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Israel at 57
By Gil Troy
The Montreal Gazette
May 11, 2005
Israel celebrates 57 years of independence tomorrow mired in paradox.
What should be one of the Western world's great success stories is frequently treated as a pariah state. A democracy with a rollicking political culture, a fertile arts scene, a sophisticated economy, a tremendous infrastructure, a cutting edge scientific community, a young, growing, multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual population, is frequently caricatured as a fragile, dysfunctional, garrison state teetering on the edge of collapse.
By any objective standards, Israel is thriving - this has been a very good year. The high-tech sector has bounced back and the economy is beginning to soar again. Israel won its first Olympic gold medal last summer, and just months later won its first Nobel Prize in science for chemists who discovered cancer-busting proteins.
Moreover, while it is impolitic to say, Israel won the ugly war Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians unleashed in 2000. The cost was too high - more than 1,000 mostly civilian Israeli deaths, thousands maimed, and too many Palestinians killed in the fighting, too. But morale held, the people persevered, the army ultimately contained the situation.
Israel has proved democracies can defeat terror with a combination of effective fences, aggressive policing, active soldiering, vigilant citizens and creative leadership. Arafat's death, and the resulting outbreak of optimism on both sides, confirmed what Israelis had long maintained, that Europe's darling, that media-savvy manipulator, the world's first Nobel Peace Prize-winning terrorist, was an obstacle to peace who brought instability and misery to his own people as well as his enemies.
Nevertheless, the headlines focus on two existential threats that seem to hang over the Jewish state, one internal, one external. Internally, many politicians, activists, and reporters warn of a looming civil war over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposed disengagement plan to dismantle Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. Shrill, marginalized voices threatening violence drown out the discussions between the Israeli army and the settlers about rules of engagement for a peaceful anti-disengagement protest, including talk about banning weapons to avoid bloodshed.
Rather than risking a self-fulfilling prophecy by bracing for violence, Israelis, both left and right, should be preparing to welcome the uprooted settlers, acknowledging the trauma of leaving their homes, thanking them for first moving out to areas that the state encouraged them to settle, then for leaving peacefully when government policy changed.
Meanwhile, world leaders and the mass media should reassess their caricatures of Ariel Sharon, helping Israel manage the risks connected to this bold step. At the same time, the world should pressure the Palestinians to silence the extremists, disarm the terrorists, and build a functional political culture focused on building up their own society rather than terrorizing their neighbours.
The external existential threat is also much ballyhooed - and frequently exaggerated. Intellectual intifadists along with nihilistic Islamicists believe that if they call frequently enough and lustily enough for Israel's destruction, they will realize their hopes. Thus, despite Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's calls for Palestinian moderation, jihadists throughout the Middle East continue to demand Israel's extermination.
The outrageous boycott that the British Association of University Teachers slapped last month on two Israeli universities is sadly typical of the armchair warriors who feed such rhetoric and, ultimately, encourage violence.
Closer to home, Israel's critics repeatedly violate their own core principles in their zeal to condemn the Jewish state. Professed pacifists rationalize suicide bombings, feminists and gay activists overlook Palestinian patriarchy or homophobia, and colleagues, even at McGill University, supposedly committed to accuracy, teach students that the name of the city in Israel's north is not Haifa, with too many spreading a one-sided narrative in classrooms, preferring politically correct caricature to complexity.
These absurdities embarrass the critics, not the criticized. This Yom Ha'atzmaut - Israel Independence Day - like every day, in countless ways, 6 million Israeli Jews - and Arabs -- will mock those critics by living good lives in a stable, thriving, democracy. Academics and jihadists can ignore the truth but they lack the power to negate it.
Israel remains, like all countries, like all human endeavours, imperfect. But given what it has endured, given the quality of life of so many of its citizens, given the many life-changing pharmaceutical, medicinal and technological wonders emanating from there, given the symphonies and universities, the newspapers and bookstores, the full cafes and the booming businesses, the delicious mix of old traditions and new ideas, the warm, effusive, sometimes dyspeptic citizenry, it remains one of the 20th century's great accomplishments.
Israel also represents one of the great hopes of the 21st century, especially if it can find its way toward a stable, mutual peace in its tough but - we can hope - evolving neighbourhood.
Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University.
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