Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s “Day of Independence,” marks the establishment of the modern state of Israel. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, publicly read the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
As Israel now prepares to celebrate its Diamond Jubilee, signifying 75 turbulent years dating from the invasion by five Arab armies on the following day, it is well to remember the words of the prophet Isaiah that Israel was to be “a light unto the Nations.”
Much of the world begs to differ. Israel is the one nation on earth whose right to exist is widely questioned and threatened. It is the disproportionate target of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which devotes many of its sessions to attacking the Jewish state. In 2022, for example, it approved 15 anti-Israel resolutions promoted by the Palestinians while giving some of the world’s most scandalous human rights violators—China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, Qatar—a get-out-of-jail-free card. Israel has been subject to a worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign and to the vicious defamation of Israel Apartheid Weeks hosted on our morally debased university campuses.
The propaganda assault on Israel is merely another species of terrorism, the contemporary form of the age-old pogrom. Israel is regarded as a geopolitical irritant, a historical mistake, a garrison kingdom and an artificial construct that should never have been established, despite its validity and legality. Does the 1967 U.N. Resolution 242, guaranteeing “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries,” have no juridical force? Do the binding dispensations of international law, beginning with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and culminating in Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, no longer apply?
It can be argued that the existence of Israel is an absolute necessity. It is, to begin with, a haven for the Jewish people from the world’s ancient antipathy. As Leonard Cohen sang in one of his most moving songs, “Dance me though the panic ‘til I’m gathered safely in.” It is a lyric version of Moses’s Song in Deuteronomy in which Jacob is led from “the waste howling wilderness” and kept in “the apple of the Lord’s eye.” Israel is a testimony to historical continuity and cultural memory in an age of temporal dissipation, a sort of Benedict Option for Jews. It is a sign of what is possible when a people gather together and pool their intelligence, courage, obstinacy and talent to create a vibrant pluralist democracy in the midst of ignorance and barbarism.
While Israeli politics is splintered among innumerable fractious parties, the country remains a robust, if tempestuous, democracy. Israel is also an object lesson in how to manage a sound economy, running an engine with almost no gap in the output curve. And it is the spearhead of the democratic West in the war against Islamic terror, receiving and resisting the brunt of the theo-imperialist onslaught against Western institutions, interests, and, indeed, long-term survival.
Those who study the history of civilizations and who are disturbed or fascinated by the spectre of decline exhibited by our own are likely to find Israel important for another reason. It is difficult to repress the suspicion that ominous forces are working toward the demise of Judeo-Christian civilization. I would hazard a guess that many people across all walks of life are troubled by an inchoate premonition that something has gone terribly wrong with Western culture, governed by a political elite without moral convictions and educated by an academic elite without scholarly scruples. But since its founding, Israel has embodied heroism, determination, enterprise, ancestral spirit, and renewal. The word itself means “he who wrestles with God.” Israel is the struggle and trial to prove oneself.
The tiny state of Israel is like a postage stamp on a letter sent by a celestial agent appearing as a mystical interpretation of distant events. In the present context of doubt and apprehension, it constitutes a catechism for the West, a trial of values, and a test of honour and principle—a test which the West appears to be failing. For the cherubs of political correctness and the fantasists among the intelligentsia cannot abide the ideals that Israel exemplifies: vigilance in the face of aggression, a commitment to genuine historic purpose, and unapologetic self-affirmation that is rare, if not unprecedented, in the annals of modern statehood.
