Hitting age 60, Israel turns nostalgic

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Image: Jubilant residents ride a police car and wave what would become the Israeli flag

Israel turns 60
As Israel celebrates 60 years of independence, a look at the Jewish state’s turbulent past.

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The failure of peace talks with the Palestinians in 2000 and the violence that ensued have left Israelis deeply cynical about prospects for resolving the conflict. Olmert is holding talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, but polls have shown that a majority of Israelis doubt anything will come of them.

"Today, most Israelis don't believe in peace anymore. This wasn't the case when the country turned 50," said historian Tom Segev.

While they indulge in nostalgia, most Israelis don't really long for a return to the past, Segev says. They live better today than they ever have, he said, adding: "Anyone can leave the country if they want to, but they don't."

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"People don't believe in politicians, they're not interested in the news or in ideology, but in life," he said. "There isn't anything more normal than that, and that normalcy is precisely the Zionist dream."

In an anniversary poll published in the daily Yediot Ahronot, 91 percent of Israelis said it was "fairly good" or "very good" to live in Israel. Those who said life in Israel was "fairly bad" or "very bad" numbered only 9 percent. The poll, carried out by the Dahaf Institute, included 500 respondents and had a 4.5 percent margin of error.

Ruth Gefen-Dotan was 23 when Israel was founded, and remembers men on her kibbutz fashioning mortars out of irrigation pipes to battle Arab forces. Over the years, her son and a half-dozen members of her extended family have died in the military.

Now 83, she lives at Ayelet Hashachar, a kibbutz in northern Israel. If there is something that has changed for the worse, she said, it's that "people put 'me' first instead of 'us.'"

"We have to understand that things are in our hands. Everyone must give what they can," she said.

But that's as nostalgic as Gefen-Dotan allows herself to be.

"I look at my kibbutz — it was destroyed in the fighting in 1948, and everything here was yellow and dead. Today I'm sitting in a flowering garden full of children and young people," she said. "What am I supposed to miss?"