The Significance of Israeli Socialism [antikvár]

FOREWORD Last summer I visited several countries in Eastern and Western Europe. I finished my tour with a visit to Israel. I had intended to pass a week there but the experiment in social reconstruction of a country neglected for nearly two thousand years was so fascinating that I had to prolong my stay for a week more. The welding in one national community of people, who though they call themselves Jews, gathered together from many lands with differing background of habits, customs and culture, speaking various and diverse tongues, was a herculean task indeed. It has been fairly successfully accomplished. The Hebrew, the language of the old Jewish scriptures, has been revived and modernised and made the national language of the people. The work of construction of the country has been taken in hand with an earnestness and dedication rarely witnessed in history. The people have wilUngly borne the sacrifice and privation imposed on them by the task of putting on a sound base a backward economy both in agriculture and industry and arranging it on a Socialistic basis. The Israeli people have been able to drain marches and grow food and commercial crops on barren and sandy soil and cover bare hills with luxuriant forests and fruit grooves. They have established heavy and light industries. They have advanced knowledge and scientific research. Their social and health services are of the best. In a short span of a decade or so they have been able to accommodate in their small territory one million of new immigrants and provided the people with an adequate and advancing standard of life. All this has been accomplished through democratic methods. From its inception the idea kept before the people was the establishment of a "Social Democracy in which the secret of community is revealed without impairing the freedom of the individual". This aim has been consistently persued. In Israel I saw more of social and economic equality than anywhere else, either in Eastern or Western Europe.