2006-06-08-israel-portugal

By Ira Sharkansky

JERUSALEM —I have had a soft spot for Portugal since doing my undergraduate thesis on "The Portuguese of Fall River." Twenty-five years ago Varda and I traveled from one small town to another in the center of the country, enjoying the fish, the wine, the flowers, and the calmness of a country without stress, or without the stresses apparent to tourists.

We went again, this time to the northern part of the country. We walked, ate and drank for three days in Porto, before taking a car and doing another circuit of small towns. It was a different country than the one we remembered. The urban metro and intercity trains are the best Europe can offer, which means far ahead of the filth of rattling equivalents in Boston and New York. True, they fall short of those in Seoul, where metro stations have rest rooms as clean as those of Swiss hotels, and the trains play Vivaldi. Superhighways out of Porto are as well engineered and maintained as any I have seen; the posted signs indicating 120 seem more to be suggested averages than upper limits.

The experience was depressing as well as fascinating. Portugal is supposed to be the poorest country in Western Europe. The World Bank indicates a per capita income of $14,220. Israel's is $17,360, and is not been able to match Portugal's urban or interurban transportation network. Is this the price we pay for the excitement of national conflict, a world class military, and dealing with boycotts voted by British academics? Israel spends more than four times what Portugal does for its military as a percentage of the national economy. A few years without that burden would support a European class metro system reaching out from Tel Aviv to Haifa, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, and Ashkelon. It might even be put underground to deal with objections from environmentalists that have so far kept a fast rail line being built to Jerusalem.

Alas, there is another Portugal, which we encountered as soon as we left the superhighways. The small towns and villages are still there. Farmers tend their fields with hand tools, and village folk drink wine served from large bottles enclosed in wicker. The isolated places we saw on our cross-country walks had some new construction, but also quite a few buildings with "for sale" signs, and some falling-down without signs, presumably abandoned when people died, or had left for jobs in the cities. We had to find a tiny village on the outskirts of a small village to locate a workshop where the lone craftsperson was producing tiles painted with scenes and figures in blue, which had been available in lots of shops during our last visit. Why are these traditional crafts less available now? According to the artist we met, that kind of handwork is no longer attractive. People owe too much money to the banks, and they cannot make enough from painting tiles.

Israel is ahead of Portugal on a number of indicators important to moderns. The World Bank reports that high technology is twice as prominent as a percentage of exports and there is twice the incidence of people who use the internet. Israelis also have two years longer to enjoy their lives than Portuguese have to enjoy theirs.

Portuguese wine is as good as any I have had, especially when judged on a pleasure to price ratio. I am not aware of any world class research being done in Portuguese universities. The country is also behind Israel in the technology involve in pilotless military planes, and Warren Buffet has not made any major investments there. It was blessed by ridding itself of dictatorship and ugly spats with large colonies in the 1970s. Membership in the European Union may help the country pay for its fancy infrastructure. People that hate the Portuguese are too far away for lots of suicide bombers concerned about having been conquered to do their thing in Portuguese cities. Being poor is not all that great, but it does limit the numbers of Third World migrants wanting to share the national goodies. Today's Ha'aretz notes that Elie Wiesel is urging Israel to take refugees from Sudan. Some are already coming over the border with Egypt, along with prostitutes from the Ukraine and Moldavia. Israel can send the ladies back to their homelands, but not the Sudanese, due to a lack of diplomatic relations with that Moslem paradise. So we may get some points on Wiesel's index of humanity, probably reduced by keeping the Sudanese in confinement.

One does not have to ponder these issues when drinking Portuguese wine in a village cafe.

Sharkansky is an emeritus member of the political science department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem