In Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years after Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams?, Daniel Gordis seeks to answer the question posed in the subtitle; he is sanguine, although reservedly so, in his conclusions. Among the sweeping array of evidence Gordis musters of the Jewish state’s success is its consistently high rankings in the annual World Happiness Report. “But,” observes Elliott Abrams in his review, “the goal of Zionism wasn’t happiness; it was survival.” It has achieved this goal as well:

Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that it is “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.” As Gordis writes, “we begin with an extraordinary fact—extraordinary in part because it now seems entirely natural—that the Jewish people can defend itself.” This is a complete inversion of the historic reality Jews had faced for 2,000 years. As Gordis says, “Power has done what it was meant to do: Jews are no longer victims on call.”

Gordis . . . argues that “Israel’s founders took upon themselves an impossible task” and “to a great degree, they succeeded.” They changed the existential condition of the Jewish people, after 2,000 years of statelessness and vulnerability. They did not create a state that is, in the words of their Declaration of Independence, “like all other nations,” but that is due to the enduring hostility that led to the denunciation of Zionism as racism in the United Nations, to wars in 1948, 1956, 1973, and to endless terrorist attacks that continue to this day.

Yet even without the vicious hostility, could Israel ever have been a “normal” state? Given the unique history of the Jewish people and of the new state of Israel, and given the waves of immigration that have formed the new society, Israel was never plausibly going to be “like all other nations.”

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.