Blows to Israel Must Never Go Unanswered

[bemildred]

Posted mostly because it's in the LA Times.

Jewish history had prepared neither Gentile nor
Jew for the cosmic achievements the Zionist
enterprise would make in the process of
reconstituting a nation. These achievements are
easily summarized: the ingathering of a millennially
dispersed and diverse people; the regeneration of
its ancient and near-moribund language; the
fashioning of a lively and democratic polity and
press; a genuinely independent judiciary; the
mobilization of one of the two or three most
proficient and scrupulous militaries in the world; the
crafting of a commonwealth curious, open, tolerant
- a nation-state not unlike the United States.

At the end of a century of unthinkably cruel and
ultimately empty revolutions - Nazism, communism
- Israel stands virtually alone in the right to assert
that, after the crackup of empires and rage for
popular sovereignties, it is a success, and a
decent one at that.

Now envision Israel in its actual neighborhood -
the tyrannical societies of the Middle East made
even more twisted by corrupting and unproductive
oil wealth - and you have a standing reproach to
the Arab hubris that lies to itself.

From the western Sahara to the deserts abutting
the Persian Gulf, not a single regime beyond Israel
has so much as even embarked, or allowed its
entrepreneurs to embark, on the exacting
beginnings of industrial advance. This wide swath
of terrain on which a quarter of a billion people live
produces with all its hands and brains just about
what little Finland or Spain does. Remind yourself
also that not one ruler across the region governs
by consent of the ruled. Evoke the phantoms of lost grandeur put in the
heads of miserable boys and girls by dogma and dogmatics.

LA Times