A Day in the Life of the Israelis [antikvár]

. .. Before dctwn, a pair of bleary-eyed teenagers prepare to leave a Tel Aviv discotheque. ... A few hundred yards away, politicians at a party caucus huddle to discuss the unexpected results of a late-night vote. ... At Rosh Ha'Ayin (a suburb of Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv); established four decades ago by immigrants from Yemen, the elders gather for morning prayers behind the venetian blinds of a resident's balcony. ... In Jerusalem, an early riser on his way to a computer lab stops by the local grocery for his daily loaf of bread. ... A Tel Aviv municipal worker, on his annual six-week tour of duty as an army reservist, patrols the long strip of minefields and electrified barbed-wire fence along the Israel-Jordan frontier. ... In Bak'a-el-Gharbiya, an Arab village in the Galilee, preparations begin for an afternoon wedding in the home of a local farmer. ... In a kibbutz at the foot of Mount Tábor an old settler squints into the early sun outside his little house and remembers how it all began. How in the late 1920s, as a nineteen-year-old boy fired by the dream of a just society in a restored Jewish homeland, he had quit his studies in Warsaw University at mid-term in order to jóin a commune in what was then British-ruled Palestine. How he and somé thirty other fervent believers in the Zionist and the socialist remedy had settled in tents and huts on an arid patch of abandoned land a few miles out of a place called in the Hebrew tongue Megiddo (Armageddon). How they had drained nearby malaria-infested swamps and planted orchards and built cowsheds and somé solid houses. Only a few houses, for the children, at first-the grownups continued to live in makeshift shelters. How in the late 1930s, armed only with sticks and a few pistols, they had held off attacks by Arab gunmen. How in 1948, as a forty-year-old soldier in Israel's War of Independence, he had dug trenches and fiiled sandbags on the Syrian front, and been wounded in the leg. How in the following years the kibbutz, like Israel as a whole, had achieved a relative prosperity, and how at last in 1961, after thirty-three years of sharing a communal toilet and shower, he and his wife had been given the luxury of a priváté bathroom in their new 1 Wroom kibbutz fiat.