Israel's 60th Anniversary

Youths, one waving an Israeli flag, dance in Rabin's Square in Tel Aviv, Israel during a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel, late Wednesday May 7, 2008.  AP Photo Moti Milrod Photo Tools

Israelis wave their flags while fireworks kick off the celebration for the 60th anniversary in Jerusalem on May 7.  AFP Marco Longari

Cars drive past a building lit up with an image of Israel's flag in Tel Aviv May 7, 2008.

REUTERS Gil Cohen Magen

Israeli soldiers fire their weapons during a Memorial Day ceremony at the military cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem May 7, 2008. REUTERS Eliana Aponte

The streets of downtown Jerusalem are decorated for the upcoming Memorial and Independence Day celebrations, Tuesday, May 6, 2008. Israel began marking its annual Memorial Day observances Tuesday night, with air raid sirens wailing across the country in memory of its fallen soldiers and victims of attacks by militants, just a day before its joyous 60th birthday.  AP Photo / Lefteris Pitarakis

An Israeli woman mourns beside the grave of a fallen soldier at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem May 6, 2008. Israel commemorates its fallen soldiers on Memorial Day, which begins on Tuesday night.  REUTERS Eliana Aponte

Israeli soldiers salute in front of graves of fallen soldiers at the military cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem May 6, 2008. REUTERS Yannis Behrakis

Israelis watch fireworks and a laser show during Independence Day festivities in Jerusalem, Wednesday, May 7, 2008. AP Photo Tara Todras-Whitehill

Hillel Halkin, writing in "Land Without Regret":

How many people would have believed a hundred years ago, in 1908, that 40 years later, in 1948, there would be a Jewish state in Palestine?

How many would have believed in 1948 that, in another two decades this state would be a military titan bestriding the Middle East, its armies triumphantly camped from the outskirts of Cairo to those of Damascus?

How many would have believed in 1967 that another 40 years would pass with the titan still at war with its closest neighbours and unable to defend its population against small groups of guerrillas belonging to organizations pledged to destroy it?

How many would have believed that, in 2008, it would have become trendy to talk about its demise?

If you want to be pessimistic, you don't have to look far for reasons. Israel is a tiny speck on the map, surrounded by a hostile Arab and Muslim world that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf and beyond; that is growing all the time in wealth, influence, population, military power, self-confidence and religious zealotry; and that continues to be convinced that a Jewish state in its midst is a historical anomaly and a moral injustice that must one day be wiped out. What rational gambler would bet on this state's survival?

But one can argue the opposite side of it, too. Arab wealth and power will prove to be ephemeral products of an already doomed Age of Oil; so will radical Islam, which can never deliver on its political promises; in the long run, the Arab world will have to democratize, modernize and come to terms with Israel's existence. And meanwhile, Israel itself, far from a failure, has been an extraordinary success, a country that has gone in 60 years from being the poor, bankrupt, imperilled home of less than a million Jews to a militarily powerful, economically thriving, financially independent state of five-and-a-half million Jews who are among the world's richest and most technologically advanced peoples. Already at peace with some of their Arab neighbours, they can hold out against the others until accepted by them as well.

History will decide -- and its decision will almost surely not come in any of the ways we might expect it to. The only thing about history that is predictable is its unpredictability.

And yet as an Israeli -- or, more precisely, as an American Jew who decided 38 years ago to make his life in Israel-- there is a sense in which none of this matters to me.

I don't wish to be misunderstood: The future of Israel is of enormous importance to me. The thought of Israel's death is as saddening to me as the thought of my own.

But the thought of my death is not sufficient reason to make me wish I had never lived. On the contrary, it makes my life meaningful in a way it would not be had I been guaranteed immortality.

I feel the same about Israel. I did not choose to live in it because I was convinced it could not perish. I have always lived in it with the consciousness that it could. This is what makes it so precious to me.

I'll go further. Were I prophetically to know that Israel would perish within the next 20 or 30 or 50 years, as many of its bon ton critics are now prognosticating, it would not make the slightest difference to me in terms of my own decisions. I would still feel happy that I chose to live here; would go on living here; would want my children to live here; would want them to raise my grandchildren here -- until the last possible moment. Isn't that the way we want to live our own personal lives, too: Until the last possible moment?

Happy -- and proud. Because for all its shortcomings and mistakes, Israel is and will always be one of the most glorious historical adventures in the history of mankind. A 3,000-year-old people, the victim of the greatest act of mass murder ever committed on this planet, has the indomitable will to reconstitute itself in its ancient homeland, to revive its ancient language, to assert its right to live, to create new life, to nourish it and maintain it in defiance of all odds -- there's never been anything else like it before and never will be again.

I'm grateful that I've had the opportunity to be part of it. I would have felt envious had I been anywhere else.

Sixty years isn't much. I hope Israel has many times that amount still ahead of it. Realistically speaking, the chances seem to me pretty good. But I would have no regrets even if they weren't. Life doesn't have to go on forever for it to have been forever worth living.

Recall also this from a Rabbi David Wolpe sermon in 2006:

Back in April, Rabbi Wolpe gave a sermon whose title took one aback: "Can Israel Survive?"

One would not have thought such a question – 58 years after Israel's restoration – would still be a question. The theme of the sermon was that nothing physical endures. Even empires do not last; entire civilizations come and go. . . .

The trick of life, Rabbi Wolpe argued, is to value something while you have it the way you will value it when it is gone. We frequently appreciate things only when we no longer have them – valuing them retroactively because we took them for granted while they were here.

So, the sermon concluded, we need to think about Israel, and what it means, and what we would do to have it if we did not already have it.

And then we need to do that, in order to keep it.

Comments

[Alan Levitt]

I would like to e-mail this article

[Ralph Kostant]

Harkin asks, "How many would have believed that, in 2008, it would have become trendy to talk about its demise?" Who would have believed that in today's Los Angeles Times, the paper of record for the second largest American Jewish community, the only story in the front section on Israel's 60th anniversary is entitled "For some Palestinians, one state with Israel is better than none."

The story describes what it claims is an emerging new trend among Palestinians, to abandon the "two-state solution" in favor of one multi-national state in all of Palestine.

Of course, the Times writers either did not know, or intentionally concealed from their readers, that this is no more than a reprise of the traditional pre-Oslo PLO program for a "secular democratic state" covering all of the territory of the former British Mandate in Palestine. Just how secular and democratic such as state would be is amply demonstrated by life since Oslo in areas that have come under Palestinian control. However, no such troublesome thoughts intrude upon the rarified heights inhabited by trendy thinkers such as the Los Angeles Times.

[yk]

great post. I recorded a video of the party in Ben Yehuda, and it's on youtube.

check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwbAvc_GH6M

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