c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) There is a crowded shop in Jerusalem offering customers a wide assortment of lettered T-shirts. Some shirts prominently display faces of famous rock performers or movie stars. Other brightly colored shirts feature comic-strip characters or witty bon mots. Yet the best selling T-shirt has only three words printed across its front: “Israel Is Real” _ a proud, almost defiant declaration.

Why have so many people purchased a shirt that proclaims such an obvious truth? Why has the semantically clever phrase “Israel Is Real” struck such a responsive chord? It is, after all, a statement that hardly needs to be made. Or does it?

Fired by the ideas of national liberation and political self-determination, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and my choice as one of the greatest Jews of all time, declared Israeli independence on May 14, 1948. But many people, including Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary James Forrestal, opposed the creation of a Jewish state and were convinced its 650,000 people would be quickly defeated by the combined Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan and Lebanon, who were backed by millions of supporters throughout the Islamic world.

While the United Nations General Assembly in 1947 had voted to partition British Mandate Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, there was wide skepticism whether “the Jews” were capable of self-rule after 2,000 years of living as a minority within a global Diaspora. There was also the grim question whether “the Jews” had the ability to defend themselves against the host of enemy armies publicly sworn to drive those same Jews into the Mediterranean Sea.

Like many other nations, including the United States in the 1770s and 1780s, the Israelis earned their independence only by winning a war. The 1948-1949 War of Independence was so fierce that the new Jewish state lost 1 percent of its population in battle _ the equivalent today of 2.8 million Americans dying in a single war.

Despite its military and political victory 56 years ago, Israelis have never known a single day of true peace or freedom from terrorism and renewed warfare. Instead, something the media calls “the Arab-Israeli conflict” has raged on despite numerous diplomatic efforts, “Final Status” talks, road maps and a series of peace processes.

After 56 years two things remain clear: The slogan on the T-shirt is accurate _ Israel IS real _ and there will be no permanent peace until and unless Israel’s neighbors, especially the Palestinian people and their leaders, grant to Israel the same right of self-determination they demand for themselves.

But while waiting for all that to happen, Israel has not been stagnant since 1948. Just the opposite is true.

Instead of the 650,000 Jews of 1948, Israel’s Jewish population today numbers about 5.5 million, soon becoming the world’s largest Jewish community, surpassing the United States.

Israel, the only functional democracy in the Middle East, has a vigorous, raucous political system, a dynamic press and a gross national product of more than $100 billion. Despite the constant reality of terrorism and the possibility of all-out war, Israel has made extraordinary advances in modern medicine, physical sciences, high technology, the liberal arts and religious scholarship.

Perhaps Israel’s greatest achievement is the steadfast commitment of its citizens and leaders to achieving peace with their Arab neighbors. However, the Jewish state’s biggest challenge may lie just ahead.

Israel is the world’s test case whether a dedicated democracy has the necessary strength, the adequate political institutions and the moral power to outlast the forces of terrorism who hate all those qualities.

In addition, Israel faces another challenge that is familiar in Jewish history.

Once widely supported and admired in Europe (the continent of the Holocaust), Israel has become the convenient scapegoat used to explain many of the world’s problems. The latest purveyor of anti-Israel scapegoating is the U.N. special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, who recently declared that Israel is “the great poison in the region … this is a fact _ not opinion.”

Like the traditional scapegoating that blamed Jews for the bubonic plague and other societal ills, Israel is now blamed for the lack of democracy in the Arab world, the economic poverty in the Middle East, anti-Western feelings among Muslims, and even the appalling human rights record of Islamic states in the region … think Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria.

But on its 56th birthday, both Israel’s friends and adversaries should never forget my favorite T-shirt’s message: “Israel Is Real.”

DEA/PH END RUDIN