Insight

JERUSALEM — Sixty years after its founding, Israel boasts a powerful military, vibrant economy, modern cities and 62 colleges and universities. It is home to more than 7 million people — 5.5 million of them Jews — nine times the population in 1948.

Yet, to many Israelis, the country is more threatened than ever. Palestinian militants in Gaza fire homemade rockets nearly every day into southern Israel. The Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, is reportedly rearming after fighting Israel to a stalemate two years ago. And Israeli media reported last week that Iran may be about a year away from producing a nuclear weapon.

What, then, will Israel look like in another 60 years?

Despite the odds, will peace, at last, take hold and transform Israel and its Arab neighbors into a prosperous region built on commerce, trade and intellectual cooperation? Or will conflict spiral into nuclear war, leaving the Middle East an uninhabitable radioactive desert?

Or is Israeli in 60 years most likely to be where it is now — hoping for peace, but struggling to define its relationship with the Palestinians?

"Jews understand there is no other option than survival," said Gerald Steinberg, chairman of the political science department at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. "Sixty years is a long time, but it's hard to see the essential issue of Israeli Jewish sovereignty changing. That's the bottom line."

Modern Israel's permanence can be seen in Tel Aviv's high-rise office towers, Jerusalem's condominium building boom and the world-class high tech corridor, known as Silicon Wadi.

Three-quarters of Israelis believe their nation will exist to celebrate its centennial, according to a public opinion poll published last week in the daily newspaper Israel Hayom. But half of those surveyed said Israel is "moving in the wrong direction."

Israel is still an island in the Middle East. Peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan 15 years later have not led to peace with the Palestinians, or the wider Arab world. And as Iran pursues nuclear power, it has threatened to annihilate the Jewish state.

"We will live and possibly die by our sword for many, many years," Ofer Shelah, columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest circulation daily, said in an interview. "Sixty years after its independence, Israel is still seen by most of its citizens as a refuge, as a fort in a way."

In the April installment of the War and Peace Index, a monthly telephone survey of Israelis conducted by Tel Aviv University, three-quarters of respondents said they expect a war with one or more Arab states within five years. Almost the same number said they do not expect a peace deal with Palestinians.

At the same time, there is reason for optimism, said Galia Golan, professor of government at the Interdisciplinary Center, a private college in Herzliya, and a founding member of Peace Now, an Israeli group that has long advocated swapping land for peace.

"Today, you still have the majority of both populations favoring a two-state solution. We've come a long way, that's important to remember. In that regard, we're closer to peace," she said.

In the same Tel Aviv University survey, 70 percent favored "two states for two peoples."

But when asked if she thought her grandchildren would live in a Jewish state called Israel in 60 years, Golan said, "I'm concerned. I'm very concerned.

"My oldest grandchild now is 13. And it looks like he'll be going to the army. And he'll probably have to fight. I didn't think he was going to do that when he was born. I thought it was going in the other direction."

Israelis hold little hope that renewed peace t·lks with Palestinians will bear fruit. The militant group, Hamas, which controls Gaza, is not participating in the U.S.-brokered talks.

Despite the nation's 60 years, which were commemorated on Thursday — Israel's anniversary according to the Hebrew calendar — and will be feted again this week during a visit by President Bush, Israel has yet to form a constitution, define its political boundaries or reconcile the rights of its 1.5 million Arab citizens within the notion of a Jewish democracy.

"I want to get to a point when I look at the independence of the Jewish people as my independence," said Ahmad Hijazi, who has lived since 1992 in a cooperative village of 250 residents founded jointly by Israeli Arabs and Jews, called Neve Shalom in Hebrew and Wahat al-Salam in Arabic, meaning Oasis of Peace.

"I think Zionism has to change," he said, "as well as the Palestinian national movement."

Hijazi joins a growing number of Arab citizens of Israel — and a small, but vocal, cadre of Jewish Israelis — who support a one-state solution, which would incorporate Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into Israel and offer equal rights to Arabs and Jews.

A vast majority of Jewish Israelis rejects a one-state solution, or a bi-national state, as anathema to Zionism — Israel as a homeland for Jews.

Israel's mainstream left and right increasingly consider the Palestinian birthrate as one of the nation's primary threats. Demographers predict the balance will tip dramatically in favor of Palestinians in the coming decades.

If Israel doesn't change course, it "will be an apartheid state or a Palestinian state in the end. The question of a bi-national state is a disaster," said the prominent Israeli novelist, essayist and playwright A.B. Yehoshua, who, along with two other Israeli literary giants, Amos Oz and David Grossman, have called on the government to negotiate with Hamas.

It was demographic concerns that helped convince former prime minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 and construct the separation barrier in the West Bank, as a way to begin to draw political boundaries between Israel and a future Palestinian state, according to Arnon Sofer, a geography professor at Haifa University, who was an adviser to Sharon.

Sofer favors territorial concessions that include East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their rightful capital. He says if a peace deal is not attainable, Israel must unilaterally withdraw from wide swaths of the West Bank. If not, he said, "slowly, we will find ourselves in a bi-national state. This is the end of the Zionist dream. This is the end of the Jewish state."

Akiva Eldar, author and chief political columnist for the left-leaning daily, Haaretz , envisions two scenarios in 60 years: an Israel that is "small, but beautiful," or "big, but ugly."

Mainstream secular Israelis worry that Israel's long occupation of the territories and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank, opposed by Palestinians and considered illegitimate by most of the world's nations, will eventually preclude the creation of a viable Palestinian state beside Israel.

"Status quo is not an option," Eldar said.

Israel, however, seems far from loosening its grip on the West Bank.

After Hamas filled the power vacuum left in Gaza, the Jewish settler movement was emboldened with warnings that the same would take place in the West Bank.

"The territories are the heart of the historical homeland of the Jewish people ././. the pillar that the state is standing on," said Noam Arnon, a settler in the Palestinian city of Hebron.

A third future scenario may be the status quo.

"As much as I would talk about urgency and that the window is closing, deep down I don't think the window can close because there is no other solution possible" than two states, said Golan, the government professor and peace activist.

"We will be a minority and the theory is that as a minority, the world will not tolerate our continued rule over the Palestinians. That's the theory. But I'm not convinced that's the case."

Many Israelis and Palestinians point to one factor that will ensure the Jewish state's survival: American support.

Mahdi A`dul Hadi, founder and head of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, called a bi-national state "wishful thinking," and also questioned whether a two-state solution would come to pass.

"As long as it stays in the laps of decision-makers in Washington," he said, "Israel will continue to be there, and there will be a degree of autonomy, whether I like it or not, for Palestinians in what is left of Palestine."