They'd like to celebrate. They really would. Modern Israel turns 50 this coming week, and the very fact that it is reaching the milestone is a remarkable achievement. A nation founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, by a people that had lost six million of its souls, in a region determined to resist its presence, has somehow stuttered its way to the half-century mark, surviving at least one major war each decade and still managing to attract almost 40 per cent of the world's Jews to its towns and villages.
Life expectancy is well into the 70s, the economy is relatively robust, the education and health systems function fairly competently, and there is no immediate prospect of enemy invasion. No wonder Jews around the world have been lighting anniversary candles, holding folklore and dance festivals, organising competitions and exhibitions and star-studded salutes.
And yet, in Israel itself, Independence Day fever is, if anything, more muted than in past years. It is as though the significance of the jubilee landmark has induced a kind of national stocktaking, and the conclusions are some way short of ideal. That the logistics of organising the celebration have been tortured is well-known: the disputes over which events would be appropriate, the budgetary complications, the resignations. But those difficulties have now come to symbolise the jubilee itself, to mark it as an occasion less of unity and unbridled joy, more of debate and dissent over what has been achieved and how Israel should seek to shape itself over the coming 50 years.
The fact that Israelis have not been prepared to try to paper over the cracks, disguise the divisions, and allow themselves a reality-suspending 50th-year rave-up might be considered evidence that here is a rapidly maturing society, determined to get to grips with its flaws. Equally, though, it might represent proof that the gulfs are too wide to be concealed, even for the briefest anniversary fling. Certainly, the conflicts and contradictions are unmistakable, and they affect almost every aspect of how Israelis are assessing their brief modern history, and contemplating the future.
Foremost, of course, is the debate over Israel's physical existence, the argument over whether the era of the existential threat has been safely negotiated and, if it hasn't, how best to keep that threat at bay.
It has been 25 years - another, less-noted anniversary - since Israel faced a real prospect of being wiped out, following the surprise Arab attack on the Day of Atonement in 1973. And if the immediate lesson of that conflict has probably been learned - that politicians should not become so arrogant as to disregard the warnings of their military intelligence advisers - no long-term consensus has been reached.
The two prime, competing conceptions have their roots in the Holocaust experience. Some Israeli leaders, notably the former hardline Likud prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, emerged bitterly from the horrors of the second World War convinced that the Jews, once established in their homeland, must maximise their territorial holdings, even at the price of rejecting peace overtures from neighbouring Arab states, even at the price of maintaining a morally-debasing occupation over millions of Palestinians who happen to cherish the same patch of land. Other major figures, such as the moderate ex-premier Shimon Peres, believe that Israel must strive to maintain a moral regime, and be prepared to relinquish captured territory in return for peaceful accommodation within the Middle East.
Common to both stances is the desire to guarantee the survival and security of Israel, and thus to ensure that the Jewish people are never again vulnerable to murderous anti-Semitism. In the Israel of 1992 to 1995, when Peres was foreign minister under Yitzhak Rabin, the process of trading land for peace yielded a warm relationship with Jordan, a fragile partnership with the Palestinians, and signs of a thaw with Lebanon and Syria. In today's Israel, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it is the Shamir-esque strategy that dominates, and that has seen Israel's fragile Arab ties strained almost to breaking point by a disinclination to give up territory captured in the 1967 war in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
With hindsight, it is no surprise that Rabin, assassinated at the height of the peace process in November 1995, was gunned down by an Orthodox Israeli. For if Israel was, just a few years ago, roughly divided down the middle on the dilemma of how to ensure its physical survival - through trading captured land or retaining it - the issue has been decided, for now, by the country's Orthodox minority, which bolsters the Shamir mindset with the uncompromising claim that East Jerusalem and the West Bank constitute part of Greater Israel, the land bequeathed by the Lord to his chosen people.
So finely balanced was the Israeli electorate, and so narrow-minded the Orthodox vision, that Netanyahu - younger, slicker and more charismatic, but no less hardline than Shamir - won the election here a mere six months after Rabin was killed.
So inexorable is the trend nowadays towards Orthodoxy and the hardline, that if Netanyahu is defeated in the next elections, whenever they come, it will almost certainly be as a consequence of some personal failure, or by another candidate from the right, rather than through the triumph of moderation.
THE trend towards Orthodox nationalism, a trend maintained despite the influx of close to a million mainly secular immigrants from the former Soviet Union over the past decade, has profound implications for internal Israeli society as well.
Here, too, the divide is clear and potentially cataclysmic.
While a goodly proportion of Israelis are trying to shape a liberal, pluralistic country, in which people of all faiths and preferences can comfortably express themselves, the growing Orthodox constituency is seeking to impose a lifestyle governed by a narrow interpretation of "Halacha", Jewish religious law, which bars everything from intermarriage, to the eating of non-kosher meat, to driving on the sabbath.
Because the Orthodox parties constitute a crucial component in Netanyahu's coalition, many battles are being won by the religious coercers - streets are being closed on the sabbath in Jerusalem, pork is being barred for import, Conservative and Reform Jews are being made to feel inferior, "unkosher".
Jerusalem is rapidly turning into a city of Arabs (in the East) and Orthodox Jews (in the West), with secular Israelis fleeing towards Tel Aviv. Entire neighbourhoods in the capital are now sabbath no-go areas. An ultra-Orthodox mayor is a very real possibility within a few years.
While the secular Israel represented by Tel Aviv prides itself in its growing Americanisation, with its chic shopping malls, ubiquitous MacDonalds outlets, and cable TV addiction, the Orthodox Israel symbolised by Jerusalem laments the fading of "Jewish" values and resolves to enclose itself still more deeply in the certainties of the Torah's teachings. The two worlds are diverging, polarising. Well-meaning attempts to bridge the gap are few and far between.
Should the pluralistic mindset ultimately prevail, Orthodox Israelis would probably have little to fear, beyond pressure for their youth to give up their Torah study for just a few months' military service. But if the Orthodox approach conquers, secular Israelis will do their best to flee, abandoning the country to the rabbis and to ancient traditions, with no-one to fight the wars that the stubborn retention of "God's land" would inevitably trigger.
Perhaps the saddest irony about Israel's 50th anniversary misgivings lies in the sense that, for all the contradictions and divisions, the possibilities for unity and consensus are within reach but are simply not being grasped.
Most Israelis, and most of their political representatives, are prepared to see the Palestinians gain statehood in much of the West Bank and Gaza, and some representation in Jerusalem, provided that new state is limited in its military development and thus cannot conceivably seek to destroy Israel. Similarly, most Israelis, and their political leaders, vigorously oppose religious coercion.
And yet, because the rivalries among mainstream politicians -
among the centrists of the opposing Likud and Labour parties - are so deep and vicious, it is the strident champions of the West Bank Jewish settlers, and the uncompromising Orthodox rabbi-legislators, who are setting the national agenda.
The longer these extremists are allowed to hold sway, the deeper Israel will sink into debilitating Orthodox nationalism. And the fear must be, as Israel turns 50, that if the killing of a prime minister by a religious zealot failed to galvanise a process of re-evaluation and change, nothing else is likely to.