“A people of chess-players will become a nation of footballers.” That prognosis, uttered shortly after the birth of Israel, is attributed to the late Arthur Koestler, a fervent devotee of the Zionist enterprise who nevertheless offered a somewhat wry view of the impact newfound statehood would exert on the Jewish people.

Ostensibly, the trade-off was highly favorable. Jews of Israel traded in their centuries-old status as tolerated/despised minority; shedding the role of eternal vagrants chased from one temporary home to the next. In return, they acquired the long-coveted trappings of nationhood: flag, anthem, government, army, UN membership, and all other accessories of an internationally recognized entity.

It was a proud time, a miraculous moment of almost messianic elation. That dream incarnate is exemplified for me by an item of family memorabilia: my staunchly Zionist father, on a first visit to the new state, refused to move from the pier where he was feasting his eyes on the splendid sight of a Jewish policeman in national uniform.

Heightened by recent memories of the worst calamity of Jewish history, that sense of wonder persisted into Israel’s early years. Enormous challenges, military, economic and social, invoked mighty achievements. There were worries and concerns, but pride persisted. Each annual Independence Day, fathers hoisted their children aloft to see and remember the wonder of the marching soldiers, the sea of blue-and-white flags fluttering from every window.

But beyond the euphoria, the dream showed frayed edges. There was the minor matter of demography. The state was Jewish, but not so all its citizens. A significant minority of Palestinian Arabs, clinging on despite the mass expulsions of 1948, were shunted onto the margins. Mocking the boast that Israel’s Jews, having so recently emerged from the humiliations of minority status, would show the world how a minority should be treated, successive Israeli governments subjected their Arab citizens to two decades of military administration that denied them their most basic rights.

Bias was not confined to Arabs. Zionist dreams of national rebirth generated a “melting pot” creed to forge disparate ethnic groups into a single uniform entity. Lingering “Diaspora” traits were frowned upon. Picking up on the trend, children derided parents who spoke anything but Hebrew, or heard music not of the standard Israeli strain. Enforced assimilation decimated traditional cultures as a rich Diaspora heritage—Yiddish, Ladino, Baghdadi Jewish-Arabic—was offered up on the altar of a triumphantly resuscitated Hebrew. Immigrants from Arabic-speaking lands were put on notice that their culture and traditions were unworthy. The ideal of the blond, blue-eyed Sabra, brandished before swarthy newcomers from Iraq or Morocco, signaled that they did not really “belong.” Marginalization set off successive eruptions of discontent; some barriers have dissolved over the years, yet ethnic antagonisms survive.

But transcending blatant social and cultural ills, probably the most fundamental exchange represented by transition from “Jew” to “Israeli” was a forfeit of long-cultivated values in favor of a newly assertive national character. “Inborn national traits” are racist claptrap, but Jewish history and tradition had fostered a certain shared ethos, which now underwent swift—and not always beneficial—change.

Supplanting “Diaspora” humility, the self-confidence of nationhood produced a forceful collective personality deferring to no one—as is made glaringly clear to anyone who ventures to drive on Israel’s highways. The social solidarity that once characterized Jewish communities is in scant evidence in a land where 1.6 million citizens live below the official poverty line, their numbers rising steadily and the state doing too little to alleviate their lot.

Another traditional “Jewish” trait is empathy, the flair—vital to any minority—to see matters from the other’s viewpoint and know what moves him, lest he prove to be a mortal threat. On a less life-preserving level, it is a knack cherished by chess-players, perhaps explaining why Jews excelled in a game which demands an ability to foresee an adversary’s moves. But as Koestler foresaw, chess lost its primacy to football, whose main requisite is brawn, not mental outreach.

The decline of empathy engendered a mindless indifference towards others, as exemplified in the early seventies in the failure to sense the resentment among Egyptians and Syrians over having parts of their land occupied since 1967. Thus, Israel’s elite was taken utterly by surprise when those two countries unleashed the 1973 Yom Kippur offensive—with appalling losses.

At home, many Israeli Jews are puzzled when their Arab fellow-citizens object to the definition of Israel as a “Jewish state” —seemingly oblivious that their own co-religionists in other lands stubbornly resist majority attempts to apply comparable denominational designations (“Christian America”).

A collective amnesia about recent Jewish history surfaced when African refugees began sneaking across Israel’s borders in frantic flight from genocidal conflict. Many Israelis whose own parents fled Nazi persecution by using every unlawful trick in the book, now declare outrage over the “illegal” conduct of the Darfur refugees, urging the security agencies to use lethal force to keep them out!

Most recently, Israel’s military and political leaders seemed utterly nonplussed when the Palestinians of Gaza, beleaguered and desperate, responded to the Israeli siege by breaking out across the Egyptian border to the south. In what can only be defined as a demise of empathy, it had evidently never occurred to Israel’s much-vaunted strategists and “Arab experts” that Gazans would respond in such a manner.

But then, how could they possibly have foreseen it? They are, after all, footballers.