By their sheer numbers, immigrants have made Israel viable as a Jewish state. Assuming a rather vigorous 2% annual rate of natural increase since 1948, the country's Jewish population, if not augmented by immigration, would have numbered about 1,900,000 in 1997 -- a figure actually attained in 1961. Thus, about one-third of native-born Israeli Jews can also trace their roots to post-independence immigrants.

On the quality side, immigration has always represented an "import of development." Israel's world-class ratio of university educated citizens masks a higher education culture that admits candidates parsimoniously; without the immigrants, the country might have a schooling demography reminiscent of the Third World. Even today, more degrees are held by the newly landed than are awarded in Israel. And although some veterans regard immigration as a burden on the job market and the state generally, the history of GDP growth suggests the opposite.

The 1990s immigration, still in progress, set in motion a social transformation that still has a long way to go before it ebbs. It has destroyed the Israeli notion that single-parent families are a negligible minority of misfits by adding an estimated 30,000 such households. It has enhanced consciousness of destitute elderly by delivering many seniors without a family supplied safety net. It has augmented the population of Holocaust survivors and introduced a new element to Israelis' understanding of that period: the realization that, while the Nazi murder machine operated, a war was being fought for the survival of the USSR, in which many of the Red Army soldiers were Jewish. It has brought in a large non-Jewish population, creating a new reality with which the "veterans" are only just beginning to grapple.

More broadly, whereas the 1950s aliyah gave Israel the critical mass to survive, the 1990s aliyah has given it the critical mass to normalize. By augmenting the military induction pool, it has enabled large cutbacks in non-immigrants' reserve duty obligations and made selective service a possibility, not a Quixotic dream, for the future. It has given Israel the world's highest ratio of physicians to population. It has enriched cultural life, flooding the country with performing artists. It has fleshed out the periphery, although not as extensively as manipulative planners would have liked. And despite the segregationist trends noted above, most immigrants in the current wave have embraced the Jewish-Zionist ethos of aliyah, rejecting a construction of "we" and "they" and embracing one of "we" and "we."