A Lost Generation

It is no little thing for a country with a population as small as that of Israel's to lose 40,000 young people. Not through war directly, despite that country's constant state of embattlement but in an indirect way. An attrition due to that continual awareness of war on its periphery of existence. This is a country envisioned and established for the direct purpose of offering a refuge to world Jewry post-Holocaust.

In any country its most prized resources must represent its new generation, its young. In any population children enjoy a very special relationship to the larger population who see a need to protect the young, to encourage and stimulate them and prepare them to take their place in the layer upon layer, generation upon generation that speaks to us of the human experience, the relaying of the torch of life from the old to the new.

In Israel, a country birthed in agony and struggling continually against the adversity of resentment at its presence in a hugely Islamic geography of traditional culture and religious supremacy, there has never been a relaxation of armed services conscription. When young Israeli boys and girls are taken away from the normalcy of everyday life and brought into the hard reality of armed service in protection of their country.

Israel has, of necessity, and through genuinely authentic creativity, sought many methods by which she could make full use of the small parcel of land allotted to her. In the dry, desertified presence of the Middle East her pioneers established agricultural collectives, Kibbutzim, that became successful enterprises, the envy of the world. They succeeded where Communism's collective farms in the U.S.S.R. became spectacular failures.

The success owing to the passionate need of the people to succeed, to ensure survival in a harsh atmosphere, not entirely conducive to passive relaxation in the triumph of nationhood. Their attempts at self-sufficiency, their success at being able to produce agricultural products sufficient to their needs, and enough for export, helped the State, and gave confidence to its people.

Children growing up in these collectives were accustomed to living in a communal atmosphere; everyone's children became as siblings to one another. They thought, behaved and reacted as a collective, for together they succeeded at what they did best. They relied upon one another. Their collective reliance, after all, their ability to selflessly co-operate with one another, was what marked their success.

Their social closeness was endemic to the Kibbutz tradition and reality. Self-reliance, however, suffered, and it was discovered that these Kibbutz offspring were incapable of conceiving and reacting as individuals, bereft of their companion Kibbutz members. That was yet another interesting lesson learned in collective human behaviour.

And here is another lesson to be learned. Young Israelis, conscripted into the Israeli Defence Forces becoming mentally, psychically fatigued beyond endurance. Utterly drained of normal aspirations. Seeking escape from the inevitable in a country truly beleaguered and seeing no other options for its populace than to call upon the young and the untried to protect, exposing themselves to constant danger.

Following their obligations to protect and to wage war when required, including taking up positions at check-points and border entries humiliating to, and deleterious toward normal living conditions imposed upon neighbours from among whose population death stalks Israelis, these young people have chosen to opt out. To completely absent themselves from all that is familiar and should have given comfort to them - their country of birth.

They have found sanctuary other than in Israel, their country of sanctuary for Jews. They have transported themselves to Goan India, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 young people, to live alongside the country's 900 million Hindus and 150 million Muslims. "Our souls need a permanent break from Israel", said a 24-year-old IDF veteran. "We're all runaways. There's nothing for us back in Israel."

They have willingly, desperately, traded in their lives in Israel for the pointlessness of drugged dissipation, frail indolence, and a nihilistic mindset living on a long beachfront below the impoverished mountain villages of Goa. A room with a plank bed and a mosquito net goes for $5 a night, although many choose to sleep under trees.

There are little restaurants with piquant names like Outback Indian Israeli Restaurant complete with Hebrew-speaking Hindus ladling out vegetarian food for a few cents a plate. "People my age come here because Israel is an empty place. The presence of Muslims in India is not a concern. India is not just the world's biggest democracy, it's the world's rowdiest democracy", explained a 30-year-old waiter.

There is, though, resentment of their presence. The locals don't think highly of the youth hanging about, their reliance on recreational drugs, living in utter squalor, and doing nothing of the most utilitarian nature to support themselves. This exodus to India began in 1994 as a perceived temporary escape from reality, post-military experience.

Now, the young people living on the beaches, with no intentions of returning to Israel any time soon, and no apparent thoughts of their future, sit about, embittered, with nothing to look forward to. They have fled, they say, their country's armed turbulence with the Palestinians. And, they also say, the spiritual emptiness of Judaism.

This large, self-disenfranchised demographic represents young people too fragile emotionally, traumatized by the brutality of war, their nebulous requirement to desert morality to the imperative of survival. Not for them the comfort of martyrdom, that young Palestinians resort to. They seek their very own version of Paradise on a sandy beach in India, stoned out of their pain.

Israel: much has been sacrificed for the imperative of national survival.