No less than a miracle: Israel turns 75

The creation of the United States in the 18th century was one such event. Again and again, members of the founding generation, though profoundly shaped by Enlightenment values — the preeminence of reason, natural law, faith in empirical evidence, the scientific method — concluded that the Revolution's extraordinary success could not be logically understood without considering G od.

"Through the whole of the contest, from its first rise to this time," proclaimed the Second Continental Congress in 1781, "the influence of divine Providence may be clearly perceived in many signal instances."

At quite a different moment six years later, James Madison perceived heavenly intervention in the remarkable unity achieved by the Constitutional Convention. That delegates so riven by sectional, political, and philosophical differences could have agreed on a charter for a radically new form of government could not be explained in normal terms.

"It is impossible," Madison wrote in Federalist No. 37, "for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of the Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution."

Even Benjamin Franklin, the intensely practical and worldly man of science, was certain that America's founding must have been "influenced, guided, and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent, and beneficent Ruler" — namely, G od.

Like the birth of the United States in 1776, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 was miraculous. The reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland more than 1,900 years after the destruction of the last Jewish commonwealth by the Roman Empire was unlike anything ever recorded in history.

The Roman destruction of Judea in the 1st and 2nd centuries had been catastrophic. By the time the last of the fighting ended in 135, as many as 1 million Jews were dead. Of those who survived, hundreds of thousands were sold into slavery or expelled. Not until the Holocaust 18 centuries later would the Jewish people experience a more shattering catastrophe. The Roman emperor Hadrian renamed Judea "Syria Palestina" — later shortened to "Palestine" — to signify that the Jewish nation was at an end and its connection to its homeland severed.

Yet through all the centuries that followed, the Jews never lost their self-awareness as a nation or their bond to the Holy Land. They expressed their longing for it in daily prayer and turned toward it when they worshiped. They raised charity to support the minority of Jews who never left. Over the generations, as sovereignty over the land shifted from one ruler to another — Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, British — Jews kept coming back, often in response to Christian or Muslim persecution elsewhere. By the mid-1800s, a majority of Jerusalem's population was Jewish once more. Zionism — an organized movement to renew Jewish independence in the Jewish homeland — was formally launched in 1897. Five decades later, against insanely steep odds and in violation of every historical precedent — and in the wake of a genocide that had murdered one-third of the world's Jews — the modern state of Israel was born.

This week, Israel marks the 75th anniversary of that birth — 75 years during which it has not merely existed, but thrived. And thrived not amid conditions of peace and neighborly friendship, but despite the unyielding hostility of enemies within and without, the neverending threat of terrorism, and the focused hatred of the world's antisemites. In the teeth of challenges faced by no other nation, Israel has become an economic, cultural, scientific, military, and technological powerhouse. Its land, once notorious for being, as Mark Twain found, "rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary . . . [with] hardly a tree or shrub anywhere," has been transformed into a marvel of agricultural innovation and productivity.

Though it dwells in a region of dictatorships, theocracies, and monarchies, Israel is democratic and free, with vigorously contested elections, a fearless press, and — as recent developments vividly underscore — an extremely independent judiciary. With the possible exception of the United States, no other country is so passionately loved and so implacably despised by so many people worldwide.

For 75 years, Israel — a nation no bigger geographically than Lake Michigan — has been in the glare of world attention. While there are 56 Muslim states and 22 Arab states, Israel is the only Jewish state — and the only country whose legitimacy is continually denied. The modern state of Israel is unique in having won the legal imprimatur of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. But its enemies have never stopped screaming that it has no right to exist.

And the result of living for 75 years under such unrelenting pressure? Israelis are among the happiest people anywhere. Their birth rate — a proxy for confidence in the future — is the highest in the developed world.

Is this normal? Can it really be seen as the natural outcome of ordinary political and historical forces?

The renowned historian Paul Johnson didn't think so.

Writing in Commentary 25 years ago, Johnson observed: "In the last half-century, over 100 completely new independent states have come into existence. Israel is the only one whose creation can fairly be called a miracle."

He went on to outline some of the wildly unlikely circumstances that aligned to make possible Israel's independence. Johnson pointed out, for example, that Soviet ruler Josef Stalin, though a Jew-hater and a foe of Zionism, briefly reversed his opposition to creating a Jewish state. "Stalin ignorantly supposed that the way to undermine Britain's position in the Middle East was to support the Jews, not the Arabs," wrote Johnson,

and he backed Zionism in order to break the ‘British stranglehold.' Not only did he extend diplomatic recognition to Israel but, in order to intensify the fighting and the consequent chaos, he instructed the Czech government to sell it arms. ... Then, in mid-August 1948, Stalin decided he had made a huge error in judgment, and the obedient Czech government ordered a halt to the airlift within 48 hours. But by then the war had effectively been won.

In 1948, Israel's population was only 600,000. On its first day of existence, it was invaded by five countries — Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Iraq — with a combined population in the tens of millions. The head of the Arab League predicted that the Jews would be wiped out in "a war of annihilation" and "a momentous massacre." Yet the fledgling Jewish state survived. Even more miraculous was Israel's staggering victory in 1967, when Egypt, Syria, and Jordan again attempted a war of annihilation, and were defeated even more decisively.

After centuries in which defenselessness and persecution had been the Jewish lot, Israel would ensure justice and security for Jews through feats of astonishing daring, from the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann to the spectacular rescue of the hostages in Entebbe to the destruction of Iraq's nuclear reactor.

When the new state of Israel proclaimed its independence in 1948, it was home to less than 6 percent of the world's Jews. Today almost half of all Jews live in the Jewish state, to which they emigrated from every inhabited continent. The country's national language is Hebrew, which had not been a spoken language for millennia until revived by the Zionist pioneers. And all this, it bears repeating, within living memory of a genocide unprecedented in the annals of horror.

Paul Johnson was right. The rebirth of Israel in modern times — the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the only land where Jews have ever been sovereign — is miraculous. Many religious believers see in it the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Winston Churchill, speaking in Parliament in 1949, described Israel's founding as "an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective ... of a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years."

In our secular age, it is unfashionable to acknowledge what the Continental Congress called "the influence of divine Providence" in world affairs. But when it comes to Israel, so abnormal and astounding, what better explanation is there?

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."