In 1998, the historian and essayist Paul Johnson—who died in January at the age of ninety-four—considered what the Jewish state had achieved in the first 40 years of its existence. Much has changed about Israel since then (although not the identity of its prime minister), but this Yom Ha-Atsma’ut, Johnson’s insights remain as true as ever.
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.
I observed the drama of 1948-49 from the security of an ancient Oxford college, where I was an undergraduate. Academic opinion was then, on balance, favorable to the new Zion: many dons had been brought up in the philo-Semitic tradition of Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot’s novel about a young man who discovers his identity as a Jew and dedicates himself to the Zionist cause, and they welcomed Israel as an intellectual and moral artifact. But opinion was also virtually unanimous that the state would be crushed. That was assuredly the view of most governments and military staffs: the notion of the Jew as a soldier had not yet captured the Western imagination.
After reflecting on the extraordinary circumstances of Israel’s creation and survival, Johnson turns to the challenges before it. Note that he was writing years before the term “start-up nation” had been coined:
The real task, and one that Netanyahu is well equipped to handle, is to create a society where—under conditions of peace—the clever children of Israel will want to stay, and where they can be confident they will flourish. Israel is an elite nation; in my opinion, that is what it should be, and unashamedly so, encouraging and training its people to be in the vanguard of the world’s activity in agriculture and industry, in technology, in the arts, in education and administration, in the conquest and the preservation of nature. Israel must have its place among the nations (to borrow the title of a book by its prime minister). But it is not a nation like other nations. Willy-nilly, it is and will continue to be sui generis, its people shaped by the terrible events of our century, and marked by destiny.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/paul-johnson-3/the-miracle/