JERUSALEM — Is Israel a success as it turns 70? As Israelis commemorate the milestone this week, satisfaction and a grim disquiet share the stage.

It has a standard of living that rivals Western Europe, without the natural resources. It can boast of scientific achievements and military and technological clout beyond its modest size. It controls most of biblical Israel, and despite widespread criticism of its policies toward the Palestinians, it has cultivated good diplomatic ties with most of the world.

But it’s also a country that is weary from decades of conflict with the Palestinians. It is riven by religious, ethnic and economic divisions. It is still seeking recognition in a region that has not fully come to terms with the presence of a Jewish state.

Its founding declaration offers it as a “light unto the nations,” but it still is regularly accused of war crimes against Palestinians, millions of whom it has controlled for decades without the right to vote.

The grand peace hopes of the 1990s have mostly evaporated. Israel still feels endangered, with well-armed adversaries calling for its destruction and no permanent borders. Israelis are fretting over the possibility of war with archenemy Iran, which has a military presence in neighboring Syria.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite winning three elections since 2009, is reviled by many and faces corruption scandals.

A look at Israel at 70:

WEALTH AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

Fueled by a vibrant high-tech sector, Israel’s per capita GDP of almost $40,000 ranks with Italy and South Korea, and is within reach of Britain and France.

But it also suffers from one of the highest levels of inequality in the developed world, and poverty is especially prevalent among its Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

These two sectors, at nearly a third of the population and growing, risk dragging down the rest of the economy.

PUNCHING ABOVE ITS WEIGHT

For a country of just under 9 million, Israel has enjoyed surprising success. It counts eight living Nobel winners among its citizens and has helped give the world instant messaging, Intel chips and smart, autonomous vehicles. High-tech units in the military have made Israel a global cybersecurity powerhouse.

It is in a small club of nations to have launched a satellite, and is widely believed to be among an even smaller group with nuclear weapons, although the government won’t confirm it. Israel has one of the world’s strongest air forces.

It has won European basketball championships and song contests, and hit shows like “Homeland,” ‘’In Treatment” and “Fauda” are Israeli creations. Last year’s blockbuster “Wonder Woman” — the highest-grossing live-action movie directed by a woman — starred Israeli actress Gal Gadot.

FORGING A NATIONAL IDENTITY

Despite decades of development, Israel is still working at forging a national identity.

Over a century ago, Zionists in Europe saw the Jews as a nation, not just a religion. Persecution in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, sent European Jews pouring into the Holy Land.

Soon after Israel’s establishment in 1948, they were joined by immigrants from countries like Morocco, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.

These Middle Eastern, or Mizrahi, Jews had little in common with their European counterparts. They were poorer, more religious and often targets of discrimination. Three generations of integration and intermarriage have blurred the distinctions, but gaps remain.

Arrivals from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia have made Israel even more diverse, yet the different communities still often keep to themselves.

The entire arrangement can seem an affront to the founding idea of the Jews as a nation — yet it is also a rare feat that all of these have been forged into a Hebrew-speaking population with considerable national pride.

Still, antipathy exists along cultural lines: Many Europeans, still said to account for perhaps half the Jews in Israel, cannot stand the popular Arabic-style “Mizrahi music” that in earlier days was suppressed; Moroccan-descended Culture Minister Miri Regev once boasted she does not read Chekhov.

Meanwhile, nationalist lawmakers push legislation that would define Israel as the Jewish nation-state. These initiatives have faltered so far amid criticism that they would discriminate against the Arab minority of about one in five citizens.

DISAGREEMENTS OVER JUDAISM

After 70 years, the place of Judaism in the Jewish state is unclear.

Most Israelis are either secular or mildly religious. Yet the devout ultra-Orthodox, about 10 percent of the population, wield disproportionate influence because right-wing coalitions never have been able to muster a majority without them.

They have used their political power to shut down much of the country on Saturdays, the Jewish day of rest; obtain exemptions from compulsory military service; and gain a monopoly overseeing rituals like weddings and funerals. Their strict rules have upset the secular majority, but attempts at change frequently result in violent protests.

The issue of religion has also affected relations with U.S. Jews — the largest Jewish community outside Israel and a key base of support. Israel’s Orthodox establishment repeatedly has sought to prevent inroads made by the liberal streams of Judaism popular in the U.S. Last year, it blocked plans to allow egalitarian prayer at Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

Such moves have created a sense that liberal American Jews are unwelcome. They also have been disenchanted by Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. American Jews tend to be liberal and support the Democratic Party, while Netanyahu boasts close ties with President Donald Trump.

RELATIONS WITH ARAB WORLD

After Israel declared independence, its Arab neighbors attacked it. And even after the watershed 1967 Mideast war, in which Israel captured parts of Syria, Jordan and Egypt, the Arab world refused to engage.

That began to change with the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt, Israel’s first with an Arab country. Jordan followed in 1994, after Israel reached an interim peace deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Meanwhile, Netanyahu strengthened ties with countries like India, China and Russia.

He often boasts of covert ties with moderate Arab countries — presumably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations that share Israel’s concerns about Iran. Saudi Arabia now allows flights between Israel and India to use its airspace. But without resolution of the Palestinian issue, formal relations remain elusive.

PALESTINIAN ENTANGLEMENT

The euphoria that accompanied the interim peace accords of the mid-1990s was short-lived.

The sides established an autonomous “Palestinian Authority” with limited powers on islands of territory but were never able to complete a final deal, due to deep disagreements and repeated violence that killed thousands. Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank are poor; its relations with Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers, who seized the territory from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, are hostile.

Israel has faced heavy criticism and war crimes allegations for high civilian casualties in Gaza — most recently with the deaths of over two dozen Palestinians in border protests. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars. Hamas, which is committed to Israel’s destruction, has repeatedly fired rockets at Israel, with Israel accusing its leaders of using civilians as cover for attacks.

Despite the autonomy arrangement, Israel has effective control in the West Bank over 2.5 million Palestinians who are left without voting rights, while it has expanded Jewish settlements in the same territory. That has drawn international condemnation and comparisons to apartheid in South Africa.

For years, it seemed that Israel would agree to a Palestinian state next door in order to preserve its status as a democracy with a Jewish majority. But after failed talks, Israel’s current hard-line government opposes the very idea of negotiations. Opponents consider this a suicidal path.

If things continue this way, a fateful decision awaits: Give Palestinians citizenship in a single state, and end Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority country; or maintain a two-tiered system, with a disenfranchised Palestinian population that could no longer credibly claim to be a democracy.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NEW YORK — Starbucks, moving swiftly to confront a racially charged uproar over the arrest of two black men at one of its stores in Philadelphia, plans to close more than 8,000 U.S. stores for several hours next month to conduct racial-bias training for nearly 175,000 workers.

The announcement Tuesday comes after the arrests sparked protests and calls for a boycott on social media. A video shows police talking with two black men seated at a table. After a few minutes, officers handcuff the men and lead them outside as other customers say they weren’t doing anything wrong. Philadelphia-area media said the two were waiting for a friend.

Philadelphia police released a recording of the call from the Starbucks employee that led to the arrests. In the recording, a woman is heard saying, “Hi, I have two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave.” She gives the address of the Starbucks store, and the entire call lasts less than 30 seconds. In the communications between police and dispatch that were also released, someone refers to “a group of males inside causing a disturbance,” and additional officers are sent.

Starbucks, which was once ridiculed for urging its employees to write “Race Together” on coffee cups to start a national conversation on race relations, has found itself through the looking glass: under fire for its treatment of black people.

The company reacted from a high level: Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson called the arrests “reprehensible” and said he wanted to apologize to the two men face-to-face. The company and a lawyer for the two men said they did meet, and Johnson delivered the apology. Starbucks also said the employee who called police no longer works at the store, but declined to give details.

Johnson also promised to revamp store management training to include “unconscious-bias” education. Starbucks said its U.S. company-owned stores and corporate offices will be closed on the afternoon of May 29 for the training, which will eventually be incorporated into the instruction process for all newly hired employees.

The episode highlights the risks large corporations run when they tie their brands so closely to social messaging. In 2015, then-CEO Howard Schultz shrugged off the “Race Together” fiasco as a well-intentioned mistake and pressed on with his public efforts to engage in the debate over race in America. Johnson was scrambling to keep the Philadelphia incident from shattering the message Schultz was going for: Starbucks is a corporation that stands for something beyond profit.

“The more your brand is trying to connect emotionally to people, the more hurt people feel when these kinds of things happen,” said Jacinta Gauda, the head of the Gauda Group, a New York strategic communications firm affiliated with the Grayling network. “They are breaking a promise. That’s what makes it hurt deeper.”

Beyond racial relations, Starbucks has staked much of its brand on its dual promise of providing good customer service and treating its employees well, said John Gordon, a restaurant industry analyst with Pacific Management Consulting Group.

But in a multinational company with more than 28,000 stores worldwide, there has “to be a situation every day where some human being handles things wrong,” Gordon said. “Even with a huge operations manual that lays out what to say and what to do, you can’t cover everything.”

Gordon called the decision to hold the May 29 training sessions “the most practical way to get word out to all employees, the same way at one time.”

Starbucks has set its own high bar.

Last month, the company claimed it had achieved 100 percent pay equity across gender and race for all its U.S. employees and committed to doing the same for its overseas operations, an initiative publicly backed by equality activist Billie Jean King. The company also touts the diversity of its workforce, saying minorities comprise more than 40 percent of its employees in the U.S.

In 2016, Starbucks promised to invest in 15 “underserved” communities across the country, trying to counter an image of a company catering to a mostly white clientele. One of those stores opened in Ferguson, Missouri, the scene of 2014 protests following the police shooting of Michael Brown, one of several such killings that moved Schultz to launch the Race Together campaign.

Gauda, who has developed workplace inclusion strategies for corporate clients, called the bias training initiative “the right thing to do.”

“It’s a tremendous statement that they are making,” she said. “I think that the fact that they are making the whole company go through this is a recognition of how important this training is.”

Starbucks said the curriculum for the training would be developed with input from several experts, including Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The company said the educational materials would eventually be shared with its licensed stores. In addition to the company-owned stores, Starbucks had as of January about 5,700 licensed stores in the United States, such as the ones inside Target and Barnes Noble stores.

Gauda and other corporate communications experts said they were impressed with Johnson’s hands-on approach to the crisis.

“I definitely applaud that. Most people won’t jump on the bomb,” said M.J. McCallum, vice president and creative director of Muse Communications, an advertising and communications agency with an African-American focus.

“As far as the company’s initiative to rectify this situation by closing all stores for racial bias education training, it’s a positive start,” McCallum said. “It may also inspire other companies to do the same.”

“But the question is, how can Starbucks have this program and not have it be viewed as “Training people on how to deal with black people?”

He said the training should be aimed broadly to “make sure that you are respectful to everyone’s culture. First, just be good people.”

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.