The Two Other Miracles of Israel

On the occasion of Israel’s 70th anniversary—April 19 on the Hebrew calendar, May 14 on the Gregorian—many have remarked on the miraculous nature of the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. Rick Richman points to an additional two, equally miraculous, aspects of the country’s history:

David Ben-Gurion described [the second miracle] in an essay he wrote in 1954 . . . : the extraordinary Jewish unity on May 14, 1948. Zionism had never been a single ideology. The movement included very disparate factions—Labor Zionists, Religious Zionists, Socialist Zionists, Revisionist Zionists, General Zionists, Cultural Zionists—and the conflicts among them had been fierce. But every group signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence, . . . including the non-Zionist Jews, from (in Ben-Gurion’s words) “the Communists, who had forever fought against the Zionist enterprise as reactionary, bourgeois, chauvinistic, and counterrevolutionary, to the Agudat Israel [party], which had perceived as apostasy any attempt to bring about the redemption of Israel through natural means.” From left to right, every Jewish group joined. . . .

As Israel turns 70, unity is not a notable feature of Israeli democracy. The current Knesset includes seventeen political parties. The government is a shaky coalition comprising five of them, holding a bare majority of seats. The prime minister is surrounded by politicians who believe they could do a better job than he can. Josephus, the 1st-century-CE historian, described Jewish politics of his own time as consisting of disputes between religious and secular parties, with numerous Jewish leaders who “competed for supremacy because no prominent person could bear to be subject to his equals.” Two millennia later, not much has changed. . . .

And that is the third Israel miracle. Along with its fractured politics, . . . Israel has produced one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and most dynamic economies. . . .

The third Israeli miracle demonstrates that, in fact, a fractious democracy may well be a necessary condition for generating the variety of ideas and leaders that can move a society forward—just as the multiple approaches to Zionism produced remarkable leaders across Zionism’s left (Ben-Gurion), right (Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin), and center (Chaim Weizmann), creating a national movement spanning the Jewish political spectrum.

Read more at Jewish Journal

More about: David Ben-Gurion, Israel & Zionism, Israeli democracy, Israeli history, Josephus

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF