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The Next Fifty Years

© lawhawk

Much talk has come of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Independence of the State of Israel. You can find tremendous amounts of information at a multitude of web sites including Yahoo! - Israel at 50, the Official State of Israel 50th Anniversary Section, National Public Radio's Tribute to Israel's 50th Anniversary and, of course, CNN has a web site dedicated to the occassion.

While these sites are all primarily dedicated to what has happened in the past, I am choosing to look ahead into the next 50 years. What issues have been solved, what issues need to be solved and what new problems lurk on the horizon. These issues encompass everything from environmental and water use issues to the changing social fabric of Israeli society as more Israelis come from a Sephardic (Asian, Middle East and Spanish) background as opposed to the Ashkenazic (European tradition), not to mention the growing differences between the religious and secular Jews.

This doesn't even begin to examine the issues that will occur next year when many Palestinians believe that the Palestinian Authority will unilaterally call for the creation of a Palestinian State on the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital despite the fact that Israel has continued to stand by its assertion that Jerusalem is unified and annexed into Israeli control.

Economic issues will also be a major concern as Israel will need to decide how much it can support companies. You may see a growing divestment of utilities, companies and industries akin to what Great Britain has done over the last number of years. At the same time, Israel will likely be the central hub of high technology in the Middle East as its use and innovation of the Internet and high technology ranks it among the top five in Internet use per capita. Among its more well known companies is Mirabilis, which makes the well known ICQ program that enables people to send messages almost instantly.

Israel will have to determine what kind of state it wants to become as the differences between the religious and secular populations have become highly politicized. The makeup of the Knesset has changed tremendously over the last three to four election cycles as religious parties are becoming increasingly stronger and taking away seats from the two main parties - Labor and Likud. This means that the religious parties (primarily Shas and Agudat Israel) will be in a position to dictate what policy will succeed and control vital functions in society including the judiciary and the Ministry of Religious Affairs which sets standards as basic as who is a Jew and who can preside over conversions.

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