70 Years of Miracles

The Fellowship  |  April 20, 2018

The Israeli flag on a pole waving in the sky with an old brick building behind it.

While the world continues to look at the problems it sees in Israel and portray the Jewish state in a negative light, this type of outlook overlooks the miraculous story of Israel and her people. Our good friend at JNS, Jonathan Tobin, writes that instead the focus should be on the miraculous turnaround God performed for the Jewish people:

The problem in our thinking about 70 years of Israeli independence is rooted in its normalcy. Those who grew up in the second half of the 20th century, let alone the 21st, think of Israel’s existence as a given. We relate to it in terms of what we think of its prime minister or our opinions about what it should do to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, with battles over religious pluralism and its treatment of migrants from Africa—or whatever the issue of the day might be.

But its 70th birthday is an apt moment to try and take the long view of Israel’s importance.

What has been forgotten in its rise to the status of a First World economy and a regional military superpower is just how unlikely its existence was considered before 1948 and what that has meant to the lives of every Jew on this planet.

A century ago, even after the Balfour Declaration gave the Zionist movement its first real triumph, the notion of a Jewish state in what was then called Palestine was still considered a fantasy. For nearly 2,000 years, the Jews had been deprived of sovereignty over any part of their ancient homeland. Homelessness was not merely an unavoidable element of the plight of the Jews, but part of their identity…

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