israelinsider: Inside look

Sharon Chaplik is a mother of two who lives in Yehud and immigrated to Israel from Kenya 11 years ago.

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Inside look
By Sharon Chaplik May 8, 2001

In the weeks just before Israel's Independence Day, sirens of remembrance filled the air. We stood in silence, heads bowed in mourning, remembering and honoring the millions who perished in the Holocaust. Sirens rose from the ashes of those who marched unknowingly to their death, and from the dark clouds of terrible memories and permanent anxiety of the generation of survivors' children.

A week later we paid homage to the lives lost in Israel's War for Independence and for those who fell in later battles defending that independence in a continual fight to exist. We stood in silence and paid our respects in a land that has many freshly dug graves.

Times surely have changed, for behind the waving flags of celebration lies a disintegrating society held together mostly by a web of common faith. The gap between the economic classes is constantly growing - the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is slowly but surely getting smaller, and all the while the rich become richer. Our boys today openly question their fate and worth in the army. These are children who have grown up in their own free country and indeed feel entitled to ask - What is more sacred, the State or the individual? A question that was impossible to ask only a generation ago. Our initial fight for survival made the State the individual and vice versa. National pride merged with the individual's quest for a homeland. It is widely apparent that today, the individual comes first and perhaps that is how it should be. We suffer from all the symptoms of a developed country. We have reaped the fruits of a sovereign state but we still remain locked in a Biblical territorial battle.

We have transformed deserts into lush fields and swampland into prosperous industrial zones. Yet in the untouched beauty of Jerusalem hills it is hard to listen to nature's silence because endless injustices have been committed on both sides and it is so deeply etched in our faces. Surely the holy sites must tremble with God's wrath at lives so cruelly thrown away in his name.

Mutual distrust and dislike is tearing away at the fabric that brought religious and non-religious camps together. Thoughts of better days seep and trickle through our national and religious conscience. For like the State and the individual, our nation is synonymous with our faith. Israel in its diversity encompasses different strains of Zionism; people from all walks of life have built this country up.

We constantly concentrate on fighting to secure our borders - to a large extent Israel's wars have overshadowed the inevitable changes that our society is going through. We live in a region where borders shift like the sands that surround us. We are a nation trying to burst out of a cocoon that is the Middle East.