Israel At 60: The Hope

Hope is deeply ingrained in the Israeli consciousness, along with resilience, creativity, progress, democracy, self-criticism, and decency. There is sometimes unavoidable friction among them, but cumulatively they make Israel a unique modern miracle among nations. May 8, the 60th anniversary, offers the lesson of Israel’s experience to the world.

Israel’s Left and Right argue and re-argue about how to relieve Israel of the burdens and threats from Gaza and the West Bank, and Iran. These arguments, however, are largely subsumed by hope, hope without much evidence to support it. There’s quite a difference between constructive optimism and potentially lethal leaps. Still, the strengths of Israel's other national characteristics are what makes hope possible.

For example, Colette Avital, a Labor Party Knesset member, argues:

At the end of the decade, the traditional disagreements between left and right have lost much of their relevance, as a majority of Israelis support the end of occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state. Moreover, the debate on the path to follow seems to be over, too. Unilateralism is largely discredited as an option. Our negotiating partner is our partner, however imperfect. Israelis may be less hopeful than they were, but they are more realistic in their demands. They know the limits of military power. What’s more, they know that time is running out. It may just be that sense of urgency that will make an agreement possible at the end of 2008.

One may be excused for dismissing this hopefulness. But, it must be realized it is deeply felt by a broad range of the public in Israel and the US, and comes more from strength than from weakness of spirit.

Hope is what Israel is, ultimately, about. Israel’s national anthem is Hope, Hatikvah. That Hope is based upon the diaspora’s return to Israel to live in peace and progress. This video has Hope and some images that tell that story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6WMtyuAazc&feature=related

Daniel Gordis, from the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, writes about that Hope and "The Future", among other notables discussing the other aspects of unique Israel At 60:

What is our vision for the Jewish future? Today, any one of us could wax eloquent about what we envision for the Jewish people in the years to come. Yes, there are clouds on the horizon and the next decade is likely to be difficult for Israel. But the Jewish people pulses with a confidence about its future.

American Judaism has an optimism and self-confidence that would have been unimaginable just half a century ago. Jewish life is reborn and is beginning to thrive in Moscow and in Warsaw. Berlin is one of the world's fastest-growing Jewish communities. And in Israel, despite all the challenges facing the Jewish state, Jewish life thrives as it can nowhere else in the world.

The Jewish ability to imagine a future is the greatest contribution of Israel to date. In 1946 or 1947, the mere notion of a Jewish future would have been difficult to conjure. The vast majority of Europe's Jews had been murdered, while most of the rest of the world either participated or stood by idly. Many of those who had survived were then living under a repressive Soviet regime. In the United States, American Jews had a much more tentative sense of being fully American.

In Palestine, the shores were still closed by the British and many Jewish refugees were being turned away. Arab armed resistance to Jewish immigration and nation building was growing, and in 1946, though the yearning for statehood was palpable, it was anyone's guess when, or if, that dream might be realized.

Just two years before the creation of Israel, the mere mention of a Jewish future could well have been met with a smirk or a tear. The Jews had had an often-glorious past - but a future?

What changed that, more than anything, was the State of Israel. The image of Jews huddled around their radios on Nov. 29, 1947 - the day on which the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine - remains etched in our minds because it captures beautifully the sense of a life in abeyance, the scales suddenly tipping toward the possibility of life and recovery.

That day at the U.N. and several months later on a Friday afternoon in Tel Aviv, when David Ben-Gurion declared independence, gave Jews a new lease on life. Israel permitted Jews to believe in hope, rather than in despair. Even under the lingering shadow of the Shoah, it presented Jews everywhere with a project of rebuilding so dramatic and massive that it mustered their energies and galvanized a people that months earlier had been scattered and largely disoriented.

Though Israel's incessant wars have been one of the most tragic dimensions of Israeli life, the creation of a Jewish army and the "opportunity" for survivors of the death camps to take up arms and defend their fledgling state was a dramatic shift in the fortunes, and the image, of the Jew. Some of those escapees from Europe died on the battlefields of the nascent state. But they died defending themselves, rifles in hand, not in the gas chambers that were operating at full throttle just a few years earlier.

And most didn't die. They lived, created families, studied and worked. They built universities and hospitals, roads and factories. They wrote novels and edited newspapers and plowed the fields of a land they called their own. They imagined a future radically different from the Jewish past. And all this, they knew, was possible only because Jews had a state. It is thus no accident that Israel's national anthem is called HaTikvah, or "The Hope." For hope is the central contribution of Israel to the Jewish people. The prophet Ezekiel, in the Vision of Dry Bones (37:11), had written "our bones are dried up" and "avdah tikvateinu," "our hope is lost." But Israel's anthem purposely misquoted Ezekiel. "Od lo avdah tikvateinu," the anthem insists: "our hope is not yet lost."

To be sure, the coming decade, as Israel moves from 60 years of independence to 70, is not likely to be easy. Iran threatens from afar, and the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas menace from much closer. The world has turned on Israel, and many Jews, both in Israel and beyond, have begun to wonder if the enterprise might be faltering.

The answer must be a definitive "no." Because what is at stake is not simply Jewish sovereignty, but Jewish hope and the Jews' ability to believe in a future. The optimism of American Judaism and the newfound vitality of Judaism in Europe would not survive the loss of the Jewish state. Ensuring Israel's future and her thriving is about more than nationalism; it is about the hope that 60 years after statehood, the Jews still want to believe that their greatest days lie ahead.

For a delightful, very today, view of the vibrancy and faces of that Hope, take this youthful tour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuX5Ef2B3GA&feature=user

Judith Klinghoffer offers her favorite, a contrast to Mark Twain:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HpFhKpS67DQ&feature=related"