Only once in my life have I ever rushed to see a movie the day it premiered, and that was in November 1989  when my two friends and I raced out of our high school in Palo Alto, California to go see Back to the Future Part 2.

The excitement was high because we knew that in this film Marty McFly would be traveling forward in time and we were all anxious to see what that future held.

Naturally, we we were in awe of the opening scenes with all sorts of futuristic gadgets (like the hoverboard), but none of us gave much thought to the actual year Marty traveled to, 2015.

October 21, 2015 to be precise.

And now that we have reached that future date, and as I now live in Israel, I can’t help but be amazed at how far Israel has come.

So imagine, if you will, if Marty McFly had been a nice Jewish boy, Motti McFineberg, and instead of Hill Valley, he ended up in the Hebrew equivalent, a fictional Israeli town of “Givat Ha’emek”. What would he see?

Israel has of course changed drastically in the last 30 years since Marty hopped in Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine, but rather than looking back to the past, let’s go ‘back to the future’ and make some predictions.

Since looking 30 years into the future may be a bit too much to ask, I’ll just go 15 years ahead, from 2015 to 2030 (while steering clear of religion or politics):

By 2030 Israel, alive and kicking, will have achieved the following:

The Arts:

After being nominated so many times, but coming home empty handed every time, Israel will finally win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Sports:

Gal Fridman will always be the first Israeli to win a gold medal, but he won’t be the last. I predict we’ll have another Israeli olympic gold medalist in the next 15 years, maybe in gymnastics, maybe in track & field, but it will be from a new immigrant who may speak in broken Hebrew, but will proudly wave the Israeli flag on the podium.

Science/Medicine:

Predicting a cure for cancer or AIDS might be a tall order, but by 2030 I expect an Israeli to come up with a patent for curing baldness, acne, or some other less serious medical malady.

Transportation:

No, I’m not counting on Tel Aviv to get its act together on the new light rail system, but wouldn’t a bullet train from Tel Aviv to Eilat (via Beersheva) be nice? Forget costly air fare or an all night drive south, everyone will be hopping on the train for a southern vacation.

Technology:

There’s no telling what innovations are in store for Israel. Perhaps a new app taking the world by storm like Waze did? Or maybe another Israeli startup getting acquired for millions of dollars? I’m betting the big news coming out in the next decade will be a car battery that can be charged in under five minutes produced by Israeli startup StoreDot.

Weekends:

But perhaps the biggest change I predict in the next 15 years will be something that we all miss from the Diaspora - sundays off! It may take a while, but I predict it will happen. We may have to work half a day or more on Fridays, but we’ll finally get to enjoy weekends that include Sundays as a family and leisure day off, which will be especially beneficial for the Shabbat observant.

But there is one very important thing we should remember about the future. I will never forget the final scene in Back to the Future Part 3 (the final film in the trilogy) in which Marty McFly’s girlfriend shows Doc Brown in 1985 a fax message from the future (from 2015!) which had said that Marty was ‘fired’, but now had been erased.

Doc Brown explained it to her follows, “Your future hasn’t been written yet. It’s whatever you make it - so make it a good one!”

Make it a good one, Israel!

Yonatan Sredni has an MA in Creative Writing and works in PR at Blonde 2.0.