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By Root 912 0

among the Jews from North Africa, who despise manual labor—unlike the early European settlers, who idealized it and made it the cult of the kibbutz. Whereas they came to Palestine drawn by an ideal, the present Orientals have come as more or less passive victims of circumstance. To adapt at all, they must learn a new manner of living, a new language, how to read, and new agricultural or manual skills they never knew before, a task beyond the capacity of most of them. For teenage immigrants, however, the period of military service, which provides as much classwork as drill, is an effective forcing house. Mixing with the native-born sabras, they learn to speak Hebrew and feel Israeli very soon.

Antagonism between Orientals and Europeans certainly exists. The latter, who led the return and reclaimed the country, have made Israel, despite geography, predominantly Western in ideas and habits. They are not particularly happy about the flood of darker-skinned people, whom they yearn to see balanced by a portion of their three million compatriots still locked up in Russia. (The Soviet government refuses to allow a general exit, because it would annoy their Arab friends and because voluntary departure would reflect poorly on the Soviet paradise.) The Orientals resent the fact that the earlier comers hold the better houses and jobs and, on the whole, the direction of the country (although there are two Cabinet ministers of Oriental origin). They are burdened with all the frustrations and troubles of a group which feels itself inferior. Israel has an integration problem, but it does not have a deep or hardened segregation pattern to overcome. With both will and need working for a rapid solution, Israelis talk of absorbing their Oriental citizens into the society within two generations.

Efforts are concentrated on the children, whose problems are many but whose inner transformation into Israelis can be quick and visible. When I visited a school in Beersheba, the woman principal, a Bulgarian by origin, showed me her classes with the pride of a creator, although the way had been rough. The absolutism of the Oriental father, particularly the Moroccan, collapses in Israel, she explained. The parents lose prestige, and the children, quickly feeling ashamed of them, look for revenge and become discipline problems. During her first year as a teacher, she said, her classes were so unruly that she cried every day for a year and wanted to quit, but her principal would not let her go. In a torrent of anguished reminiscence, she poured out all the difficulties of the past years, including, as an example of the immigrants’ adjustment troubles, cases of stealing among children. When I suggested that this was not unknown in the private school my daughters attended in New York, not to mention every other American school I ever had any acquaintance with, she brushed aside the interruption, unimpressed. The problem is always bigger and better—or in this case, worse—in Israel.

As the teacher talked, the end-of-period bell rang, as it was doubtless doing all over the world. The corridors flooded with noisy youngsters, and the yard outside in the warm sun filled with groups kicking soccer balls. It could have been anywhere. The children all dressed much alike in slacks and colored shirts and cotton dresses, and one could not tell a Persian from a Pole or Moroccan from Hungarian.

Education is Israel’s greatest internal task and absorbs the largest share, after defense, of the national budget. At the peak of the system stands the pride—or the wonder—of Israel: the reincarnated Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Opened in 1925, its original campus on Mount Scopus, one of the eastern hills behind the Old City, was left inside Jordanian territory by the war of 1948, a loss that seemed almost as irreconcilable as the loss of the Wailing Wall. Under the terms of the truce the Israelis were to retain ownership and have access to the University and the adjoining Hadassah Hospital as a kind of enclave within Jordan, but as things have worked out, the only access