Evaluating Israel at 60: A success
by world standards; but by its own?

By Leon Cohen
of The Chronicle staff

Sixty years after the State of Israel’s founding, how should one evaluate it?

David Mendelsson, head of Israel studies at the Hebrew Union College’s Jerusalem campus, proposed two ways of doing so in his final appearance as scholar-in-residence at Congregation Sinai Sunday morning.

For one, we should compare Israel with the some 15 other nation-states that also came into existence in the immediate post-World War II period (1945-1953), he said to an audience of about 50. That gives the evaluation of Israel “a comparative dimension” that Jews “tend to forget,” he said.

These nations include North and South Korea, India, Syria, Jordan, Cambodia, Laos, Libya and Vietnam, among others.

The yardstick Mendelsson proposed was the United Nations’ Human Development Index. This measures and compares countries’ gross national products, per capita incomes, life expectancies, literacy in their populations, percentage of children attending schools and relative political freedom.

Mendelsson said that by these measures Israel is a resounding success. Of the 177 nations evaluated this way, Israel is number 23; and of those nations born in the immediate post-war period, Israel is at or near the top in virtually every category, he said.

Israel has among the highest per capita income in the world at $24,000 (compared to, say, $2,200 for India); one of the longer life expectancies at 80; and a 97 percent literacy rate, which puts it at number one in the 15 post-war nations’ group, said Mendelsson.

And in political freedom, Israel is at the top of the list. It is “the only one of the 15 nations that sustained democratic institutions” continuously from its founding to the present, Mendelsson said.

Its own aims

But these world standards aren’t the only important measuring sticks for Israel, Mendelsson said. There is also “how Israel is measured against its own standards,” he said.

For this yardstick, Mendelsson proposed Israel’s founding document, its Declaration of Independence, that David Ben-Gurion read in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948 (or on the Jewish calendar, Iyar 5, 5708).

While it has no legal force, Israelis do appeal to the declaration for statements about the fundamental purposes and values the founders wanted the state to express and embody, Mendelsson said.

For example, the declaration’s fourth paragraph spoke about how the First Zionist Congress “proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national revival in their own country.”

The phrase “national revival” expresses a significant goal of the state’s creators. One may ask, said Mendelsson, whether Israel has created that in 60 years.

He answered that Israel “has done an amazing job” of inculcating a new kind of Jewish Israeli identity, based on the Bible, the revival of Hebrew, identification with the land and creation of a distinctive culture.

However, this culture — which has taken the positions that “What is Jewish has to do with what Jews create” and “Israel precedes the Torah” — often conflicts with the traditional religious understanding of Jewish identity, he said.

In fact, Israeli Jews have a choice whether they want to define their Jewish identity in “national, national-religious or religious terms,” Mendelsson said. “This debate is sometimes painful,” he said, but it is also “intriguing” and “one of the creative dimensions of Israel.”

However, the state of Israel was also founded to “provide the answer to anti-Semitism,” Mendelsson said, by, as the declaration stated, solving “the problem of Jewish homelessness” and “lifting the Jewish people to equality in the family of nations.”

By that criterion, Israel has failed, he said. “The phenomenon is still around,” he said.

However, “Israel has changed the way that Jews respond to anti-Semitism,” he said. They can face it with “greater confidence,” knowing they have a place to go or a state that can help fight against it, he said.

Moreover, the declaration emphasized the idea that the world would accept Israel “in the family of nations.” By this measure, said Mendelsson, the record has been mixed.

In many ways, it is “not clear” that Israel has been so accepted, he said. Israel, for example, is the only U.N. member state that is not a member of one of its regional groups. (It is a limited, but not full, member of the Western European and Others Group.)

On the other hand, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, during the period of the Oslo peace process, political leaders from around the world attended his funeral, which might indicate a willingness to accept Israel, said Mendelsson.

“The ongoing conflict has inhibited this possibility,” he said. But Israel may achieve it “in the future,” he said.