Israel at 60: Has the promise been fulfilled?

When my son was born shortly after the Gulf War, said David Horovitz in The Jerusalem Post, our midwife greeted his arrival “with the Eeyore-esque summation, ‘Another soldier.’” It is with similarly mixed emotions that Israel this month celebrates its 60th anniversary. By most standards, the country is a roaring success, said Benny Morris in the Los Angeles Times. Forged from the slaughter of the Holocaust, Israel stands as a refuge for world Jewry and a democratic bastion in a region awash with dismal dictatorships. Its “economic, scientific, and cultural” achievements belie its minuscule size and population. Yet enemies are still bent on its destruction, whether with suicide bombers or nuclear weapons. Three out of four Israelis expect to fight another Arab war within five years. “Israel at 60 is a sad place because its Jews have begun to lose hope—hope that the conflict with the surrounding Muslim Arab world will ever end.”

It won’t, said Yousef Munayyer in The Boston Globe, until Israel pays its debt to the Palestinians. The Jewish homeland was created by uprooting more than 700,000 Arabs who were living in Palestine before the first Arab-Israeli war, in 1948. Those people were barred from returning, and their homes were seized or razed. Palestinians now living under Israel’s oppressive occupation lead grim lives defined by “borders, settlements, and roadblocks.” This denial of my people’s basic human rights cannot fester indefinitely, said Daoud Kuttab in The Washington Post. It’s no longer practical or even desirable for Israel to give Palestinians “the right of return,” but it must take “responsibility for this decades-long tragedy” by ceding the West Bank to Palestinians, returning the Golan to Syria, and withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders.

To continue to survive as a Jewish state, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Israel clearly has to do something. The country’s biggest threat now comes from within, in the form of a rapidly growing Palestinian population. Unless the West Bank and Gaza become part of a new Palestinian nation, “the number of Palestinian Arabs under Israeli control will probably outnumber Jews within the next two decades.” That could leave Israeli Jews presiding over the nation the way whites did in South Africa in its apartheid era.

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I’m not so sure that Israel should continue as a Jewish state, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. It’s one thing, after the horrors of the Holocaust, to create a safe haven for Jews, and quite another to create a state to fulfill the biblical prophesies at the heart of Zionism. Today, Israel “rules over millions of non-Jews who loathe and detest it from the bottom of their hearts.” Zionism, in another words, has led directly to the ugly phenomena of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. So in deciding whether Israel’s 60th birthday is a cause for celebration, a reasonable person must answer these questions: “Has Zionism made Jews more safe or less safe? Has it cured the age-old problem of anti-Semitism or not?”

Nothing cures the world of anti-Semitism, said Melanie Phillips in the London Spectator, which is why Israel must exist. If Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, were to return today to see his land “encircled by enemies, hopelessly outnumbered, and fighting for its existence, he would surely say, ‘What’s new?’” Call it an ongoing state “of existential siege,” said Walter Reich in the Baltimore Sun. Throughout Israel’s “tenuous and tempestuous history,” the fear of annihilation has never been far off. Yet at 60, Israelis are certain that their homeland is imperishable. “This is, after all, a place where miracles are supposed to be part of the natural order of things.”