Israel en 1957 : Un reportaje

In 1957, Pla traveled to Israel; he recounted his experience in a series of articles that appeared in the magazine Destino between June and September of that year. In 1958, these articles were compiled into the book Israel in the Present Day, published in Buenos Aires. It is this book that we now, almost seven decades later, are recovering in its original form, albeit with a new title that is, today, much more accurate. When Pla was there, the Second World War and the horror of the Holocaust were still very recent; the State of Israel was barely ten years old. But in that very brief time, the economic and political achievements had been enormous, accompanied by such striking innovations as the communal agriculture of the kibbutzim. Pla captured this in one of his great journalistic reports. Of course, the country that Pla knew no longer exists. From a fledgling state, Israel has become a first-rate military power. But there are also many things that have not changed, and the portrait that the Empordà writer drew of the Jewish people and their characteristics, of the history of Zionism and of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict still remains fully valid and maintains all its interest.