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David Rubinger bought his first Leica camera in 1946 for 200 cigarettes and a can of coffee. For a poor Jewish soldier in the British army, that was a fortune. But today, Israel is certainly the richer for it: Rubinger has focused his compassionate eye on the human dramas and towering personalities that have shaped Israel's 60 years since independence. His photos, many of them shot on assignment for TIME, do not just record Israel's history; they capture the myriad facets of Jewish identity.

Rubinger, now aged 83, is on his seventh Leica and still snapping away. Apart from a period during the war of independence in 1948, when he put aside his camera for a gun, he has photographed Israel's tumultuous ups and downs; its wars and (all too brief) stretches of peace; its immigrants, soldiers and settlers.

Sitting in his den on a leafy Jerusalem lane, Rubinger displays a collection of his most memorable images. There is his iconic shot of three grimy but awestruck Israeli soldiers staring in wonder at the Western Wall, Judaism's most sacred place, which they have just liberated. "There was such a euphoria of survival after the war," he recalls. "But it brought on the first seeds of messianism. Israelis started to say 'Who are we to give away this [captured] land, this gift of God?' " That was the turning point, says Rubinger. "Religious extremists on both sides think that God is with them."

On his computer screen, Rubinger clicks back to earlier photos from Israel's painful birth: a joyous swarm of men waving an Israeli flag on top of a British armored vehicle after the U.N. has announced its decision to set up a Jewish state; a fiercely beautiful Israeli woman soldier throwing a grenade; poor Moroccan migrants as they glimpse Israel from a ship's deck; a gaunt refugee bringing home live chickens for the Sabbath meal; David Ben-Gurion looking like a defiant Moses. Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon — Rubinger photographed them all in unguarded moments, stripped of the trappings of high office. He catches Meir worrying about a pot on the stove; Menachem Begin on an airplane, bending over to help his wife put on her shoe; the great warrior Dayan gazing at his formidable father Shmuel with a mixture of reverence and rebellion.

In many ways, Rubinger's history parallels that of Israel. Born in 1924 in Vienna, he became a Zionist socialist and migrated to Palestine, escaping the Holocaust, which consumed his mother and many relatives. After the war for independence — or as Palestinians call it, al naqba, the disaster — Rubinger was too much of a maverick to be anything but a photojournalist. His first internationally published shots were of a small diplomatic incident: a patient in a Catholic hospital on the Green Line had dropped her false teeth out the window onto the Jordanian side, and after much negotiation, the nuns were allowed to cross over and search for them. Rubinger's shot is of a nun triumphantly holding up the lost dentures. His epic pictures came later, and Rubinger's puckish charm, humor and uncanny instinct for being in the right place when news happens were nearly as instrumental to his success as his artistic eye.

Looking back, Rubinger sees a worrying shift in Israeli thinking. He recalls a Hebrew poet writing that to be normal, a Jewish state needed "thieves and whores" like everywhere else. "Well, we have our thieves and whores," says Rubinger, "but our politicians have made us fearful. They brought back the ghetto mentality, the idea that everybody's trying to kill us. Ben-Gurion and the other founders wanted to get away from that. They wanted Israelis to be normal." The beauty of Rubinger's photos is that by revealing Israel's extraordinary days, its glory and despair, its arrogance and insecurity, he has unveiled the Jewish nation's deepest yearning: to be accepted like any other country.

• TIM MCGIRK
• Photojournalist David Rubinger's photos show the rich history of a nation driven by hope and faith, marked by war, and still struggling fitfully toward a normal existence