Israel Anniversary Party Crashing Nation In No Mood For Year Of Celebration

The Jewish year 5758 was going to be one long party, marking a century since the founding of the Zionist movement and 50 years since the tumultuous, exhilarating establishment of Israel.

Instead, plans for a yearlong commemoration are falling apart, undermined by a nationwide funk, a deepening economic crisis and worsening social divisions.

The $70 million initially earmarked for events marking Israel’s golden anniversary has been slashed to $14 million.

And in the past three weeks, the key officials involved in the celebrations all resigned from the planning committee. First came Tourism Minister Moshe Katsav, the celebrations’ czar; then retired Gen. Yossi Peled, the committee head; and finally chief producer Haim Slotsky.

They cited “professional disagreements,” which seemed to boil down to one key problem: The Iranian-born Katsav was far more sympathetic than his European-descended colleagues to charges that the celebration plans promoted an excessively Western image of the Jewish state.

There were also charges of mismanagement, with the newspaper Maariv accusing the top officials of handing out jobs to friends and using the official facilities for private business.

Slotsky hired his personal spokeswoman and accountant to work for the committee and awarded the right to produce one of the events to his business partner, Maariv said.

Racheli Goldblatt, spokeswoman for the organizing committee, said there was no legal requirement to take bids for contracted work, and Slotsky chose professionals. “He may have known them, but that’s because he knows the best,” she said.

The Tourism Ministry’s spokesman, Motti Shilo, said the celebrations are merely being scaled down, not scrapped.

But the national mood is skeptical about the need to party.

“We can already determine that the 50th celebrations are a cake that didn’t rise,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

For Israelis, who will usher in the Jewish New Year on Wednesday night, there is mostly aggravation these days:

Prospects for peace with the Arabs, which seemed so tantalizingly close, are fading. There appears to be no remedy to the terrorism of Islamic militant groups, and relations with the Palestinians and other Arabs are fraying.

Tension between Israelis who think the Palestinians should get their own state and those who don’t has blossomed into open loathing.

Animosity is growing between Israel’s shrinking secular majority and resurgent groups of religious and ultra-religious Jews who seek to turn the Middle East’s only democracy into a Jewish theocracy.

Efforts to integrate the half of Israel’s 4.7 million Jews who are European-descended Ashkenazim and the poorer Sephardim who hail from the Middle East are floundering.

Pollster Yossi Vadana said the national mood has seldom been darker. “There is a feeling that the country is weaker than in the past. There is disappointment and fear,” he said.