No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination and the Making of Modern Israel

by Shimon Peres

immigration. In three years we had doubled the population from six hundred thousand to 1.2 million, but we hadn’t yet built a state that could sustain it. The new arrivals were forced to subsist in immigrant camps that were little more than tent cities. Food was provided by the government in communal dining halls, but it was strictly rationed. In some new immigrant camps, there was only one toilet for as many as fifty people. The conditions were harsh and unsanitary by any measure, and yet by 1952 more than 220,000 people were forced to live this way. Those who had settled in Israel early also faced intense rationing, instructed by the government about how much food they could purchase—even how many pairs of shoes they could own. Poverty was the central condition of our young state, a national emergency worthy of our urgent attention. Given all this, what other response could I expect from my fellow Israelis except skepticism? I knew there would be those who dismissed the idea without a thought, considering it a preposterous notion from an idealistic young man. And yet I also knew that I was right, and that in being right, I should be willing to stand alone, that the doubts of those without imagination were no reason to abandon an important idea. And so I made the decision to pursue the building of an aviation industry in a country without enough food for its people.