Israel is celebrating 70 years of national
independence, and there’s a huge irony in
that number.
For it was in the year 70 that the last Jewish
Commonwealth was destroyed by the Roman Empire,
and the Temple, the center of gravity of the
Jewish people, was destroyed.
The rebirth of Israel is nothing short of
a miracle.
It involved dedication, commitment of a national
movement that began with the establishment
of Zionism, which is the national liberation
movement of the Jewish people.
That movement, through brilliant diplomacy
of our forefathers, like Theodore Herzl and
Chaim Weizmann, brought the energies of a
people back together and allowed for the Declaration
of Independence by David Ben-Gurion in 1948.
At its birth, Israel was attacked by multiple
Arab armies around it, and if you look at
the data, at just the very statistics of Israel’s
situation, we were a country not even today
with 8 million people.
But our neighbors, who have been at war with
us all these years, they have about 300 million.
If you look at our territory, territorially
Israel is a country with little or no strategic
depth.
For example, it takes only four minutes for
a Soviet Sukhoi 24 jet fighter to cross from
the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,
giving Israel very little early warning time.
Ten thousand square miles.
You could drop Israel into the Great Lakes,
and you wouldn’t even hear the splash.
But our Arab neighbors have 650 times the
amount of territory.
That gives them a distinct strategic advantage.
It creates a basic asymmetry between Israel
and the countries around it.
Yet Israel, over the last 70 years, has managed
to persevere.
That’s the miracle that Israelis will think
about when they consider what the meaning
is of the country being 70 years old.
There was this extraordinary commitment to
innovation.
Every time our adversaries threw at us another
strategic challenge, we had an answer.
Just even recently, we’ve been facing this
threat of rocket fire from Lebanon and the
Gaza Strip.
So what does Israel do?
It develops the first really working rocket
defense system, after we developed missile
defense systems 10, 20 years ago.
To replace the rocket, our adversaries develop
tunnels.
Tunnels are an old technology, but these tunnels
were going to allow terrorists to come in
their hundreds into Israeli territory and
kill innocent civilians.
What does Israel do?
It makes the first anti-tunnel system in the
world.
So innovation that came out of military necessity
helped give Israel a scientific and technological
leg-up.
What Israel developed was a formula for integrating
diverse immigrants into our society - people
from backgrounds like the Soviet Union, Ethiopia,
Germany, the United States, India, Great Britain,
and despite many flavors of Israeli society
we became one.
That determination, that commitment, to making
the Zionist experiment work gave us enormous
strength for facing every challenge that was
hurled against us.
People like to ask, is Israel closer to being
a Sparta, a military powerhouse, or an Athens,
a country with art, poetry, and excellent
universities?
Frankly, Israel has to be both.
You can’t have an Athens in a dangerous
Middle East unless you have some qualities
of being a Sparta, which is able to defend
itself.
Since the days of its founding in 1948, Israel
developed a doctrine that it must defend itself
by itself.
Certainly, there are threats that are hard
for Israel to handle alone.
In the days of the Cold War, we couldn’t
hold back the Soviet Union just by relying
on our own skills.
We had an alliance with America.
Before that, we had an alliance with France.
But we have shown an ability, certainly with
respect to the countries that have threatened
us from the Middle East, to withstand anything
they can throw at us by ourselves.
That also gives us a moral edge in the struggle
for world public opinion.
The Israeli holiday cycle does something which
is very unusual in the world.
In fact, it’s very unique.
Before we reach the day of commemoration of
our national independence, we have a day to
remember those soldiers who fell in all of
Israel’s Wars, because I think Israelis
understand that our successes today, our independence,
would have been impossible if it wasn’t
for those who were willing to sacrifice their
lives so that we could remain free.
Now, as we look forward to commemorating 70
years of Israel’s independence, we bow our
heads to those who made that independence
possible.
We go from a keen memory of the past to the
tremendous joy and anticipation of Israel’s
future.
