MY SAY: ISRAEL: FROM DESPAIR TO TRIUMPH
When World War 2 ended in 1945 the Jewish people were mourners confronting a brutal statistic. One third of our population- one out of every three Jews were killed in the Holocaust, with the attendant guilt of Western indifference and British duplicity in clamping shut the gates of Palestine.
The despair and grief energized the Jewish citizens of Palestine and world Jewry and concerned Christians to demand sovereignty in Israel. On May 4th 1948, a new link was added to the ancient and eternal chain of Jewish survival – namely, recognition of Israel as a Jewish national state.
In the 74 years of independence, Israel ranks as a gem of the decolonization movements in Africa and Asia. In spite of fractious and disputatious politics Israel remains a free-wheeling democracy; arts , theater, dance and social and philanthropic institutes grow and thrive; its contributions to global advances in medicine, science, technology, agronomy, and water purification are dazzling and outsize; its defense establishment is state -of -the -art in a citizen army with powerful ordnance; and most heartening of all is that despite wars and terrorism and human termites’ libels and bias, Israeli Jews are happy and now number well over 6 million.
On my first trip to Israel after the 1949 Armistice, my parents, my brother and I who had lost our entire family- never to know grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins -experienced indescribable emotion when we heard a roar overhead and saw a V formation of tiny military airplanes with the Star of David on the undersides.
This past March, while sitting in a plane waiting for takeoff, I saw a large jet land and taxi. Emblazoned on its gleaming steel tail fin was a giant Star of David.
You’ve come a long way, Israel! They even play your national anthem in Dubai!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! rsk
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