I’m disappointed that Charles Krauthammer hasn’t acknowledged Israel’s 60th anniversary. 10 years ago, he produced one of the best articles on the meaning of Zionism and its importance, At last Zion.
Two columnists recently have celebrated Israel’s 60th. First there’s Jeff Jacoby who’s scheduled to speak at my synagogue tomorrow night, who wrote the Triumph of Life and Hope.
THE BIRTH of the state of Israel 60 years ago this week was an astonishment. It is not unheard of for a nation to vanish from the map and later reappear. Poland, for example, was partitioned out of existence in 1795 and regained its independence in 1918. But the restoration of Israel was unlike anything the world had ever seen.
more stories like thisJews had been deprived of their homeland for nearly 2,000 years, ever since the Roman devastation of Judea in the first and second centuries A.D. That upheaval had been cataclysmic. By the time the fighting ended in 135, half of Judea’s population was dead. Of those who survived, hundreds of thousands were sold into slavery or expelled. Not until the Holocaust 18 centuries later would the Jewish people experience a more shattering catastrophe.Yet through all the generations of dispersion that followed, the Jews never lost their self-awareness as a nation or their connection to the land of Israel. They expressed their longing for it in daily prayer and turned toward it when they worshiped. They collected charity to support the minority of Jews who had never left the land; and over the years others made their way back as well, often in response to Christian or Muslim persecution. By the 1860s, a majority of Jerusalem’s population was Jewish once more. Zionism – an organized movement to renew Jewish independence in the Jewish homeland – was formally launched in 1897. Five decades later, against steep odds and every historical precedent, Israel was reborn.
Despite all this Jacoby acknowledges the irony:
Under siege since the day it was born, Israel has never known a day of true peace. It is the only nation in the world whose legitimacy is routinely called into question. It still has enemies who want it wiped off the map. Uniquely, the Jewish state came into being with the imprimatur of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Yet time and again it is told it has no right to exist. Of course that is fatuous; few nations can present a birth certificate as storied as Israel’s. Nonetheless, Israel’s fundamental right to exist doesn’t derive from UN votes, or promises in the Bible, or its own Declaration of Independence.
It’s ironic too, that though the sympathy accrued to the Jewish people due to the Holocaust was one of the factors that enabled the acceptance of the new Jewish state, the ones whose leaders allied themselves with the Nazis now claim that the founding of Israel is a catastrophe rivaling that of the Holocaust. Of course they choose to stake their claim to the land not by building a parallel state but by trying to destroy the Jewish one. (Unfortunately, many, in the name of peace, see parallelism between the two aspirations.)
Bill Kristol weighs in with The Jewish State at 60. Though the essay revolves around a number of wonderful quotes, Kristol’s conclusion is simply:
Still, even though the security of Israel is very much at risk, the good news is that, unlike in the 1930s, the Jews are able to defend themselves, and the United States is willing to fight for freedom. Americans grasp that Israel’s very existence to some degree embodies the defeat and repudiation of the genocidal totalitarianism of the 20th century. They understand that its defense today is the front line of resistance to the jihadist terror, and the suicidal nihilism, that threaten to deform the 21st.
via memeorandum
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
