not made use of the doctrine, but have sought to avoid a situation in which the doctrine might have to be invoked.

The Jews of Israel regard this line of reasoning as moral cowardice. Moreover, they point out that in March, 1966, the Israeli Reparations Mission in Cologne will be closed down. In that month the channeling of reparations in kind from Germany to Israel will end. The Cologne Mission was in theory concerned simply with agreeing on lists of goods which West Germany could supply and which Israel wanted. In reality, the mission had definite diplomatic value; its members were high-powered diplomats who could talk to the West German government at any time. But after it is closed, there will be no further official contact between Bonn and Jerusalem, unless full diplomatic relations are established in the meantime. Rather naturally, the Israelis will not accept the substitute of a permanent trade mission or a consular office.

It might be thought that differences with the West German Republic may have given birth to a new persecution pyschosis in Israel. This is not the case. Israelis examine and re-examine the position earnestly and objectively. They do not underrate Germany’s importance to the Western alliance, or the efforts of Germany’s leaders to prove themselves good allies and upholders of democracy.

Mrs. Golda Meir, the Foreign Minister, has summed it up this way: “We know that the Germany of 1964 is not the Germany of 1934. We know that Germans have made some amends for Hitler’s crimes. But Germany must come to terms with Israel in the right spirit and of her own free-will — and this means taking the first, vital step towards restoring fully normal relations between our two countries.”

The cost of defense

Israel faces additional problems, some of them of a pressing nature. First, there is the reality of Nasser‘s military threat to Israel‘s existence. The rockets which he is developing could blast Israel’s thickly populated centers of population to pieces (over half of the population live in the three cities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and their suburbs). These rockets might be most dangerous if fired from launching pads on the new fast motor torpedo boats bought by Egypt from Russia.

In conventional weapons, too, Egypt probably has the edge on Israel. Israel’s best fighter, the French Mirage III, is probably superior to Egypt’s Russian MIG-21‘s. But the Egyptians have better sccond-line and transport planes. They have a better tank, the Russian T-54, than the Israelis’ British Centurion. They have better ack-ack, all of it Russian. With four times the population of Israel. Egypt has a greater manpower potential. And Egypt has allies, even if some of them are manifestly unwilling: Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon.

Major General Rabin, the Israeli chief of staff, says that “it is still possible to create the necessary strength to deter aggression against us. We must buy the arms that we need from the western world, for we cannot produce all that we need. We look to the West only to help us balance the military force of the Soviet-backed Arab states. This is how peace can be kept in the Middle East.”

But the keeping of the peace imposes a huge burden on Israel. It means conscription, of all males for twenty-six months of service, and of unmarried females for twenty months. Men and women stay in the regular reserve until the ages of forty-nine and thirty-four respectively, and train each year for varying periods, according to their age groups. Training is rigorous, and a recruit is reckoned ready for battle after six months of preliminary and nine months of combat training.

In the event of war, Israel could mobilize 300,000 men and women in less than seventy-two hours. Three quarters of them would be men, and most of the women would be trained in the use of arms. The morale of Israel’s military forces is very high indeed, for its members are dedicated patriots who are highly alert to the need to defend their country. But the Israeli military effort costs a lot of money for a small country. In 1963 the defense budget rose by nearly $100 million. Defense absorbed one third of government expenditure.

Maintaining the trade balance

The defense burden means that Israel‘s economy is strained to the limit. This became painfully apparent in the early fall when the Ministry of Finance revised its estimates of the 1964 trade figures. The ministry had previously forecast a deficit in the balance of payments of $460 million; it then decided that the deficit would be around $580 million. This compared with deficits of $406 million in 1963 and only $316 million in 1959. The plain fact which was illustrated was that imports had been rising faster than ever before, but that exports have not been able to keep pace. The deficit will be partially covered by “services” like tourism, insurance, and shipping, and partially by borrowing.

The Israeli government had another worry. It has been benefiting financially from reparations from Germany. These reparations have taken two principal forms – payments to individual victims of Nazism, and payments to the government under the Debts Agreement. These latter payments are now tailing off and will virtually end in eighteen months. But reparations payments to individual citizens of Israel reached their highest level during 1964; now they too will begin to tail off. The total for 1964 shows that Israel has benefited to the extent of around $300 million; by 1969 the figure will have shrunk to $180 million.

How is Israel to deal with its balance of payments problem? Agricultural production can be further stepped up. But Israel already supplies most of the foodstuffs which its ,citizens consume. The export of foodstuffs, almost entirely to Europe, is becoming a chancy business. The Common Market Six aim at agricultural self-sufficiency. The EFTA. the free-trading group led by Britain, will give no special preferences to Israel and will buy the sort of semitropical products which Israel exports from other sources – America and the former British colonies. Raising agricultural production will help Israel to evolve a more balanced economy; it will not earn the foreign currency which Israel needs.

Israel has to earn more from tourism, from banking, insurance, and other financial means, but above all from industrial production. The country’s industrial effort is impressive. Everywhere new plants are going up, with a degree of concentration on Haifa which may make it Israel‘s biggest city in fifteen years’ time. Israel has no coal and no iron ore, and this makes its heavy industries relatively unprofitable. But it has big and expanding chemical resources, potash, phosphates, and natural gas. It can in time evolve a supremely efficient production of fertilizers.

Israel is putting much effort into sophisticated industries like electronics, knowing that it has an excellent market in Greece, Turkey, and the Far East. The Israeli planners believe that the balance of payments deficit can be reduced to $280 million by 1970 and eliminated shortly thereafter. Independent observers think this optimistic; but the Israelis arc very determined people and make a habit of fulfilling their government’s demands.

Labor is becoming more expensive, but at the same time more efficient. In the last four years 250,000 immigrants, largely from underdeveloped North African countries, have been absorbed into the economy. Jews of the older generation who suffered during the war, many of them emerging from it physically wrecked, are drifting into honorable retirement. A steady insistence on high investment in capital goods will in due course begin to bear fruit. There has been a determined effort to raise the national income at least as fast as the standard of living.

The results can be analyzed in a few lines. Israel now produces 81 percent of the goods which it consumes; twelve years ago it produced only 30 percent. Israeli exports today cover over 50 percent of the costs of imports; twelve years ago they covered only 14 percent of those costs. The balance of payments deficit is rather higher than it was ten years ago. But the national income has multiplied threefold during that period. Foreign-exchange reserves have grown to around $600 million, and the total amount of Israeli currency in circulation is only around $240 million. The country’s financial position is sound.

Working the soil

There are other factors in Israel’s favor. The population, most of which has been imported during the last fifteen years, has had shortcomings. It has been mainly a trading, shopkeeping, sedentary one. But today around 100,000 Israelis work on collective farms, which are organized on a system which is part Spartan, part humanitarian. Possibly twice as many people are at work on cooperative farms, where they are less driven and left much more to their own resources.

It has been unkindly said of Jews in the past that they have acquired sunburned palms but no muscle during the last, acquisitive two thousand years of their history. Today they produce good farmers, manual workers in industry, and soldiers. Their children are growing up straighter, slimmer, more muscular. King David was recorded as being “ruddy and of a fair countenance,” and it is an interesting fact that young Israelis are tending to have reddish or even blond hair. The physique of the nation is changing.

Prosperity and resilience

Israel has been described as the world’s most strategic crossroads; but its internal policies attract little attention outside the country. For example, a political crisis in midDecember produced the resignation of the Eshkol government and a showdown between Premier Levi Eshkol and his chief critic, former Premier David Ben-Gurion. The crisis arose over a ten-year-old security fiasco, the Lavon affair. Lavon was Minister of Defense in 1954, when an Israeli spy sabotage group was uncovered in Egypt.

Ten years later Ben-Gurion attempted to revive the affair on the grounds of his own “unappeased conscience.” As a result Eshkol resigned his premiership, but the ruling Mapai (Labor) Party gave him a strong vote of confidence, and he was reinstated with increased stature and power.

Hemmed in by hostile Arab countries, struggling for a fair economic existence, acutely aware of the need to defend themselves by the strength of their own right arms, the Israelis are continuing to show an astonishing resilience and confidence. They can afford the luxury of a dozen competing political parties, but still achieve stable government. They have spread the Hebrew tongue to immigrants from fifty different countries, speaking nearly fifty different languages. They have reclaimed stretches of near-desert where no crops have grown for centuries, and their Jordan waters pipeline will guarantee their water requirements for twenty years to come. They have built a new port, Eilat, as their outlet to the Red Sea and are in the process of building Ashdod, a Mediterranean port which will have 250,000 inhabitants in ten years.

All this is immensely impressive, but the Israelis themselves believe that some of the steam has gone out of their drive to economic selfsufficiency, and some of the old, selfless pioneering spirit has gone out of their agricultural settlers and their industrial workers. Growing prosperity has brought a demand for a still higher standard of living.

The Israelis are eating and drinking more, and buying more consumer goods — even though their government has maintained high sales taxes on all articles which could dimly be classified as luxury. Israel has lost a father figure in the retirement of Premier Ben-Gurion, who has gone to a kibbutz, or collective farm, in the Negev Desert, an act which typified his high idealism and which was intended to stimulate recruiting for the kibbutzim, many of which are strategically sited along the frontier.

Border incidents continue

During the fall, there were several shooting incidents on the IsraeliSyrian frontier. All of them started with Syrians firing on Israeli tractors and kibbutz workers in the fields. The Syrians are intent on proving themselves “better Arabs” than even the Egyptians and on diverting attention away from the failures of their own unstable government.

In border incidents provocation comes nearly always from the Arab side and is generally an act of policy rather than the reaction of a triggerhappy frontier guard. This sort of provocation has no psychological ill effect on the Israelis. There is an old saying that a Jew on a desert island would build first one synagogue and then a second synagogue, in order to have the pleasure of resigning from one or the other of them. Arab pressure has made the Israelis untypical Jews, for they are now a united people.

This year will bring elections and the usual difficulties in forming a coalition government. It will bring a reappraisal of the economy and possibly some restrictions on credit which the Bank of Israel has been demanding. It may bring an even greater threat than before from the militant Nasser. But Israeli nerves will remain steady, for the Israelis are certain of their survival.