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By Root 905 0

after centuries of being strangers and rootless in the lands of others, has helped to achieve that result as much as anything. The Jews are at home: not a home taken over ready-made, but one they had to clear, clean, repair, and reconstruct by their own labor. Palestine, under Arabs and Turks during the thousand years before 1900, reverted to the nomad, and for lack of cultivation was left to the desolation predicted by Isaiah: a “habitation of dragons and a court for owls.” English explorers in the nineteenth century found it a stony goat pasture with “not a mile of made road in the land from Dan to Beersheba.” To be made livable again, reported the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1880, the land required roads for wheeled transport, irrigation and swamp drainage, restoration of aqueducts and cisterns, sanitation, seeding of grass and reforestation to check soil erosion. This was the task that faced, and all but overwhelmed, the early Jewish colonists. Internal dissension and self-made problems, as prevalent then as today, did not help. While they starved, they engaged in furious dispute over whether to keep the commandment of a sabbatical year during which no work on fields or among livestock could be done.

The issue survives. At Kfar Yuval, a little colony in northern Galilee settled by an Orthodox group of Indian Jews, a schoolteacher apologized for the weed-grown yard that could not be cultivated because it was sabbatical year for the village. When I asked, “What do they eat?” my guide shrugged and said, “They pray and eat less.” The fossilized rules of Orthodoxy hamper progress and convenience in the nation out of all proportion to the number who take them seriously. Because the Orthodox party holds the political balance of power, it has an official grip on the country, and Orthodoxy strikes a visitor as the most stultifying of Israel’s self-made problems.

Yet the Jews have made the land bloom—with terraced hills and delicate orchards, hedges of rosemary and the thick lush green of orange groves. Everywhere around the groves in springtime the pungent sweet fragrance of orange blossom hangs in the air like smoke. Yellow mimosa and feathery, pine-like tamarisks grow along the roadside, punctuated by great cascades of purple bougainvillaea. Away from the urban strips and gas stations and industrial plants and somewhat shoddy emergency settlements, Israel has an extraordinary beauty. Cypresses like dark green candles point upward against the blue sky, and windblown olive trees shimmer as if their leaves were tipped with silver. When the wind blows, the palms bend like reeds over Lake Tiberias, and from western Galilee one can see, far in the distance between the hills, the whitecaps of the Mediterranean glint in the sun.

It is no wonder the Jews have grown a new face. Perhaps what accounts for it most of all is that Israel is theirs; here they are not a minority; they are on top. Which is not to say they will live happily ever after, or even now, for they are the most contentious people alive, and Orthodoxy is not their only self-made problem. Their quarrels are legion, they abuse each other incessantly and without compunction, and settle differences of opinion within any group by splitting instead of submitting to majority rule. The Haifa Technion, Israel’s MIT, was recently plunged in battle over the teaching of architecture. The issue, roughly one between scientific and humanistic schools of thought, exists in other countries as well, but the solution in Israel was radical. By dictate of the Technion’s president, the faculty of architecture was split into two faculties—a decision which enraged the students, since they would have to choose between one or the other, and many wanted elements of both. Carried over to political life, the habit causes factionalism which Israelis explain as the natural consequence of long centuries without political power or responsibility. They consider that the experience of self-government is gradually providing an enforced cure.

Israel is not an affluent society; it is hard-working, with