Image via Wikipedia//Kibbutz guard, 1936"In our conversation in 1961 Pandit Nehru had asked me how Israel, with a population two hundred times smaller than that of India, managed to find so many suitable heads of mission to man such a variety of posts. (...)
He was astonished to learn that quite a few of Israel's ambassadors had graduated from kibbutzim rather than from professional schools for diplomats. The man from behind the plough who was familiar with the intricacies of modern rural economy, who understood how to get along with his Arab neighbours and to negotiate with hard-headed bankers and thick-skinned bureaucrats, who had innate intelligence and human culture, was at least as good ambassadorial timber as the professional diplomat reared in the precincts of academic exclusivity. Some of our best people had a background of both. They were deeply immersed in the life of the country, had toiled and fought for it, grown up and gained experience in its struggle for independence, were educated in the ways of other nations and imbued with the knowledge and sense of the history of their own people. Most of them had swiftly acquired their professional polish, others had remained rough diamonds, attractive and valuable in their own way".
Gideon Rafael, Destination Peace. Three Decades of Israeli Foreign Policy. A Personal Memoir, p. 376
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