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Why I Have Hope for Israel

(Times of Israel) Amb. Michael Oren - Fifty years ago, I came to a country that had no relations with China, India, and Africa, nor the 12-member Soviet bloc, no peace with Egypt and Jordan, or any Abraham Accords. We had friendly relations with the U.S., but no deep, multifaceted strategic alliance and no high tech. Our major export was oranges. My historian's eye enables me to see what no people in all of history could have accomplished, rising after two thousand years of statelessness, a mere three years after the Holocaust, to establish an independent nation in our ancient homeland. I see how that country, shorn of allies and natural resources, repelled a multi-pronged invasion designed to destroy it, absorbed 10 times its original Jewish population in 10 years, created one of the world's only uninterrupted democracies, built seven top-flight universities, a universal healthcare system, and mustered an army more than twice as large as those of France and Britain combined. I saw Hebrew not merely reborn, but spoken, sung, and written. I saw how a poor, agrarian backwater became a military and technological superpower, the country that could invent Mobileye and Waze while standing up to the lavishly-armed forces of evil. And during the current war my hope has grown. I've seen close to half a million Israelis leave their homes, their jobs, and their families, pick up a gun and go out to fight for their country, knowing full well that they may come back irreparably altered or may not come back at all. Half a million Israelis is - proportional to the U.S. - the equivalent of many millions more than all the Americans who served along with my father in World War II. Whether in biblical or contemporary days, we are a nation of flawed heroes, and our miracles often come encapsulated in pain. But based on the empirical evidence, our nation will survive this trying period and emerge, once again, robust. The hope of being a free people in our own land, as our national anthem envisions, has not been lost. The writer was Israel's ambassador to the U.S., 2009-13.
2025-08-03 00:00:00
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