What Is It Like To Live In Israel?

This is an excellent question, one that I’ve been asked numerous times and so I have made the time to commit it to writing.

First, let’s compare Israel with the USA from a perspective of size as well as resources. For those of us who are used to growing up and living in a huge country, the US, living in Israel means appreciating living in a country that is tiny, a speck actually. Size-wise, Israel ranks between the states of Rhode Island and Delaware. Israel is a land of many contrasts with the coldest area in the far north, the Hermon Mountains on the Armistice Line with Syria. In the winter one can go skiing in morning in the ski resorts on the Hermon and then drive 5 hours south through the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the surface of the earth, to the Gulf of Eilat and enjoy scuba diving in balmy tropical, magnificent coral reefs that abound there. Before I moved out here my wife and I took a 10,000 mile trip around the US which took some 7 weeks. After living here in Israel for about 10 years and having traveled extensively throughout, I came to the conclusion that there were only 2 things that we saw in our trip around the US that Israel didn’t have: 1). A river the scale of the Mississippi and 2.) caverns with the beauty of Carlsbad. About that time there was some routine blasting done at a limestone quarry a few miles from us and a cave opened up in the mountain side. When it was entered it had some magnificent formations and a world expert in such things was called in to give his opinion. This was named the Soreq Cave and is only one dinky acre in size. One acre in area – however in that acre the stalagmites and stalactites were judged by that expert to be far more beautiful and varied than all of the formations in what is known in the 40+ miles of passages at Carlsbad. In all the time I’ve lived here I’ve discovered that this is typical of Israel. Tiny, compact, compressed but equally and at times even more beautiful than what is in the US. The Judean Dessert has colors equaling and exceeding the beauty of those of the Painted Dessert and the Grand Canyon. Ok, so it’s smaller than similar places in the rest of the world, Israel is a tiny country, that should be obvious, but there’s lots packed into a small country. So I don’t lack places of natural beauty for Israel has a great many such places all compressed into a land smaller than the size of Delaware.

As far as natural resources go, the United States is a rich land, full of mineral wealth and fuels such as natural gas, coal and crude oil. Israel has almost none of these. Oh, there’s a bit of phosphates and magnesium that come from the salts of the Dead Sea but nothing to write home about. There is some copper ore in the dessert near Eilat that was mined in King Solomon’s days but today the price of copper has dropped to the point where it’s not profitable to mine the copper there. There is some iron in the basalt rock of the Golan Heights, but that is also not a profitable ore these days.

When it comes to crude oil and natural gas the Land of Israel hasn’t got any. Nuthin’, zilch, nada – period. In fact, even drinking water is in very short supply and we’re paying an absurd price for water to our households, about 4-cents a gallon, and that’s mostly due to 20 years of lower-than-average rainfall that has depleted the aquifers to critical levels. In the US and Europe rain is normal and expected, in Israel every drop of rain is a blessing and regarded as a gift from Heaven.

As far as energy resources, Israel has been searching for oil and gas for years, and of late there are hints that there may be a very small crude oil deposit near Tel-Aviv but that has yet to be confirmed. There has been a discovery of a large natural gas deposit off the Gaza coast and Israeli government promptly gave that to the Arabs in the Gaza Strip as a “good will gesture” supposedly to ingratiate ourselves to the Hamas terrorist group that controls Gaza.

So Israel is a country that doesn’t live off of natural resources because there aren’t any of significance. What keeps this country going economically are both the brains of the Jews living here and its strategic location. As far as brains go, Jews constitute the smartest people on the planet when it comes to the sciences, technology, the arts and the humanities. Considering that Jews are 0.2% of the world’s population and have received 20% of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences and technologies. Israel is second in rank in the number of hi-tech start-ups and business investment start-ups – second only in rank to the United States. So living here means that I rub elbows with lots of intelligent, if not brilliant people. Just on my street alone may illustrate this. My next door neighbor has a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry and works as the Chief Accountant for a municipality of 40,000 people. My neighbor on the other side has a doctorate in Chemical Engineering but works as a computer programmer. Another is an architect, two others are crack computer programmers for a hospital chain. Yet another is a social worker, another is a furniture designer, another is in the Israeli Air Force and we’re not supposed to know what he does on a day to day basis, one is a chemist for a top pharmaceutical corp, another owns a business supplying oil products. Many of their wives are nurses, midwives (two of our kids were delivered by the midwife down the street and our latest grandchild was delivered by another midwife in our neighborhood) or they own and run small businesses. So if I have a question about things many different areas there are neighbors nearby that can answer them, of if they can’t then they probably direct me to someone who can.

Since Israel is located in the confluence of the African, European and Asian continents we are a geo-political gem that everyone wants. The country that controls the Land of Israel controls the easiest land-route among those 3 continents and just from a transportation standpoint controlling this would mean being able to transport goods more cheaply overland. There still exists an oil pipeline that runs from Iraq to Israel and its outlet at the Israeli city of Haifa on the Med Sea. When the State of Israel was established in 1948 the Iraqis decided to shut down that line because they wouldn’t have anything to do with Israel. Pity, as both Iraq and Israel they could have made a lot of money having a Middle-Eastern oil terminal that would have filled oil tankers on the Med and so reduced transport costs for everyone. Yet Iraq would rather hurt the nose on it’s own face than give Israel any benefit. The other advantage that Israel has is that it’s a convenient base of operations for intelligence gathering, not only deep into ME countries but the Israel Defense Forces listens in to what’s cooking in Russia and the other countries in the region. So sometimes we know stuff here on the street that it takes you people in the US a year or so to finally get wind of.

One of the differences between living in the US and Israel is that the US has two neighbors, Canada and Mexico, that you’ve been on very good terms with for at least a100 years. Here, Israel still has 7 countries that are formally at war with her. Jordan and Egypt have signed formal peace treaties with Israel but they both have very frigid relations with us. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel and at the first excuse pulled diplomatic relations. Jordan still has diplomatic relations but they make it clear that they prefer not to have Israelis visiting. Opinion polls were taken in Egypt before and after the Egyptian government signed a peace treaty with Israel and, oddly enough, the polls after the signing showed a substantial increase in the hate the average Egyptian held for Jews and Israelis. Seems that the result of the treaty was to increase the hate of Egyptians toward Israelis, which just tells you what good signing a piece of paper does. It is possible for an Israeli to visit Egypt and see the Pyramids and the archeological sites, but outward hostility toward Jews and Israelis is evident on the streets and in the bazaars of Cairo, so lots of Israelis don’t go there. The Sinai Dessert was taken by Israel in 1967 in the Six Day War and was given up in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Israelis can still visit the Sinai and the Gulf of Eilat where scuba diving and tours into the dessert is fantastic, but there have been terrorist attacks aimed at Israelis in the Egyptian Sinai. Those attacks happened but the Egyptian government made sure that no medical help arrived to treat the wounded for hours afterwards and those in critical condition died as a result. So I’d love to travel down into the Sinai but the Israeli government puts out warnings about potential terrorist attacks down there so I dare not go. To bad as the scenery is fantastic there.

Another contrast with Israel and the United States is in the amount of history that is connected with the land. The Land of Israel is extremely historic and Israel has more archeological sites that have exposed more history than in any other country in the world. In the Old City of Jerusalem as anywhere one digs means going through layers of rubble that go back centuries any digging, even for things as mundane as putting in a new water pipe, requires coordination with the Israel Archeological Ministry and they excavate the place before the pipes are laid down. Every square mile in Israel has at least 3 interesting items of historical or archeological interest. And lots of towns, villages and hamlets are named after their former biblical names.

Take my own town, Elazar which is located between Bethlehem and Hebron for example. Some 2,160-some years ago the Assyrian Greeks invaded and were challenged by the Macabees, a rag-tag guerrilla force that succeeded in ultimately driving back the Assyrians. However in the Battle of Beth Zechariah that occurred nearby the son of Judah the Macabee the leader of the Macabees, Elazar, ran up in front of an elephant that the Assyrians used as heavy transport vehicles and that one had a royal seal. So with the expectation that the elephant was carrying someone important, Elazar ran up, laid down and pointed his spear into the soft underbelly of the elephant. The paciderm was killed and rolled over Elazar killing him. That battle which occurred nearby ended in defeat for the Macabees but overall they were able to drive out the invaders, a miracle considering that they were an unorganized guerrilla force with no military experience. The holiday of Hanukah commemorates the victory of the Macabees in the face of the Asyrian Greeks.

In addition, there are caves within a mile from my home where archeological artifacts such as coins, clothing and evidence of people having lived there in the period of the Bar Kochba Revolt against the Romans in 115 C.E.

And a hundred meters from there is a ruin of a Byzantine church dated at 630 C.E. Here are pictures of the church ruin.
http://picasaweb.google.com/rabelad/ByzantineChurchRuinOnKibbutzMigdalOzMarch2008?authkey=zz0w8IDjnr0

Since our area is wine country, grapes have been growing here for the last 5,000 years (we’re told that mankind started viticulture in these mountains) and the terraces that are all over the hill sides here were built by Jews in order to raise vines and other vegetables 2,000 years ago during the Second Temple Period. There are many ancient grape presses that are carved into the bedrock and boulders in these parts. The presses are really press-pans that were cut out of the limestone with the lower corner emptying into a pit. The grapes were dumped on the pans, stomped, and the juice ran into the pit where clay jars were filled with the juice. There are a great many press-pans sprinkled throughout the hills here and that testifies to the amount of viticulture that was extant 2,000 years back. As it happened the screw-press made its appearance into this area around 700 C.E. so all those press-pans must be older than 1,300 years old.

Along with those, I have found coins that date back to the Roman period, and one very nice coin I found is a Byzantine coin from 630 C.E. which was minted in honor of the Byzantines having conquered Jerusalem from the Persians. I have also found pieces of glass bottles from the Roman Period and a piece of pottery fragment that an archeologist has dated to at least the Late Bronze Age which goes back to at least the time of the Exodus from Egypt some 3,200 years ago.

Our community includes the ancient highway that used to run from the Galilee to the original Beth-El, to Jerusalem, Bethlehem through our area and then on to Hebron and then to Beersheba. The highway followed the hilltops and because the climate was much wetter and much more lush 2200+ years ago lions were still a problem. In addition, the highway ran the hilltops and ridges so that it would be harder for lions to get a running start uphill and thus be more dissuaded from attacking. There is a ritual immersion pool that was discovered along the highway. The pool was cut out of the limestone in the hillside and it was used for travelers who needed to dunk in order to be ritually clean as from that point it was a 5 hour walk to Jerusalem and those who were going to the Temple had to be dunk the night before. In any case, every traveler back then used that highway, both the great and the small. History says that King David ruled in Hebron, about 5 miles south of us, for a number of years and then was invited to assume the kingship in Jerusalem. It stands to reason that when he transferred the locus of his reign to Jerusalem, King David along with his entourage, traveled up that very highway a couple of stone’s throws from our house.

So living in Israel we develop a feeling and appreciation for history that Americans simply cannot fathom. When I lived in Illinois the nearest archeological site was some 250 miles away and was the Cahokia Indian Burial Mounds. Those mounds were only 1000 years old. Before I moved here my wife and I took a 10,000 mile trip around the US and the most ancient site we saw was the Cave Dweller Indians in New Mexico and the remains of their settlement was only 600 years old.

The Arab-Jewish conflict is part of life out here. Much can be written about this, but I don’t care to get into the details of the conflict in this article, however if asked I will go into depth in another article. However, I must note that what the media reports and the impressions it gives has little to do with the facts on the ground and the realities of life out here. The media has their own agenda, and the politicians have their agendas that they do not reveal openly, yet none of their agendas correspond to reality out here. In fact, the very reason that this conflict continues is that none of them have a clue what’s flying out here and what the realities are. The fact is that they can’t fix the problem because they have no idea what the cultural mentalities of the peoples are and why it exists from the onset. As a result they keep trying the same old tired formulas, with tiny and insignificant variations, time and time again. The formula centers on Israel surrendering territory supposedly in exchange for peace. Well, Israel has surrendered territory a number of times, the most recent was when Israel “disengaged” from the Gaza Strip, expelled 10,000 Jews, destroyed their beautiful homes and businesses and have essentially left them in their shattered lives, with compensation to only a small percentage of their loss. Yet the Arabs responded to that surrender by using the territory Israel withdrew from to launch thousands of rockets, mortars and missiles into Israel-proper causing significant property damage, injuries and deaths as well as enduring psychological trauma. You probably never heard about the Arabs shooting missiles into Israel-proper because it’s not on the agenda of the world’s news media to tell of the suffering of Jews as a result of giving the Arabs what they want. The editors in the media would rather ignore this and instead project the impression that the Arabs are the only ones suffering in this conflict. In any case, world leaders have pushed Israel to surrender territory time and time again, Israel responded by doing so, as well as dozens of “good will gestures” and the Arabs still want more and more. No amount of concessions, no amount of territory offered is good enough for the Arabs. They say explicitly that they want it all. Period. Funny, if there’s a problem and a normal person wants to solve it he tries something, once or twice, if it doesn’t work he tries something completely different. No normal individual will try the same thing dozens of times to try to solve a problem, but unfortunately that’s what the world’s leaders push Israel to do despite the repeated failures. I must mention that President Obama seems to have realized that the Arab nations will not leave Israel in peace, no matter what concessions or surrender terms Israel offers unless Israel decides to pack it up and decide to willingly self-destruct. Obama seems to have seen that reality and the up side to that is good - yet the down-side is that even though he recognizes that the Arabs states will not give Israeli peace he nonetheless is putting enormous pressure on the Israeli government to make even greater and more far-reaching surrender terms with which Israel should expect nothing but more war and conflict than before.

As part of my experience here I was required to join the Israeli Army at the tender age of 32. Basic training was abbreviated for us old codgers but after that I was assigned to courses and a reserve unit. My first assignment was in a communications unit based in the Galilee and that meant yearly month-long reserve stints up in one of the most beautiful parts of Israel. After a number of years in that unit I was transferred to a more local unit where I received counter-terrorist training and did patrols in my immediate area.

Another impression that the media and governments convey is that Jewish "settlers" in Judea and Samara (often referred to as the "West Bank") are the most intolerant and violent people, and that these people and their "settlements" are responsible for the ongoing conflict. Well, having lived on just one such community for the last 30 years I can say unequivocally that the "settlers" are some of the most willing to get along with their Arab neighbors. After all, we live nearby and have good relations with the local Arabs, we employ them to build our homes and work in our shops, work on our farms and factories. It's also true that the Arab economy depends almost exclusively on Arabs working for Jews, for there are no natural resources in these parts and agriculture is limited to growing grapes and olives, and the prices of those commodities are very low overall. Without Arab labor and Jewish employers the Arabs in these parts would probably starve. In addition, I know many Jewish "settlers" that have the utmost confidence that someday terrorism will be over and done with and that some day Jews and Arabs will live in peace and harmony. I know one such "settler" who knows some 15 friends and neighbors who've been victims of Arab terror yet he holds out the hope that 'It'll be ok" in the end. Personally, I don't entertain such a level of optimism but my POV is not typical and my US non-Jewish mentality shows itself so I take a harder line than many of the Jews around me.

One curious thing is that despite the conflict, I’ve noticed that people here in Israel are really happy and content with life. There is a curious fatalism here, not fatalism in the negative sense but fatalism in the positive sense. When Israelis are beset with an intractable problem they typically say “It’ll be ok” even when there’s clearly no hope. This sense of positive fatalism is reflected in the one of the lowest suicide rates in the world combined with one of the highest birth rates, as Spengler has noted in his fascinating Asia Times article “Why Israel is the world's happiest country” http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE13Ak01.html

I guess that one reason for the “it’ll be ok” attitude is due to the fact that the mere existence of the Jewish people’s survival despite centuries of persecution as a tiny minority is plain miraculous. On top of it the existence of the State of Israel is just as miraculous and even secular and dyed-in-the-wool anti-religious types will admit to the many miracles that have occurred over the 60 years of Israel’s existence. Here in Israel even the atheists admit to miracles.

In the end, I can’t help concluding that one of the best things I’ve ever done was to move here to Israel, and this remains such after 30 years of living in this country.