For many nations, a 65th birthday would not generate much excitement. But if the country happens to be Israel, which celebrates its birthday this year on Tuesday, April 16, it’s another story.
Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only United Nations member state whose right to exist is regularly challenged and whose elimination from the world map is the aim of at least one other U.N. member state (Iran).
None of the countries that are serial human-rights violators — not Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Sudan, or any of the others — gets anything near the relentless, obsessive, guilty-till-proven-innocent scrutiny that democratic Israel receives from U.N. bodies, with their built-in, anti-Israel majorities, in New York and Geneva.
Indeed, Israel is the only nation in the world that has a permanent, separate agenda item at the U.N. Human Rights Council. All other countries in the world are lumped together under another agenda item.
No other country is the target of such nonstop, well-funded, and highly organized campaigns to discredit, delegitimize and demonize it.
No other country faces systematic attempts to launch boycotts, divestment campaigns and sanctions against it, not to mention flotillas and flytillas. All the while those behind the efforts, claiming to speak in the lofty name of human rights, studiously ignore places like Syria, where more than 70,000 people have been killed in the past two years alone and numberless more are wounded, homeless, exiled and detained.
No other country has its right to self-defense challenged as Israel does, even though it acts no differently than any other nation would if confronted by terrorist assaults and deadly missile and rocket attacks on its population centers.
I have enormous admiration for Israel — for its resolve, resilience, courage and ingenuity.
What it has achieved in the past 65 years is breathtaking: the rebirth of a state with a rock-solid democratic foundation; the ingathering of millions of refugees and immigrants from nearly every corner of the world; the creation of a world-class economy; the building of a first-rate army; and a determination to overcome one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after another.
Other nations might have succumbed, after 65 years of uninterrupted hostility, to enemies trying everything under the sun to destroy, demoralize and isolate it. But Israel has not flinched. It refuses to cave. It keeps confounding its foes.
Its commitment to a two-state accord with the Palestinians remains unshakeable, even as many Israelis can’t help but wonder if the Palestinians, given one chance after another for sovereignty, truly share Israel’s aim of Jewish and Palestinian states living side by side in peace and harmony.
Moreover, in global surveys Israel comes out among the “happiest” countries in the world, Tel Aviv ranks as one of the top “go-to” destinations for young people, and Israelis’ life expectancy exceeds that of Americans.
How can this small, beleaguered nation manage to stand tall, strong, and, yes, optimistic?
Too often, Israel’s adversaries have come up with misguided if self-satisfying answers, usually elaborate conspiracy theories inspired by anti-Semitic tropes.
In reality, though, the answer is much simpler. It derives from age-old connections among a land, a faith and a people. Many have tried to sever the link. All have failed.
To be sure, Israel, like all democratic societies, is a permanent work in progress. Much remains to be done.
From grappling with a less-than-ideal electoral system to dealing with religious zealots who invoke a “higher authority” than the state, from addressing a yawning gap between rich and poor to balancing the Jewish and democratic nature of the country, from the decades-long pursuit of peace with its neighbors to the defense of the country in an ever more turbulent region, Israel has no shortage of challenges.
But, above all, Israel is a wondrous “adventure.” I feel privileged to see examples daily of the fulfillment of the prayers of generations longing for a return to Zion, examples that reveal the country’s character:
• Witnessing Soviet Jews arriving at Ben Gurion Airport, with Israel not missing a beat in welcoming them, even as Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles came raining down in 1991.
• Visiting Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, where victims of Hamas strikes against Israel are taken for medical care, and seeing Palestinian patients from Gaza in rooms adjoining the Jewish wounded.
• Getting to know Save a Child’s Heart, an Israeli program that provides life-saving pediatric heart surgery, many of it performed on children from Arab countries that deny Israel’s very existence.
• Seeing the scrawling on a Tel Aviv wall shortly after 21 young Israelis were killed at a disco — “They won’t stop us from dancing.”
• Watching an Israeli-Arab Supreme Court justice — who, incidentally, refuses to sing Israel’s national anthem — sit on a panel that upheld the conviction of an Israeli ex-president on charges of rape.
This Israel may not now feature prominently in the media, I’m sorry to say, but it is the Israel that pulsates daily with a love of life, of freedom and of the land.
Happy 65th birthday, Israel!
David Harris is the executive director of the American Jewish Committee. This essay is an adaptation of an earlier version written by the author.