Let's Go Israel The Student Travel Guide
by Let's Go

From the Let's Go series.

Halfway through its first century, Israel has yet to resolve a psychological struggle between secularism and reverence. An inevitable sense of religion and history permeates its modern cities, where pensive philosophers and microchip millionaires sit on park benches with patriotic Zionists and day-seizing disco-goers. The nation's heterogeneity is most apparent on Friday evenings, when Tel Aviv clubs and Eilat pubs explode with revelry that can almost be heard in the reverent streets of Tzfat or in Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter. Israel has been controversial since its inception. As a result of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, Jews of all cultures came together to fashion a new kind of state and to remake themselves, sometimes at the expense of Palestinian Arabs. With the country's identity and culture in constant flux, all Israelis have their own visions of what Israel could or should be. Amos Oz, Israel's leading novelist, sees his fellow Israelis as "a warm-hearted, hot-tempered Mediterranean people that is gradually learning, through great suffering and 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." Ask Israelis about their bewildering national situation, and they will tell you at length how they see their country - there is no lack of impassioned political or apolitical opinions. But a fundamental optimism shines through; talk with them long enough, and they will eventually smile or shrug and say, "Yihiyeh tov" (It will be OK).

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