COMMENTARY: On Israel’s birthday, a realistic look at its place on world stage

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee). UNDATED _ Nearly 50 years after the reemergence of an independent Jewish state onto the world stage on May 14, 1948, Israel continues to arouse intense passions among people everywhere. Now, however, it is time to aid […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee).

UNDATED _ Nearly 50 years after the reemergence of an independent Jewish state onto the world stage on May 14, 1948, Israel continues to arouse intense passions among people everywhere.


Now, however, it is time to aid the fragile Arab-Israeli peace process by cooling those powerful emotions and the white-hot rhetoric that usually accompanies them. It is time to face realistically what modern Israel represents as a permanent and legitimate part of the Middle East.

But it won’t be easy.

Because it is the land of the Bible, the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, many people frequently hold Israel to a higher standard of national behavior than their own countries. Critics of Israel, and, ironically, some of its strongest supporters, both demand Israel’s behavior be morally and ethically superior to every other nation-state.

Many of Israel’s Jewish and Christian champions truly believe Israel must become the biblical”light to the nations,”the harbinger of the messianic age for all humanity.

That’s a pretty heady assignment for a small country of only 5 million people the size of New Jersey; a country whose hostile Middle East neighbors, Iran and Iraq, continually threaten it with poison gas and nuclear annihilation.

For Israel’s foes and its severest critics _ and there is an abundance of both _ the Jewish state can do nothing right. Everything about Israel is judged to be vile, even wicked. A long-standing joke says it all: if the Israeli government announced the sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west, many anti-Israel political and religious leaders, filled with rage and venom, would totally reject the claim as a”Zionist deception”designed to advance Israeli interests.

Enemies of Israel would like the Jewish state to simply disappear and be no more. They perceive it as a”foreign”element within an overwhelmingly Arab Middle East. But Israel will not conveniently disappear even though its creation is repeatedly labeled illegal and abnormal.

Israel, however, is neither.

In 1947 the United Nations General Assembly voted for a partition plan providing for a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine. The Jewish leadership, led by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, accepted the plan; the Arabs did not.

Only now, 50 years later, after bloody wars and countless acts of terrorism, are Palestinian Arab leaders finally confronting the reality of partition.


When the British Mandate terminated in May, 1948, modern Israel came into existence. For Jews it was the fulfillment of a dream thousands of years old: the physical return of the Jewish people to their national and spiritual homeland.

Yet the birth process of a human being is never easy, predictable, or painless. Neither is the birth process of a nation. Few, if any, nation-states are”immaculately conceived”or peacefully born.

Like so many other nations, including the United States, an independent Israel entered the world amidst war, blood, invasion, and agony, as well as with an inner strength and a collective will to survive. Such birth pangs are rarely pretty, pure, or precise, but they are, nonetheless, authentic and irreversible.

Israel, at 49, is now”middle aged”, and it suffers many of the same problems that vex other, older democracies. Like the United States, Israel is grappling with the perplexing dilemma of finding the appropriate role of religion in a modern hi-tech nation. How can it balance private faith commitments with the needs of the total society?

But on Israel’s birthday, I rejoice that more people today speak Hebrew, the language of the Bible, than at any other time in history, and I rejoice that more Jews currently live in the land of Israel than ever before. And even when observing Israel’s complex relations with Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, I am reminded of the truth expressed in the ancient Jewish maxim that”a cold peace is better than a hot war.” And finally, the words of modern Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, are truer than ever. Nearly 100 years ago he expressed his hope for a Jewish state:”We shall live at last as free people on our soil, and in our own homes peacefully die.”DEA END RUDIN

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