Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, for one, is sick of hearing about the national government’s recent infighting over official celebrations and events.
“I think Israel is the greatest phenomenon in human history,” he said last month, sitting in his office boardroom shortly before meeting Latvia’s president.
“We have developed in 50 years one of the richest, most powerful countries in the world…This is the most spectacular achievement.”
Olmert contends that he doesn’t care about the extent of the ceremonies or TV coverage.
“Regardless of how we celebrate,” he said, “there is a reason to celebrate.”
Izzat Abu-Rabia, a 38-year-old Bedouin Muslim who lives on a kibbutz and works as a tour guide, would tend to agree with Olmert.
Ten years ago, Abu-Rabia served as a Bedouin representative for the country’s official traveling exhibit marking its 40th birthday.
He is more than willing to help out again.
“I will be very proud to do it,” said Abu-Rabia, who also served in the Israeli army.
With his cell phone and brand-new Suburban, Abu-Rabia is part of the younger Bedouin generation that has become more interested in a modern lifestyle than in a nomadic one.
“This is my country,” he said, while speeding along a road in the eastern Negev Desert. “This is my state.”
He will be happier, though, when the Arabs and the Israelis get their act together and make real peace.
“Israel could be the paradise of the Middle East,” he said emphatically. “And the Middle East could be the paradise of the world.”
On the other end of the spectrum is Jonathan Rosenblum, a Jerusalem Post columnist and self-described haredi Jew who made aliyah from America nearly two decades ago.
Sitting in a kosher Chinese restaurant in Jerusalem after the end of Shabbat, Rosenblum describes his fellow adherents to the strictest observance of rabbinic Judaism as “ambivalent” about the state of Israel.
“We still live in the golus,” he said, using the pejorative Yiddish term for the diaspora.
That attitude won’t change for the fervently religious until the Messiah comes, he added.
Rosenblum, who wears a black hat over his kippah and sports a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, said he’s more interested in Jewish lives and the fate of Jewish people than in the Jewish state per se.
“The Land of Israel is not the ultimate value for us,” he said.
Judith Abramson, on the other hand, has spent her entire life building the state of Israel.
A Tel Aviv native and a hard-core Zionist, the 71-year-old served in the elite pre-state fighting force, the Palmach. Today, the former kibbutznik volunteers as a guide at a historic site on the southern tip of the Kinneret, Israel’s freshwater sea.
She is proud of her state. At the same time, she longs for the idealism of the past.
Standing near abandoned stone buildings on what was the first land purchased with Zionist money, Abramson describes the zeal with which the Jewish socialists of the early 1900s built up this site called Deganyah.
“Those young people who came to Israel penniless…were eager to give their strength to establish the country,” said Abramson, who wears her gray hair in a neat bun.
Today, she is frustrated by the modern, capitalistic, me-first attitude she sees around her. It’s impossible to imagine her on a cell phone, traipsing through Tel Aviv’s trendy boutiques or nibbling on biscotti in an espresso bar like so many Israelis today.
“Don’t scrub my wounds,” she says when asked whether she misses the pioneering attitude. She won’t say another word.
Amir Orly, a fourth-generation Israeli and the father of teenagers, is still awestruck by pioneers like Abramson. He feels the same way about the nation’s birth and the victory against Arab forces in 1947 and 1948.
“How we survived this — it is a miracle,” said Orly, a Jerusalem resident and secular Jew.
But this long-time tour guide, who is also a coordinator for Emory University’s study program in Israel, said his country is not in the best of moods right now.
For example, Orly is sickened by Israelis’ divisiveness and the growing power of fervently religious Jews.
He has viewed himself as “an orphan” since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s murder and still carries a photo of Rabin in his wallet. He doesn’t feel much like celebrating since his hero’s death.
Orly considers the act a religious murder — not a political one.
“It broke a lot of the stitches that held the society together,” he said after finishing a lecture at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s statehood on May 14, 1948.
“Even the 50th anniversary is kind of forced. You do not see real joy in the streets,” he said.
A few days later in Jerusalem, as he sits between Rabin’s and Golda Meir’s graves in Israel’s national cemetery, Orly worries about his country’s continuing struggles.
“The question of whether the whole effort was worthwhile,” Orly said, “history will judge.”