Israel

For important information on all aspects of travel in general and some specifics on Israel, see Essentials.
At age 46, a fractious Israel (Yisrael) still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. The world’s only Jewish state is variously “a light unto the nations,” a pariah among its neighbors, and a country like all the others. From persecution culminating in the Holocaust, Jews have come together to build a new country in the midst of imperial ruins, mingling diverse cultures and backgrounds to make a brand new kind of state and to remake themselves in the process. With the country’s identity at stake, all Israelis have their own vision of what Israel should be.

To give one eloquent example, Amos Oz, Israel’s leading novelist, sees his fellow Israelis not as “the ‘Maccabeans reborn1 that Herzl talked of, but a warm-hearted, hot-tempered Mediterranean people that is gradually learning, through great suffering and in a tumult of sound and fury, to find release both from the bloodcurdling nightmares of the past and from delusions of grandeur, both ancient and modern.” Of course, many Israelis see Oz as a stuck-up intellectual, and will tell you at length, in more simple words, how they see their country (as the saying goes, if you have two Israelis in a room, you have three opinions). Finally, this rigorous self-analysis is going on in the midst of the intractable Arab-Jsraeli conflict, in itself a favorite topic for opinionated discussion. Talk with Israelis about their bewildering country for long enough, and they will finally smile or shrug and say, Yihiyeh b’seder” (It’ll be OK).