The Jewish State at 60

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. There have already been many birthday greetings, some heartfelt, some perfunctory, along with numerous reflections on the meaning of the occasion, some profound, some commonplace. For me, however, a discordant voice broke through.

Israel is a “stinking corpse” on its way to “annihilation,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last Thursday as Israel celebrated Independence Day. “Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken,” proclaimed the president of Iran, a nation that is a member in good standing of the United Nations and an active trading partner of countries like Germany and Russia. “Today the reason for the Zionist regime’s existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation.”

I didn’t intend, in writing this column, to quote Ahmadinejad. I hate to dignify him by even taking note of his comments. I meant to pay tribute to the Zionists — men like Weizmann and Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion and Begin — who made possible the almost miraculous redemption of the Jewish people in 1948. And I also intended to recognize the defenders of Israel at moments of crisis — men like Harry Truman and Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

I thought I might even dwell on the amazing essay by the novelist George Eliot who made a case for Zionism in 1879 — 17 years before the publication of Theodor Herzl’s “The Jewish State.”

Israel's existence defies two notions of our age: the peripheral nature of faith in Western society and the rise of transnational institutions as a substitution for the nation state. Both Judaism's centrality in Israeli life and Israel's insistence on maintaining a separate statehood puts paid to those notions. This has angered its enemies in both the Left and the Islamic World who scoff at the desire to be different as the vestige throwback of an earlier and less enlightened time. Being different however, is the essential definition of freedom. No one is ever the same and it follows nations just as individuals have the right to be themselves. Israel's pride in being different comes from the very unique way the Jews have combined tradition with innovation. We in the West can only be so lucky to do as much as the world's only Jewish State has done in the 60 years since its birth in 1948.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

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