When Israel celebrated its 50th anniversary, it was every bit as divided and disheartened as it is today, on its 75th.
Fifty years after its creation in 1948 as a refuge for Jews, who’d undergone two millenniums of wandering and a devastating genocidal holocaust, Israel was rich and reasonably democratic (for those it chose to enfranchise). It had revitalized a near-dead language, survived four major wars and was in the middle of a peace process with the Palestinians.
Yet its achievements seemed distant, its ideals battered, and it was a land of “unfulfilled dreams in the grips of a bruising internal struggle.”
That’s what I wrote 25 years ago, in 1998, as a Jerusalem-based correspondent covering the 50th anniversary. It has surprised me, in rereading it, how fraught and similar the situation is today.
Abba Eban, former Israeli foreign minister, told me then: “I worry very much about my country these days. It’s very sharply divided, it’s disappointing and there’s a sense of disillusionment.”