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Land Without Regret

[National Post-Canada] Hillel Halkin - It is difficult to live with uncertainty and there are those who, no longer able to believe in the certainty of success, would rather believe in the certainty of failure. But we almost never know how things will turn out and Israel is an excellent example. How many people would have believed a hundred years ago, in 1908, that 40 years later, in 1948, there would be a Jewish state in Palestine? Israel is a tiny speck on the map, surrounded by a hostile Arab and Muslim world that is growing all the time in wealth, influence, population, military power, self-confidence and religious zealotry; and that continues to be convinced that a Jewish state in its midst is a historical anomaly and a moral injustice that must one day be wiped out. Meanwhile, Israel has been an extraordinary success, a country that has gone in 60 years from being the poor, bankrupt, imperiled home of less than a million Jews to a militarily powerful, economically thriving, financially independent state of five-and-a-half million Jews. Already at peace with some of their Arab neighbors, they can hold out against the others until accepted by them as well. For all its shortcomings, Israel is and will always be one of the most glorious historical adventures in the history of mankind. A 3,000-year-old people, the victim of the greatest act of mass murder ever committed on this planet, has the indomitable will to reconstitute itself in its ancient homeland, to revive its ancient language, to assert its right to live, to create new life, to nourish it and maintain it in defiance of all odds - there's never been anything else like it before and never will be again.
2008-05-07 01:00:00
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