Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
During its fi rst forty years of existence, the conventional armies of all its neighbors
—
Egypt,
Syria, and Jordan directly and Saudi Arabia and Iraq indirectly
—
posed a daily threat of war,
fi nanced by the Arab world and with arms supplied by the Soviet Union. By signing peace
treaties fi rst with Egypt in 1979 and then with Jordan in 1994, Israel removed two of the three
main Arab armies facing it. Syria's weakness dropped out the third, reducing the likelihood of
conventional war on Israel's borders to near zero. The Soviet Union's dissolution, Iraq's turn
inward, and the Arab states' preoccupation with the Iranian and revolutionary Islamist threat
all further reduced danger on that front.
By 2011, however, that situation appeared to be taking another turn; the proliferation of
rockets on its borders in the hands of Hamas and Hizballah, the 2011 revolution in Egypt
that might undo the peace treaty, and the lack of an Israel-Palestinian peace settlement, along
with the general growth of revolutionary Islamism, show that Israel's security problems are far
from over. Undoubtedly, the threats remain high compared to those faced by almost any other
country in the world. But Israelis are mostly reconciled to the confl ict going on for decades.
Having faced that reality, however, national morale is quite high. In annual polls, the
number of people expressing satisfaction with their lives and hope in the future is phenom-
enally high. Almost 80 percent of Israelis say they would fi ght for their country, as opposed to
60 percent of Americans and 40 percent of Britons. The proportion of young people ready to
volunteer for combat units defi es all pessimistic predictions about selfi shness and hedonism.
Another element in Israel's development was that Jewish immigrants who had arrived from
many different countries and cultures were successfully integrated into a coherent society. Pre-
ceding and following Israel's independence in 1948, immigrants came fi rst from Europe, then
largely from the Middle East, and much later from the former Soviet Union and also, in much
smaller numbers, from Ethiopia. Most of the immigrants arrived as refugees, having lost all of
their property as well as suffering personal trauma from dangerous conditions and persecu-
tion in the countries they had fl ed.
On the whole, Israeli society integrated immigrants on an equal basis. This happened de-
spite the tremendous economic pressure of the immediate post-independence period when
rationing was in effect. Later on, however, complaints arose that the integrating process had
been coercive and discriminatory
—
too ready to remake Mizrahi immigrants along European
lines. This became a heated political and cultural issue in the 1980s, although it has largely
faded with the birth of a more integrated and often intermarried generation.
Arabs compose almost 20 percent of Israel's population. They are predominantly Muslim,
but there are small Christian and Druze populations too. Whatever shortcomings there are in
regard to the Arab minority, there is astonishingly little friction despite problems documented
in the Or Commission Report (2003), and there are few limits on their rights despite an ongo-
ing military confl ict and the constant threat of terrorism.
Although Israel is defi ned as a Jewish state, it functions more like a traditionally pluralist
Middle Eastern country
—
with a state religion and partly autonomous minorities
—
than like a
twentieth-century mono-nationalist European state that suppressed all minorities in a process
of forced assimilation. Each religious community has control over its own matters of personal
status and maintains cultural, religious, and, to a degree, judicial autonomy.
