Israel at 60
Today I'm celebrating the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel, and I invite readers of normblog to join me in doing so. Here are six reasons, one for each decade, why Israel's existence is something worth celebrating.
1. The destruction of the European Jews. This remains what it was when it happened - a gigantic, terrible, irredeemable fact. Two thirds of European Jewry and one third of the Jewish population of the world were wiped out in an organized project that left a stain upon the face of Europe. The relevance of this crime to the moral claim of the Jewish people to independent nationhood should be evident without need of further explanation, even though there are those for whom it is not.
2. Anti-Semitism. This has been a hatred stretching across millennia, but we may leave the entry above to stand for the anti-Semitism of the past. Anti-Semitism continues to exist today and has been on the increase as compared with the immediate post-Holocaust decades when it inhabited only the margins, and the sewers, of political life. Now you don't have to look for it; it will find you. From the ravings of the president of Iran to the obsessions of commenters at many a well-known left-liberal website and the unrelenting ambitions of the boycotters of the UCU, anti-Semitism is again a part of conventional discourse.
3. Israel's cultural achievements. David Grossman, Amoz Oz, Aharon Appelfeld, Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman, A. B. Yehoshua, Israeli medicine and science and inventions... etc.
4. Israel's democracy. This is a country which, through years of hostility from its neighbours and periodic warfare, has created a democratic political life, upheld the rule of law, sustained a free press.
5. For solidarity. Those who cannot celebrate the existence of Israel but only criticize it, put themselves beyond all sense of sympathy with the legitimate concerns of the Jewish people - as if these had no basis, no rationale, no historical genesis; as if Israel's history was solely about usurpation and error; as if it was not itself born under the threat of annihilation, a threat that is ever renewed. To celebrate with Israel is to be able to speak criticism of its mistaken policies from within, so to say, criticism without demonization.
6. For a just settlement. To celebrate the 60th birthday of the Jewish homeland is to look for a continuity with old Jewish ethical traditions, traditions of justice and freedom, and to argue alongside all those Israeli voices, all those other Jewish voices, and all those other critical but non-demonizing voices, for a solution to the problems of Israel and Palestine that accommodates the just rights of both peoples to democratic self-determination.
