Op-Ed: Despite It All, Israel is Here to Stay

Posted: 12/30/2014 5:01:00 PM
Author: Giulio Meotti
Source: This article originally appeared on the Arutz 7 website on December 30, 2014.

Op-Ed: Despite It All, Israel is Here to Stay

Israel is the world's only country which hasn't seen one day of peace since its founding. But it is here to stay.
by Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz 7.


Judged through a rational, empirical - and European - lens, Israel should have already been obliterated.

Israel is the world's only country which in the last six months has experienced 50 days of war under daily rocket attacks, the kidnapping and killing of three students, the slaughtering of four rabbis, the attempted assassination of its social activists, the daily stabbing and Molotov cocktail attacks in its cities and on its roads.


The Israelis do not fear the danger and have fun.
Israel's is the world's only country whose water devices are removed from Western buildings. The Harvard University dining services just removed the labels from its SodaStream machines and replaced them with American-made water machines.
Israel is the world's only country that has so few friends and so many more enemies, so many people who would shout "eureka!" if Israel would disappear

Israel is the world's only country which can be destroyed in one day of war: a small battery of nuclear-tipped rockets can vanish it entirely.

Israel is the world's only country without recognized borders.

Israel is the world's only country which hasn't seen one day of peace since its founding.

Israel is the world's only country which has 1,000 kilometers of besieged and ghettoized borders.

Israel is the world's only country which looks perilous and temporary, a dot on the map and a patch of near-desert.
Israel is the world's only country which withdrew from territory won in defensive wars.

Israel is the world's only country which has to free hundreds of assassins to see again one of her soldiers.

Israel is the world's only country whose books, professors, writers and scientists are banned, boycotted and expelled from Western universities and libraries.

The country is open to offensives, with long and absurd borders; it lives in a state of siege, surrounded by dangerous enemies. The Israelis do not fear the danger and have fun. The philharmonic orchestra plays on a kibbutz along the Jordanian-Syrian border, while in Jerusalem they held competitions for young filmmakers.

A French journalist called the Israelis a people that does not smile. Perhaps. Perhaps influenced by a long history of Jewish persecution, distant and recent, of collective and personal tragedies that are the very foundation of this nation of refugees. Israel is not, probably, a cheerful country as a whole; but surrounded by enemies, the Israelis demonstrate with facts that smack of not being afraid of the future.

The Israeli Jews are engaged in long-term programs; they build for future generations a modern, highly industrialized country, one that is therefore more vulnerable.

With the ratio of forces so disproportionate, the fact that the State of Israel continues to exist is a contradiction, or if you prefer, a permanent miracle. Israel is squeezed between the sea and five hostile nations, eighty times larger and twenty times more populated.

The birth, survival and achievements of Israel are in itself a great victory. Israel is a state built from nothing and built, defended, developed against obstacles that the reason judged insurmountable.

And Israel, the only democratic nation born from a religious idea, promoted as a refuge for the persecuted, will remain one of the most exciting human adventures.
So despite all, Israel will not fall. Following the first exile in 586 B.C. and the second exile in 70 A.D. and 132 A.D., Jews spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Basin, northern and eastern Europe, even unto India and China.

The Holocaust closed that noble Jewish adventure in the Diaspora.

In the last century, Jews began returning to their land and rebuilt the third Jewish commonwealth. This will not fall. It cannot fall. It must not fall. Jews wouldn't survive to another exile. And a world without Jews would be a meaningless world.

The people of Israel will live. The Land of Israel will thrive. Israel is here to stay.