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Israel, at 66, losing its creative national spirit

Once a young, creative and peace-aspiring country, Israel is missing the spirit that animated its founders.
TEL-AVIV, ISRAEL:  The crowd of Jewish immigrants waving from the deck of trawler "Andria" as they arrive 20 May 1948 at Tel Aviv harbor. Israel was founded on 14 May 1948 by the Jewish National Council and was recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union 15 and 17 May. (Photo credit should read AFP/Getty Images)
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The first 66 years in the life of a state are a period of mentoring and adaptation, of putting down roots and of growth. Not so in Israel’s case. Few states, if any, have reaped a comparable harvest of accomplishments in the first seven decades of their existence. A state born on the morrow of the Holocaust, on a land poor in resources but saturated with the blood of its fighters, became in an instant fertile soil for new Hebrew creation, for a flourishing industry and a burgeoning scientific hothouse. The security threat that kept hovering over the young state, as well as the economic, social and cultural challenges, turned it into a vibrant, creative, ambitious entity.

The Middle East arms race, Palestinian terror and Arab refusal to make peace sucked up the best of the state’s human resources. Defense considerations and the politics of fear left no room for diplomatic initiative and the politics of hope. For most of its first 40 years, the Western world — with the United States at its head — stood unquestioningly at Israel’s side. In the first 20 years after its conquest of the territories, Israel was the darling of the international community and, of course, of the Jewish communities around the world. The settlement enterprise was considered in those years an integral part of the “startup,” dubbed in Orwellian parlance “enlightened occupation.”

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