Booknotes

GLENN FRANKEL, AUTHOR, "BEYOND THE PROMISED LAND: JEWS AND ARABS ON A HARD ROAD TO A NEW ISREAL": Well, Brian, the original promised land, as you know, was promised by the God of the Old Testament to the Jews, and the state of Israel became the Jewish homeland and, in a sense, the fulfillment of that promise, in a way. But it's a very--the original promised land, if you will, is almost an ideological concept. What we've seen, I think, in Israel over the last few years and what my book really is about is the change in Israel from that small, ideological garrison state under siege, that little socialist state that we all remember from the days of, you know, seeing the movie "Exodus" and reading about Golda Meir, to a much more modern, prosperous, bourgeois, if you will, democratic state, a state that's moved beyond the old ideology, that's moved into a much different future. And to capture that beyond the promised land is the sense of movement from the old to the new. That's what I was trying to do.

The subtitle, which is "Jews and Arabs on a Hard Road to a New Israel," also captures, I think, the pain and difficulty of this process because it's not a simple process. There's a lot of bloodshed, and there's a lot of problems that have come and that--that are still to come, but what I'm trying to sum up is that sense of movement, that Israel is a much different country today than the one we knew before.

FRANKEL: Well, Simon & Schuster selected it. It's from an alleyway in Jerusalem, and it depicts really very traditional Arabs and very traditional Jews passing each other. The Jews are on their way to prayer at the Western Wall. The Arabs are probably just doing their business. It--it--it deals in symbols really; the symbols of the two people occupying the same small bit of space--the claustrophobia, if you will, of Israel. People often forget that the whole of Israel a--and the West Bank and Gaza Strip could fit into the size of the state of New Jersey, you know. So that sense of two peoples trying to come to terms with each other, struggling over the same small strip of land with very few resources. God didn't smile on that portion of the Middle East. There's no oil there. There's nothing there but symbols and sand, and so the picture, I hope, captures just a little bit of that sense.

FRANKEL: I first went there in 1970. I was a college junior going into my senior year actually, at Columbia, and I had a friend who dropped out of school and had moved to a kibbutz in Israel and was working there, and he invited me to come for the summer. So for a variety of reasons, I picked myself up and went there. A--my future wife also went to Israel that summer. We met up on this kibbutz way in the north of Israel, kibbutz Gonin. It was located right on the lip of the Golan Heights.

This was the area that the Syrians had controlled until 1967, and they had often rained down bombs and sometimes taken potshots at the shepherds who worked the fields for this kibbutz. After the Six-Day War in '67, this area suddenly became part of occupied territory. It became--the Israels controlled it, and so the Syrians were off the hills. And Gonin, this little kibbutz that had been under siege for all this time, suddenly was prospering. So I spent a--a wonderful summer, learned a lot about Israel, also learned a lot about the security issue, if you will, and that--in 1970, that particular Israel is where--where I start out from.

FRANKEL: A kibbutz is a communal, originally agricultural collective. They were started at the beginning of the 20th century by some of the early Socialist Zionist pioneers who came to what was then Ottoman-controlled territory. They set up these communities. They were little idealistic collectives, the forerunner of things that happened in Communist China and in the Soviet Union later. And they thrived in and of themselves for many years, and they became--even though they never occupied more than 3 percent, 4 percent of the Israeli economy, they became a symbol, if you will, for that old plucky little Zionist state that made the desert bloom. And so when I went there in 1970, of course, the kibbutzniks were still at the height of their powers. The kibbutzniks, even though they were only 3 percent of the population, contributed to many of Israel's heroes, people like Moshe Dayan.

Many of the leaders of the Israeli army came from the kibbutz movement. They had an influence all out of proportion to their actual size. And one of the stories of Israel, I think, over the last 20 years and one of the stories that I try to tell in my book is how the importance of the kibbutz changed; how the kibbutz itself faded as Israel changed from a socialist country. As the socialist economy begin--began to unravel, the kibbutzim and their power also began to unravel.

I tell a particular story about somebody who I've known for 24 years, a guy named Hyam Goran, who was a kibbutznik--really the archetype of this kind of guy. You know, he was a war hero, he was an accomplished man. He ran the--the orchard on the kibbutz at age 23. This was the kind of get-it-done, do-it-right kind of Israeli who I admired so much. And Goran went through enormous changes over this time. In 1973, he suffered from shell shock, basically, during the Yom Kippur War, which, as you know, for Israel was a much less successful conflict than the earlier one.

The kibbutz began to feel very claustrophobic to him, and he--eventually, after many, many years, he left the kibbutz. He took his family and he moved. He--he--he built a house. He entered the--the--the free enterprise world, if you will, and left the--the home of the kibbutz, and his story is part of the story, I think, of modern Israel.

FRANKEL: All right. I got to remember I'm talking here to a--to a much broader audience than I usually do. Kibbutz is the name--the Is--the Hebrew name for that small originally agricultural collective, where a group of people would live in a community, they would share property. Their children sometimes would sleep in a joint communal area in bunk beds. It was the socialist ethic taken to its--you know, to its highest extreme, if you will, to its greatest value.

Kibbutzniks are the people who lived on these kibbutzim. Kibbutzim are the plural of kibbutz. There's something like 300 kibbutzim in Israel, and the kibbutzniks are the members of these various collectives. They've--thrown in together. They don't have private property or private savings. This was the original ideal. And I have to add, this picture--this picture, really the snapshot of the old Israel, has changed dramatically.

The kibbutzim these days--many of them have private property. Many of their members even are beginning to earn a salary. That original socialist ethic is dying. Some of these kibbutzes are still very successful. They're doing high-tech now instead of orchards. You know, they've got factories. Many of the other kibbutzim have been less successful, and they are struggling along and they've become a remnant, if you will, of the old socialist Israel that I think is dying.

FRANKEL: Well, I was, as I say, between junior and senior year at Columbia University in New York, and--and you'll recall, those were pretty momentous times in the United States. The Vietnam War was raging. Columbia, itself, had been in the news a couple of times because students had shut down the university. A lot of people were looking--and especially American Jews like myself, I think, were looking at Israel to see if it might be a s--a--a second home or might be even a replacement home. They were looking for idealism. They were looking for a country that still knew what it--where it was going and what it was about. The United States was riven with conflict. Israel seemed much more organized in that sense, much more idealistic. Some of my very best friends went there and stayed, and some of the friends I've made over the years in going back to Israel are people of that same generation who went then.

I found Israel to be an enormously interesting country, but I found the same kinds of conflicts there that I'd found in the United States. I could easily see Israel having been through one war and that there were going to be more wars and that myself and my children would be caught up in conflict there just like I thought I might be caught up in it in the United States. So I saw no panacea there for me personally, but I did see a very idealistic, well-organized country that was trying to become something. And that country's gone through e--as I say, enormous changes since then.

Three years later in the Yom Kippur War, Israel almost lost. The Egyptians and the Syrians came over, and Israel had to fight for its life. And that took away some of that optimism, perhaps some of the arrogance of Israel. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which began in 1967, which put under Israeli control something like a million Palestinians--that began to grind away at Israel. And for 20 years the occupation went on with very little change. The status quo, if you will, stagnated. And the Israel that I came back to as a journalist, first, in 1984 but then as the Jerusalem correspondent for The Washington Post in 1986, was a very different country than the one I'd--I'd come to in 1970.

FRANKEL: I came back in '86. I watched the sort of stagnant status quo unfold for a couple of years, and I almost--you know, I'd--I'd come from Southern Africa, I have to say. I'd been there for The Washington Post between '83 and '86. And when I'd left South Africa, there was an uprising going on there. Blacks in South Africa were rising up against the white government. I got to Israel, and it's almost like I'd got off the wrong--at the wrong airport. I had expected Israel to be a very lively, vibrant place with a lot of changes going on, and, in fact, it seemed rather stagnant to me, as I said. But then in late '87 an uprising began in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, an uprising that a--even though the histories of South Africa and Israel are very, very different, the uprising had a sort of similar dynamic to it.

These were young kids in the occupied territories, young Palestinians who were rebelling not only against the Israeli military occupiers, but they were rebelling against the Arab world, which had never come to their deliverance. They were rebelling against the Palestine liberation movement, which was supposedly their national representative but, again, had never come to deliver them from occupation, from the humiliation of it. And, in some ways, they were rebelling against their own parents.

So I got into this process of writing about something that I'd seen before in Southern Africa. Journalism's a marvelous thing. You stay close to the ground. You can write about people and write about places. You can see the developments a step at a time. You don't have to--to--to sketch broad overgeneralizations. You really can take it as it comes. And because I felt a little more comfortable with this process, having been through a similar one in Southern Africa, I stayed very close to the ground all through '88.

I won the Pulitzer for the writing that I did about the Intifadah, and I won it specifically for stories that I wrote where I went back over ground--you know, places where we'd done quick news stories, but where a lot of things had been left unresolved. I didn't know what had really happened in a lot of these places or, more importantly, why it had happened, so I spent a lot of time going back. I went back to a village where an Israeli girl was killed in April '88 to piece together what exactly had happened in this Palestinian village with this incident. Several other times, went back at stories, and at the end of '88, the Intifadah had been basically the biggest story of the year, so when the Pulitzer committee got around to choosing, they looked at that.

FRANKEL: Well, I was born in the Bronx, but I was raised in upstate New York in Rochester, New York.

FRANKEL: Both of them are Jews, yes, and New York Jews to begin with.

FRANKEL: Well, Reform, but really, you know, very much in the mainstream of American Jewry, which is just secular. My folks grew up--are--are second generation Americans--or third generation. You know, the--the--their ancestors came from Russia. They escaped the Bronx in the same way that their ancestors escaped the--the--the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe, and they moved to Rochester, New York, to start their life there--their--their grownup life there. They got away from their parents and away from the Jewish community; in a sense, from that organized, small, urbanized Jewish community, out of the ghetto. So I grew up in a m--in a very secular environment. I knew I was Jewish, and I knew that was important, and I knew culturally what it meant. But in religious terms, it was never quite clear. And to this day, of course, it's something you--you--you still never quite work out.

FRANKEL: Ashkenazi...

FRANKEL: Yes.

FRANKEL: Well, we're talking about five million people or so, more than four million of whom are Jews. There are also close to a million Israeli Arabs who live in Israel and who have voting rights in Israel and are not considered part of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza who are under occupation.

FRANKEL: Oh, everybody cons--together would be up towards seven million because you've got just about two million Palestinians now in the West Bank and Gaza, plus five million in Israel proper.

FRANKEL: Yes.

FRANKEL: All right. The Ashkenazi that you mentioned at first are th--i--in Israel context, the original European settlers in Israel, the folks who came from Eastern Europe. They are the ones who've been there the longest. Many of them brought the socialist ideology to Israel, and they are sort of the founding fathers.

The Sephardim, by the Israeli context again, are mostly the Jews from north Africa and from the Arab states who came over after the founding of the state in 1948. About a million of them came, and they changed the complexion of Israel dramatically. They didn't have the Zionist ideology. They certainly didn't have any socialist ideology. They felt they were forced out of the Arab world after the founding of the state of Israel and they came as refugees. So that dream of this small socialist, elitist country that would build a sort of Marxist paradise, if you will, quickly had to adjust to the reality of a million Sephardim, of absorbing a million people. I mean, it was more than double the original population of the country so it was a major feat. And it took many, many years for that to come about.

So there are those two basic groups in Israel who make up the Jewish population, and I write about both of them. Most of the Sephardim, I think, have been a real success story in Israel. I think they've had a lot of success in being absorbed, but there is 20 percent, 25 percent who never quite made it into the mainstream of Israeli society, who have been something of an underclass in Israel. And one of the things that's been interesting in the last few years was the rise of a political party to cater to that group, to represent that group. And that political party has been very influential in the new Israel and has been one of the key factors, I think, in moving Israel forward. Most people don't believe in ideology. They're more interested in pragmatic results. They're interested in prosperity. They're interested in getting the conflict--they don't trust the Arabs. They don't trust them at all, but they are interested in getting the conflict with the Arab states behind them if they can so they can get on with having a more normal country.

FRANKEL: A sabra is an original Israeli-born Jew.

FRANKEL: That's an interesting question. I would say at this point it's getting toward half or maybe a little more, because we're moving into new generations, but the most important sabra of--of all is the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. He was the first Israeli, the first sabra, the first person born in the territory that now is the state of Israel to have been born there, and he was also the first to have ever served in the Israeli army. Until Rabin, all of the prime ministers of Israel were essentially Ashkenazim, who had come from Russia, who had been born in--in pre-war Poland. And I'm thinking specifically of Yitzkah Shamir, the previous prime minister. Both these guys are in their 70s, you know, and they--they kind of look the same to us.

I mean, we in America look at them and say, `Well, you know, what's the difference?' But there's a dramatic difference between these two guys especially. Shamir, who was the Likud prime minister during most of the '80s, during--and during the beginning of the Intifadah, was a great believer in ideology. He felt you had to hold on to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because it was part of Israel's birthright, because it was part of what he called eritz Israel, the land of Israel. And he believed that if you just bulled your way through with it and just hung on, that you could outwit your enemies and even outwit your friends because you believed in something, you had an ideological core, and they didn't. So that--Shamir was a ruthless ideologue.

Rabin, on the other hand, is a ruthless pragmatist. Here's a man who was the head of the Israeli army in 1967 when they won a smashing victory in the Six-Day War. He was prime minister in the mid-'70s for a couple of years but a rather unsuccessful premiership, as he himself admits. He felt he had a lot of unfinished business. So he gets back in power in '92, and he is determined--ruthlessly determined to get the conflict with the Arabs behind him. And so the guy you see on the White House lawn is the sabra, is the man who's born there, the man who believes in getting Israel forward, not the man who's carrying all the baggage of ideology and of the Holocaust and of pre-war Europe around with him.

FRANKEL: Today the fundamental basic taxpayer contribution is $3 billion a year. That's $1.8 billion in military aid and about $1.2 billion in economic aid.

FRANKEL: Oh, my, I think it's--you know, don't hold me to this, but it's something in the $80 billion to $90 billion range. It was low at the beginning. American Jews, giving their own private donations, were contributing a lot to Israel. That's a whole separate category, of course. But certainly since the time of the Camp David accords, when Jimmy Carter brokered that agreement between the Israelis and the Egyptians--and part of the way he soothed that agreement and lubricated it was to promise greatly increased aid to both sides in that. Since then, it's been a regular $3 billion package, and sometimes it's been more.

FRANKEL: That's right.

FRANKEL: It's one of the most interesting things that I found when I moved to Israel. You know, I figured Jews in America, Jews in Israel--these are brothers, these are partners, these are people who really understand each other well. And one of the things I learned quite quickly is that like in any large family, a lot of things aren't said, there are a lot of conflicts. There's the good-looking brother, if you will, the Israeli, and the brother who's prosperous and making money, the American Jew. And, you know, a lot of things that--that--that they don't understand about each other. And the Gulf War was one instance where you could see that very strongly. You had American Jews sitting in their living rooms in the United States feeling great sympathy for Israeli Jews and great anxiety over what was happening to Israel and raising money to send to Israel. And meanwhile, you had Israeli Jews sitting in their sealed rooms waiting for these Scud attacks, feeling great anger at American Jews, feeling that American Jews had sort of left them on their on.

And I'll tell you, one of the ways that manifested itself was night after night Israel television would show scenes of American Jewish students who had come over to go to Tel Aviv University or in Jerusalem for a year, getting on planes at Ben-Gurion Airport and returning to the States because their parents back in the States said, `It's not safe. Please come home.' Israel Jews felt abandoned.

And so at one point after the first Scuds had fallen and Israeli Jews were feeling this way and expressing this kind of anger and hostility, really, some of the American Jewish leadership decided that they had to make an emergency mission to Israel. And they came over and they spent 48 hours and they visited some of these Scud sites and they expressed great sympathy. The problem was, of course, that for Israelis, this wasn't enough. They felt very much that they had been left on their own, and they even resented this good faith effort, if you will.

I--I have a specific scene in a town called Ramat Gan outside of Tel Aviv. The Isra--the American Jewish leaders had come on a bus and they come and they look around at the rubble and they express great concern, and the Israeli Jews in passing don't for l--for the most part, don't even know who these people are and kind of wonder why they're there. To me, that represented the--the--the terrible gap that exists between Americans and Israelis, between Jews and other Jews. And it's one of the most interesting conflicts, if you will, and most interesting relationships that I try to explore in the book.

FRANKEL: Yitzhak Shamir was the prime minister of Israel through much of the '80s. He was a Likudnik. He was a right-wing prime minister. He believed strongly in ideology. He was a...

FRANKEL: A Likud--the Likud is the right-wing party that after--that came into power in Israel in 1977 under Menachem Begin, and it ruled Israel, more or less, for 15 years and it moved Israel very far to the right. It believed in holding on to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It organized a great movement of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza. And when Yitzhak Shamir became prime minister, succeeded Begin in 1983, he continued with the settlement policy. He continued with the policy that we can make things happen. He refused to negotiate with--with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which he considered a terrorist organization and an enemy of Israel. This guy was determined to hold on to the land.

Now during the Re--he was prime minister during the Reagan years. When--when President Reagan, who had a strong, visceral, emotional commitment to Israel, was president of the United States--and Israel had pretty much of a free ride--it was a great time, a great relationship. And Shamir became premier under that. He nurtured that relationship. Suddenly in 199--89, he gets George Bush and Jim Baker. George Bush becomes president and Jim Baker is the secretary of State. And these guys are much more ruthlessly pragmatic. They're not so much interested in nurturing Israel. They are interested in results in the Middle East. And you'll remember the Intifadah had started. Shamir himself, despite his hard-line, had decided that he needed to velo--to develop some sort of peace plan. I think he had the full expectation that his peace plan would never be accepted by the Arab world, would never be accepted by Palestinians, and that he could go on maintaining the status quo. The Bush administration pushed the peace plan, and they pushed Shamir gradually into a corner. And...

FRANKEL: It stunk and it began bad. You have this--you know, you remember George Bush, this tall Ivy Leaguer from Texas, if you will, you know, who loves telephone diplomacy and loves to schmooze and believes in personal relationships. And then you have this small man who grew--Yitzhak Shamir, who grew up in pre-war Poland, who became part of an underground--a very violent, radical underground movement in--in Palestine to liberate Israel from British rule; a ruthless ideologue, if you will, who believes strongly in the state and strongly in himself. These two guys did not hit it off from day one. They met at the White House in April, 1989, and, you know, Bush asked Shamir to suspend settlements, and Shamir responded with a cryptic, `Well, it won't be a problem, Mr. President.' Now what did that mean? To Bush, it meant that, yes, Shamir would be willing to suspend Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza if it were part of a peace deal, if he could get concessions from the Arab states to go along with it.

But that's not what Shamir meant at all. What he had meant was settlements are not the real issue. `The real issue for Israel is the fact that the Arab states won't recognize our existence, that they still want to destroy us.' If the Arab states would get over that, they wouldn't consider settlement to be a problem. So what you have with this sort of cryptic, elliptical phrase, the beginning of a conflict. Bush thought that Shamir had lied to him because he didn't suspend settlements. Shamir thought that Bush had purposely put him in a corner and didn't understand him. This sort of miscommunication begins in 1989 and continues all the way through four years of the relationship between them.

And, you know, it gets better, it gets worse for a time. During the Gulf War Shamir did exactly what Bush wanted him to do, which is to say that when Saddam Hussein started dumping Scud missiles on Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Shamir, to everyone's great surprise, did not retaliate. He broke basically 40-odd years of a--of Israeli defense doctrine which said, `Any time an Arab does something to you, hit him back 10 times worse because that's the only way we can survive in this region.' Yitzkah Shamir, for the first time, said, `No, we're not going to do that. We're going to go along with what the Americans want.'

FRANKEL: Mr. Shamir lost his bid for re-election in 1992, the same year that Mr. Bush was defeated for the presidency. He's still a member of the Israeli Parliament, which is called the Knesset.

FRANKEL: The Knesset has 120 members, but it's very different than the United States Senate or House in that those folks are not voted on in individual legislative districts. They run on a party list. It's a parliamentary system. And depending on what proportion of the vote their party gets nationally, that's how many members of that 120-member list get in the Knesset.

FRANKEL: The breakdown now is about 46 Labor members, l--well short of a majority, as you can see, because you need 61 to have a majority, but it has governing partners. Another left-wing party has about 12 seats. The Israeli Arab parties have five or six seats. And there is a small pragmatic religious party with another six. So the--the Labor, on its better days, can still command something like 66, 67 seats, but most of the time it's drifting along with a much smaller majority or just barely under a majority with 58 or 59. The Likud lost badly in the 1992 election. The right-wing--the major right-wing party only got 30 seats.

FRANKEL: All right. Shamir, who's in his late 70s, retired from the leadership after this electoral defeat, and a much younger man, another prototype of the new Israel, if you will, the former ambassador to the United Nations--and people may remember him. His name is Benjamin Netanyahu. His nickname is BeBe. He took over as head of the Likud in 1993. He's a young, 45-year-old American-oriented politician.

FRANKEL: Went to school in Philadelphia, went to MIT, I believe, you know, speaks perfect English with no accent. BeBe is, as I say, a harbinger of the new in an interesting way. This is a guy with one foot in each kingdom, if you will. He still believes in the old Likud ideology. He still thinks all the Arabs are out to destroy Israel, so he still believes strongly in having a strong fortresslike state that can resist. Yet, at the same time, he's a great believer in--in the free enterprise system. He's a great believer in the Americanization of Israel, if you will. He's a tela--television candidate. He gets his message across that way.

And, you know, there's a contradiction there because one of the things that's driving Israel forward, I think, into its modernity, into its post-Zionist phase, if you will, is the fact that you can't have a country that spends 20 percent of its gross national product on defense and, at the same time, afford to buy Japanese electronics and shop in shopping malls and have this sort of modern bourgeois state that Israel's striving to become. So I think there's a fundamental contradiction that BeBe and the right-wing in Israel have yet to reconcile among themselves.

FRANKEL: The next election will be in '96. Rabin will almost certainly run for re-election.

FRANKEL: Well, Rabin is in his early 70s. He's 73 now, and he'll be two years older by then. But he's determined to keep on with this peace process. Rabin is the one guy who many Israelis trust to carry it out because of his background as a general. They as--their faith in him has been a little shaken in the last year or two, of course, because of the peace process, although it's continued; has not really reduced terrorist attacks within Israel, so people don't feel secure personally.

FRANKEL: Yes.

FRANKEL: No. Now right-wing--they were right-wing largely in the sense of their attitude toward the Arab states and toward the peace process, very hawkish, very suspicious of the Arab states. But also the elements that went into the Likud Party had always wanted to break down the old socialist hierarchy. You have to remember how much control the socialist hierarchy had over Israel during the first 30 years of the state--the Labor Party, which ruled Israel for 30 years, the--David Ben-Gurion's party, the founder of the modern state of Israel.

FRANKEL: Golda Meir was another leader. Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister for a spell; Levi Eshkol. These guys not only controlled the politics of Israel, they also controlled a good deal of the economy. There was a Labor federation that actually owned more than 50 percent of Israeli industry. It's as if the AFL-CIO not only, you know, owned General Motors but also owned Ford and Chrysler. So they had enormous concentration of power.

FRANKEL: The Labor federation was run by people who basically were part of the Labor Party hierarchy. They were Ben-Gurion's appointees. Ben-Gurion himself, the original founder of the state, was the original head of this Labor Foundation before the--before the state of Israel took shape.

FRANKEL: It was not a big issue in part because everybody sort of put that aside and--and people didn't know much about it. American Jews, to some extent, knew about it, but, you know, Israel worked very hard to propagate an image off of it--sometimes a true image, sometimes not so much true--of this sort of plucky little beleaguered state that needed our help and deserved our sympathy, and the socialism was all kind of cleared aside. It was only in the '80s really when the socialist economy really went out of whack, and if you recall, 1.10 years ago, there was 500 percent inflation in Israel. The economy was really falling apart--that the--that the United States began to impose certain strictures on Israel and said, `Fine, we'll give you the aid. In fact, we'll even give you some emergency aid to help get you through this time, but we want you to liberalize your economy. We want you to make commitments to open things up. We want free trade.' And--and the cer--certain kinds of new reforms went into Israel in '84, '85 that eventually led to the demise of the socialist economy.

FRANKEL: Well, you know, I was a young guy then, Brian. It looked pretty good to me. It did seem that people had something in common, that they were sharing an adventure, if you will, but that adventure didn't last very long. In fact, it carried within it--Israel's very success as a socialist country carried within it the seeds of its own demise, if you will. They took the Golan Heights, for example, and suddenly, there was a cooler, better place to grow apples and fruit which had been the--th--you know, the main economic function of the kibbutz that I was on, so gradually, the orchard fell apart.

FRANKEL: You'd get up at about four in the morning, just before the sun came up, and you'd trudge up to the--to the cafeteria and you'd get yourself a hunk of stale bread and some coffee, and you'd head out to the orchard, and you'd put on a warm sweater and you'd pick fruit, climb up on these machines that they had.

FRANKEL: Well, the kibbutzniks. My friend Goran, for one. This 23-year-old guy who was, you know, just two or three years older than me at the time, but he seemed like he must have been about 50. He had the wisdom and you--you know, Goran said, `Do this,' and everybody snapped to it. He had that kind of authority. So we would pick the fruit and we'd break about 10:00, come down, everybody would eat together. We'd have breakfast, and then we'd go back up...

FRANKEL: That's all right. Some of the orchard--some of the people who worked in the orchard had that duty. Some of the women would come out and do it because even though the kibbutz paid lip service to the idea that men and women were equal in all walks of life, women made the food, women did the laundry, women worked with the children and--and ran the nursery and that sort of thing.

FRANKEL: Oh, at that time, Gonin must have had about 150, 200 people. It was thriving. This was in the--in the heyday.

FRANKEL: No. We got a little pittance at the end of our time there so we could go sort of tour the country, but the idea wasn't money. The idea was the experience. We were volunteers, of course. We were working for free. The kibbutzniks, themselves--the kibbutznik meaning the members, the participants, the--the--who owned the kibbutz, if you will, all collectively--they got a certain amount of money to allow them to travel. They got money to allow them to go to town, but it was really--most of the money was put in a joint fund. And then people who wanted to do something--if a kibbutznik wanted to go back and get a university education, for example, the money to pay for that would come out of the communal fund. The leaders of the kibbutz, the elected committee, would sit down together and decide each year who was going to get to do what, who might get to take a trip to Europe, who would be on sabbatical, who would be the leader of the orchard for that year. All this was done in collectivist fashion.

FRANKEL: Well, it started to break down, I would say, with the destruction of the economy. As Gonin scrambled it went from having an orchard to opening a factory. And, you know, they didn't exactly do a five-year plan or a cost benefit analysis first. So they got caught up. The factory looked like a good idea. They built wooden clogs for shoes and things. But gradually, the economics caught up to them. The economics have scaled for one thing. They were a tiny factory making a product and it wasn't--and ultimately, they got caught in the market. What happened is, ironically, the great prosperity, the--the urge for consumerism that started to seize Israel in the late '70s and early '80s also hit the kibbutz--the kibbutzim.

And so in '81, to get re-elected, the right-wing government at the time opened the floodgates and allowed cheap credit and allowed people to import electronic goods without paying duty for a spell, and the kibbutzim also went on a spending spree. They borrowed a lot of money at cheap rates. The--some of them even entered the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and started, you know, taking--you know, buying stock and gambling on the market, which was zooming at the time. Inflation was something like 15 percent a month. The bottom fell out in '84, to make a long story short, and suddenly, these proud, independent socialist entities became welfare clients, if you will. They had to go to the Finance Ministry, hat in hand for a bailout.

It was like Chrysler coming to the American Treasury, and it was a sad and almost pathetic moment because the Treasury was in hostile hands. And they got some money. The kibbutzim were given a bailout. They were given more than one, but they never were really able to pick themselves off the floor. So you had kibbutzim where there were unbuilt houses, you know, l--you know, very nice homes that were never occupied, the new dining halls that were opened up. So you--kibbutzniks always used to eat together. The evening meal was one of those communal moments. The dining halls, you know, were shut down, and eventually kibbutzniks took their meals at home by themselves. So you couldn't afford to do this kind of thing anymore. The--the dream--the socialist dream of the kibbutzim and the socialist dream of Israel together both gradually collapsed.

FRANKEL: That's my wife, Betsyellen Yeager. She--as I said to you at first, she joined me in Israel in 1970. She's been there with me every time I've been there. She's someone who went to Hebrew language school for four years when we lived there, taking Hebrew with newcomers to the country so she learned another culture; you know, part of the culture that a journalist who works with diplomats often and other journalists doesn't get to. We have three children. We sent two of them to Israeli schools where they learned Hebrew. We had access to Israeli society on a--on a very different level than many journalists get to have. And without her and without that--without my family being with me, it would have been a much less rich experience.

FRANKEL: Well, the kids now are--two of them are teen-agers. The girls who learned Hebrew and who still speak fluent Hebrew are 15 and 13. I've got a son who was born in Jerusalem. He's seven.

FRANKEL: My wife is the most professional mother I can imagine. She used to be a schoolteacher, but when we went overseas beginning in '83, she gave that up and h--she took care of the kids and took care of them in a very profound way. When they were going to school in Hebrew, she--she made sure that their English was kept up. She helped bring them through these incredibly enriching but complicated experiences of moving into a new culture and of feeling your way through it. And it was very rewarding for them and very rewarding for her.

FRANKEL: Well, as you know, I'm a professional journalist. I'm an American Jew. I have deep feelings about Israel, deep feelings about the conflict. I believe very strongly--you know, my--my sympathies are with people, not with movements. My sympathies are with the--the Israelis I met. My book is a--is a story basically--the portraits of a lot of different people and how this change struck them. So I root for them and I root for many of the Palestinians who I met also. I think there's a great mainstream, if you will, in Israel and among the Palestinians of people who want to get this conflict behind them. And so...

FRANKEL: ...personal sympathies there. I treat the movements as things to write about and--and trying to analyze.

FRANKEL: Well, Israel's struggling with that. You know, one of the things of the last 46 years was that because Israel was constantly locked in this existential conflict over its survival, it put off dealing with a lot of other national issues. `We can't deal with the question of who's going to be a citizen. We can't deal with the who is a Jewish, who are all these things. We're worried--don't bother me with that. We're worried about survival.'

And now that the conflict with the Arab states is beginning to recede, now that the issue is no longer Israel's survival, it faces a lot of questions that it put off for a long time. And one of them is: How do you have a Jewish state, how do you have a Jewish homeland and, at the same time, have a secular democracy? And what do you do about those million Israeli Arabs? Do you give them full citizenship rights? According to the Israeli Declaration of Independence, that's exactly what they should have had and--and what they've had over the years. But, in fact, in reality, they've had very much a second-class kind of citizenship.

For that matter, what do you do about the ultraorthodox religious Jews who don't consider themselves Zionist or part of the state either and who, you know, refuse to serve in the army, for example, and feel themselves as outsiders? Do you give them equal rights? How do you treat them? Who's going to run the new Israel and what role does democracy play in it? And--and these are fascinating issues, I think, Brian. These are things they're going to be wrestling with for the next 20 years.

FRANKEL: Yeah, I thi--I certainly think it will be. It's interesting, you know--with the new Republican wave in both the House and Senate, they were talking about cutbacks in all kinds of areas, and Jesse Helms wants to scrap foreign aid. But the one place he exempted from that knife, if you will, was Israel and Egypt. He said right off the top, `We're not going to cut aid to Israel.' So there is still a consensus.

However, remember, I broke it down earlier. Of the $3 billion, $1.8 billion is for military aid, and I think that's going to continue for a long time. But $1.2 billion is for economic assistance. There are a lot of Israelis these days who say, `Hey, we've got a prosperous modern country now. We stand on our own two feet. We don't need that $1.2 billion anymore. In fact, it--it's a detriment to us because it makes us sort of--it makes us look like we've got our hand out. So why don't we reduce that--why don't we eliminate that aid over the next couple of years, let's say, and get on without it?' And I think you're going to see that happen over the next few years. The--the--the economic aid will disappear. The military aid will continue.

FRANKEL: The total number now must be about 600,000, and they're still coming but at much smaller numbers than before. I'd say right now it's averaging maybe 50,000, 60,000 a year.

FRANKEL: For the most part, they are. And they've sort of--the balance now between Sephardim and Ashkenazim is about even because of the arrival of these folks. They've had enormous impact on the country. You know, you--you think, `Well, a half a million--how many is that?' But remember, in the context of the size of the state, it's as if the entire population of Canada made its way down to the United States over the course of two or three years. They're very demanding people. They're not religious. They're not ideological. They're results-oriented. And they were one of the factors that drove out the right-wing government in the 1992 election and brought in the Rabin government. Of course, the thing about them is if they don't get what they want from the Rabin government, they're just as likely to turn around in '96 and be a major factor in driving them out of power.

FRANKEL: The unemployment rate in Israel has climbed markedly. It's now close to--well, it's now 8 percent or 9 percent. It was in double digits two years ago. That's another reason why Rabin was elected prime minister, because Israelis felt their economy was not going exactly where they wanted to. That's a huge change. You know, we've had that kind of unemployment once or twice in our history. Israel never had it before. Israel, when it was a small state under siege, had almost full employment. It had a sense of egalitarianism and a sense of community that now is beginning to break down. The fruits of the peace process and the fruits of capitalism are mixed, to say the least. In some ways, they are changing Israel for the better, and in some ways they're making it a much tougher place.

The egalitarianism, as I say, is one of the major things that's changing. You go to the Israeli army--still these days--and you've got the head of one of the country's largest computer firms who, when he goes to do his month of reserve duty each year, he's taking orders from a taxi driver he knows, who's the officer of his unit. That sense of, you know, `We're all in this together' and--and--and that egalitarian spirit has been a fundamental part of Israel over the years, and that's beginning to break down. The income gap is--is widening. The unemployment rate is growing. That's one of the things Israelis have to deal with.

FRANKEL: Oh, it's about a third of the United States. I would say it's still something like $12,000, $13,000, $14,000 a year.

FRANKEL: They pay huge, whopping taxes in Israel, still in the range of 50 percent I would say. It's gone down in recent years, but it was once 60 percent or more. But remember that there are still many of the vestiges of the old socialist system. Education's free all the way through university. Everybody gets a--a--a benefit, if you will, to help pay their mortgage; gets a child benefit for the number of children you have, and the more you have, the more you get. So there's a lot--the--the--the health-care system is much more organized along socialist principles. So it's a much more--these things are breaking down. They're changing but slowly, and as the income goes up and the socialist system breaks down, you'll see it becoming much more of a Europeanized or Americanized kind of an economy.

FRANKEL: Yes, that's right, over the years. These are people who have left Israel. Many of them come to the United States or gone to various places. Sometimes they're escaping socialism. Sometimes they're escaping what they see as dead-end prospects or they don't want to serve in the army. Some of these people are drifting back, of course, because in spite of the disparity in income, there's a kind of quality of life in Israel that you can't find in many other countries and even in the United States. Part of it's the sense of community, the sense of a unique, shared enterprise. Part of it is the fact that the weather's great and people can be nice and it's a very informal society. They don't wear ties and jackets very often in Israel. So if you've got the kind of personality and the kind of spirit that in--that--that prizes this sort of informality, you can get a lot more of it over there.

FRANKEL: Oh, dear. That's a good question. I would say we're up in the 12 million, 13 million range worldwide. The two biggest population centers of Jews by far are the United States and Israel. There must be about four million here or more, maybe five million and, again, four million there.

FRANKEL: Well, it's very hard. I liked it. I have many, many dear friends there. I'd like to go back and I will go back often, but I feel very much like an American and I am an American and I write in English, and it's important to me to do many things. I've really enjoyed--writing this book was a very important thing for me to do because it got me to go back there and it got me a chance to see many of these people who I had met as the correspondent for The Washington Post and to see what had happened to them, and I loved that experience and I know I'll do it again, but this is my home.

FRANKEL: I'm the deputy national news editor of The Washington Post. I'm in charge of all the people on the national staff who are in bureaus around the country. Everybody who has a suitcase packed sort of works for me.

FRANKEL: I was there in December of '93 to put together--to try to piece--so just a year ago--to piece together this process, to try to find out who had done what to whom and how the--these sort of secret meetings they'd had in Oslo with the PLO came about and what Yitzhak Rabin's role was. And, you know, when this peace process finally resulted in the White House signing, Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, went there and, with a great grimace on his face, signed this accord with Yasir Arafat of the PLO. And I tried to put together what had happened, so it's been just a year.

FRANKEL: I think the war itself was a real turning point. Israelis, first of all, got a taste of what the missile age was like and what could happen. And remember, these were Scuds. These were not very modern missiles. They were thrown blindly from western Iraq, and yet they still hit targets in--in Tel Aviv and they still craused--caused a great panic and terror, if you will, among Israelis. And so they got a taste of what the future could be if--if war was the future. That's pushed them forward.

They also got the sense that they weren't alone in the world because, remember, they didn't have to go to Baghdad to defeat Saddam Hussein. The United States did that for them. And so they got the sense that they were--you know, that there were allies out there. And they also got the sense that the Arab world was changing. The United States had had many Arab allies, including even Syria, of course, one of Israel's great enemies. The United States was now the one key superpower in the world. The Soviet Union was out of the picture. And so even Yitzhak Shamir and the most right-wing of Israelis could see the world was changing, could see they would have to deal with it.

And I believe there's a direct connection between the Gulf War and the way the Gulf War went and the launching of a peace process that led first to the Madrid conference in the fall of 1991 where, for the first time, an Israeli government sits down at a table with various Arab states and with a representative of the Palestinian people, and they actually talk about peace. It was a--you know, it was a horrible event, on one level. They argued with each other, they fought, they feuded. It showed the gap between them in many dramatic ways. There was a lot of childish stuff that went on in M--at Madrid. But that started a process that I think will end inevitably to what we see now.

FRANKEL: Oh, I love them all. The one I found most compelling, in some ways, I have to say was Mr. Shamir because he comes from such a different world than we do. The man born in pre-World War II Poland, the man with the memory of the Holocaust sort of burned into his soul, who comes to Israel, becomes part of a violent underground movement to liberate Israel, who believes only in ideology and only in himself and who's willing to outwit and outwait his enemies. To me, he became an archetype, if you will, of an older Israel, of an older style of how you get through history.

FRANKEL: He's a--he's--he's a diminutive man. He's five-feet, four-inches tall. He's a man who's never driven a car in his life. He's never used a computer. The bu--the buttons on his push-button phone kind of bewilder him at times. This is a man of the Old World.

FRANKEL: Yitzhak Jaz--I'll pronounce it wrong--Jazernicki. He comes from Poland. He takes the name Shamir--he takes it as--first as--when he's in the underground as a code name. It means thorn in Hebrew.

FRANKEL: Well, there were three underground movements, but his was called Lechi. It was--and we know it somewhat as the Stern Gang. It was the Fighters for Freedom of Israel. And these guys were responsible for assassinations before World War II. During World War II, when the British were occupying the territory that now is Israel, are fighting a desperate war against the Nazis, these guys continue to fight the British. And they even, at one point, send an emissary to talk to the Germans before they knew the--the import of the Holocaust, if you will; then the enemy of my enemy is my en--potentially my ally. They are ruthlessly determined to overthrow the British, and Yitzhak Shamir was not just a member of this group. After the death of its original founder, Abraham Stern, Shamir became the leader of this little underground movement.

FRANKEL: Well, he blew--I'm afraid he probably blew more than one guy's head off over the--over those years. He planned assassinations. H--he comes to believe that a ruthlessly determined group of people, no matter how small or how beleaguered they are, can change history because he did it. And so he s--clings to that. And you can imagine what it's like to have a guy with that kind of background walk into the Oval Office and sit down with old George Bush. And you can imagine the enormous miscommunication that went on between the Ivy League man with the perfect resume and this underground warrior with no resume whatsoever--with a secret resume. And so it's only natural that these guys wouldn't see eye-to-eye from the beginning.

FRANKEL: Oh, I've seen Shamir about 10 times, and--and he's the toughest interview in the world. It's like--you know, it's like he's got his mouth wired shut, and you're the dentist trying to work on him somehow.

FRANKEL: He's married. He's--his wife was an underground currier during this time, Shulamete. She grew up in the underground as well. Their son is named the Iere. He's named after this first--is named after the man who founded his movement. Very interesting story, though. His son served in the Israeli air force for many, many years, and in 1988 he gets out and he joins a private firm, one of the biggest firms, Scitex, one of the most successful high-tech firms in Israel. And, you know, the father, the prime minister of Israel, didn't understand. He felt his son was selling out. He didn't understand that world.

And one day Iere sat down with his dad and said, `You know, what's going on is I haven't given up being a patriotic Israeli. What I'm doing is my patriotism now is in the private sector. There's a whole new country developing here, and I want to be part of that.' And his father n--you know, his father went along with it finally, but he never has quite grasped it. It's a world that Yitzhak Shamir, that the old-line prime minister, will never really understand.

FRANKEL: His appeal?

FRANKEL: Yeah.

FRANKEL: Well, people followed him because, you know, in a room full of people who don't know what the future holds and who are uncertain about themselves, he is the one certain man. He knows exactly where he's going. He was, in many ways, an accidental prime minister. He only got the job because Menachem Begin in 1983 suddenly resigns and--and--and retired from the public stage. And the party scrambled around to find somebody to take his place, and Shamir was sort of the least offensive to a number of people at the time. But they didn't know much about what he really believed. It's only over time that we saw the emergence of this ruthlessly ideological prime minister. His appeal was that he knew where he was going.

There's a great scene in the book. In 1990, when the peace process is blowing up and the Bush administration is really kind of conspiring with the Labor Party, which was then part of the government to get rid of Shamir--to replace him with a much more malleable Labor Party government--and--and Shamir loses a vote in the Parliament, the first time in the history of Israel that a government has lost a vote of no confidence. And he's on his way out, and the younger guys in his party say, `We've got to get rid of this guy. We're going to go into his office tomorrow morning and tell him he's through.' And they all march in the next morning, and--and they look at this 70-year-old man and he starts talking about how `We're not dead yet. We can win this contest. We're going to defeat the Labor Party. We're going to defeat the Americans. We're going to get back in power. Trust me, we're going to do this.' And, you know, the guys--they never--they never had the guts to stand up and say to him, `Yitzhak, you know, you've got to step down.' One told me it was like going to your father and saying, `Dad, it's over for you. You know, you've got to step down from the family business.'

He wins and they loses and ul--and they lose. And ultimately, you know, they got back in power. Shamir was right that time. He--they call--you know, no one called his bluff and he won. Later, in 1992, in his conflict with George Bush and Jim Baker, George Bush calls his bluff for the first time. And after it's over, Shamir does lose and he loses eventually the premiership.

FRANKEL: It was very tough in a number of ways. In some ways, I'm afraid the real problem wasn't so much that I was going to be too sympathetic to Israel but that I was going to be too critical; that I would be too demanding of people who I felt some kind of kinship with; that I would expect too much out of them, more than I would expect from another country. So that was one of my first problems.

But I found that, as a journalist, it'd be just such a fascinating story. And one of the great things about it is that so many people are accessible. They love to talk to you. You call somebody up, they see you the next day. And as a journalist, you get to roam from a place like--you can be in the prime minister's office in Tel Aviv one day, and the next day you can be in Nablus in th--in--in the occupied West Bank at a Palestinian family's house talking to a father about why his kid is out there throwing stones. You get great access. You get to meet people and talk to people who would never, ever talk to each other.

FRANKEL: No. I told myself early on--I made a pact with myself that, yes, they were my people, but they were a different country. I was there to explain them. I was there to write about what was going on. I had a job to do. And you're sort of--I ha--I had been a journalist almost 20 years when I first went there, and you fall into a pattern. It's--it's--it's second nature. And I felt there was such a great human story there, the best and the worst was there, and it was my job to capture it. And in the same way--you know, my book began really as a sense that I wanted to write about these people. I was originally just going to write a sort of string of portraits, but gradually a picture emerged that I could put together. I felt a commitment to these people to write about them fairly, to capture their dilemma, to capture the things they told themselves and the things they thought they were doing. And--and as a journalist, I think that was my calling, and it never got to me to be a question of, `How can I write about a fellow Jew this way?' I couldn't find any other way to write about them.

FRANKEL: Well, Netanyahu for one, who's now the new head of the Likud, is certainly somebody we're going to hear from. He could be the--he will be the Likud candidate for prime minister in 1996, and he could win. There are some new guys coming up in Labor. There's a guy named Ehud Barak, who just stepped down as the head of the Israeli army, and now he's going to get into politics. He could be the Colin Powell of Israel if he's lucky. Another guy named Haim Ramon, who's another Labor Party young guy. He's the same age as these two. These three guys are going to be very important.

FRANKEL: Yeah.

FRANKEL: I think it could be the $1.8 billion in military aid, but at the same time if they make a deal with the Syrians, you know, and get peace agreements with their neighbors, the army's going to demand certain kinds of things, going to need certain kinds of things. And actually the amount of military aid could go up for a spell, so it might be $2.5 billion at that point. We'll see.