JERUSALEM: The Jewish people are marking the 60th anniversary of their national rebirth, the founding of Israel, on Thursday with the usual military flyovers, flag buntings and televised reminiscences of aging pioneers. But there is another form of celebration planned, and its sponsors believe it says something about the national character: a three-day conference of some of the best minds from around the world on some of the biggest challenges facing humankind -- and especially the Jews -- in the coming decades. "The brain enriches the pocket, not the other way around," Shimon Peres, Israel's president and the patron of the conference, said in an interview. "We are a small land and a small people, but we can become a daring world laboratory, and that is our desire and plan." Nearly 700 guests are expected to take part next week in 35 discussion groups. They include statesmen like Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer, but also Sergey Brin of Google, Terry Semel of Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch, along with seven Jewish Nobel laureates and President George W. Bush.
JERUSALEM: The Jewish people are marking the 60th anniversary of their national rebirth, the founding of Israel, on Thursday with the usual military flyovers, flag buntings and televised reminiscences of aging pioneers.
But there is another form of celebration planned, and its sponsors believe it says something about the national character: a three-day conference of some of the best minds from around the world on some of the biggest challenges facing humankind -- and especially the Jews -- in the coming decades.
"The brain enriches the pocket, not the other way around," Shimon Peres, Israel's president and the patron of the conference, said in an interview. "We are a small land and a small people, but we can become a daring world laboratory, and that is our desire and plan."
Nearly 700 guests are expected to take part next week in 35 discussion groups. They include statesmen like Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer, but also Sergey Brin of Google, Terry Semel of Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch, along with seven Jewish Nobel laureates and President George W. Bush.
It was created from the ashes of the Holocaust, and grew into one of the most confident (and controversial) nations in history. Today, as Israel turns 60, its people's hopes for a peaceful future are as delicately poised as ever You get the clearest sense of it in Tel Aviv. Swinging in on the Ayalon highway past the 50-floor Azrieli towers, joining the entrepreneurs in their open-necked shirts and jeans tapping at their laptops at a café off the Rothschild Boulevard, lunching among the families and fashionistas at the beachside Manta Ray, or wandering through the elegantly renovated lanes of Neve Tzedek, where Jews in the 1880s first started spreading north along the coast from Jaffa, the still-mixed neighbouring Arab port town that secular, hedonistic, Tel Aviv grew out of, you quickly begin to see how much Israel has achieved in the last 60 years. And certainly there will be much for the country to celebrate on Independence Day today, the holiday that begins a week of high-profile anniversary events, reaching their climax with President George W Bush's traffic-stopping, TV network clogging, second visit of the year next Tuesday. It was here, on a Friday afternoon in mid-May in the main hall of the Tel Aviv Museum, that David Ben-Gurion, with the other signatories, to the accompaniment of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, put their names to the Declaration of Independence which marked the end of the British mandate and the beginning of the state of Israel. Since then, it has built a formidably strong economy, world-class science and medicine, some of the world's most advanced agriculture - making, in the words of the old Zionist mantra "the desert bloom" - and revived, to an astonishing extent admired even by the state's most strident critics, the Hebrew language. It absorbed with remarkable success one million Russian-speaking immigrants after the fall of the Soviet Union; it has a vibrant cultural scene, a vigorous and often highly critical press, and, with all its faults, a viable parliamentary democracy.
You get the clearest sense of it in Tel Aviv. Swinging in on the Ayalon highway past the 50-floor Azrieli towers, joining the entrepreneurs in their open-necked shirts and jeans tapping at their laptops at a café off the Rothschild Boulevard, lunching among the families and fashionistas at the beachside Manta Ray, or wandering through the elegantly renovated lanes of Neve Tzedek, where Jews in the 1880s first started spreading north along the coast from Jaffa, the still-mixed neighbouring Arab port town that secular, hedonistic, Tel Aviv grew out of, you quickly begin to see how much Israel has achieved in the last 60 years.
And certainly there will be much for the country to celebrate on Independence Day today, the holiday that begins a week of high-profile anniversary events, reaching their climax with President George W Bush's traffic-stopping, TV network clogging, second visit of the year next Tuesday. It was here, on a Friday afternoon in mid-May in the main hall of the Tel Aviv Museum, that David Ben-Gurion, with the other signatories, to the accompaniment of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, put their names to the Declaration of Independence which marked the end of the British mandate and the beginning of the state of Israel. Since then, it has built a formidably strong economy, world-class science and medicine, some of the world's most advanced agriculture - making, in the words of the old Zionist mantra "the desert bloom" - and revived, to an astonishing extent admired even by the state's most strident critics, the Hebrew language. It absorbed with remarkable success one million Russian-speaking immigrants after the fall of the Soviet Union; it has a vibrant cultural scene, a vigorous and often highly critical press, and, with all its faults, a viable parliamentary democracy.
