What Ben Gurion dreamed

It is said that David Ben-Gurion said at the beginning of the state of Israel:

'Within the State the differences between various kinds of Jews will be obliterated in the course of time, the communities and tribes will sooner or later fuse into one national and cultural unity. Common education, the Hebrew language, universal service in the Israel Defense Forces, the establishment of a common minimum standard of living, the entry of workers from various countries and communities into a single labour federation, mixed marriages between the various tribes, common political action in non-communal parties, and so on, will produce a new type of Jew with the favourable qualities and characteristics of all the tribes of Israel'. 

quoted in J. Isaac, 'Israel: A New Melting Pot?' in W.D.Borrie, ed. Cultural Integration of Immigrants (Paris: UNESCO, 1959) p. 266

Well, the man plans and G-d laugh. I will not start right now to write an academic article about identity in the state of Israel, but what can I say is that, for sure, David Ben-Gurion's assumption did not turn into reality. And, in a way, it is better that we have nowadays a diversity of cultures, traditions, accents and people that all of them are part of the same country: the state of Israel. More than the 'goldene medina', Eretz Yisrael is a laboratory for all cultures and traditions from the world: from the serious yekke to the Shanghai yidden, to the delicious food served by Iraqi families to the messy Russian lifestyles. How can you be not proud that each day you can discover something new about yourself? You won't learn it in school or at a PhD program: you go on the street of Jerusalem and try to find a good restaurant to eat. Or in the Army, where you need to accommodate different lifestyles, from the secular to the religious. Even the voting patterns are following the ethnic lines and most likely it will continue to be so for a long time from now. Nothing to be ashamed, nothing that we would need to change. It can get complicated sometimes and the mixed marriages are not encouraged, at least not in the traditional families and sometimes 'we' vs. 'them' is not a pleasant episode of our everyday lives. 

But, in any case, Ben Gurion was not right, and not all the dreams, including the political ones, should be true.