Peace struggles cloud Israel’s birthday

The first of two parts.

TEL AVIV — When asked to assess Israel’s geopolitical standing on its 60th birthday, lawmaker Yuval Steinitz crowed. By nearly every measure — military, economic, demographic — Israel’s position has improved exponentially.

But on one crucial count, Israel has fallen short, said the former chairman of the parliamentary foreign affairs and defense committee. With Iranian missiles aimed at the Jewish state and Islamic militants gathering strength in Gaza and Lebanon, Israel has not extracted itself from the existential dangers that have faced the country since its troubled birth in 1948.

“We thought that we would be able to get rid of this threat and achieve peace and security,” he said, “but we failed.”

Therein lies the catch in Israeli success as the nation moves into its seventh decade: Although Israelis have built a regional military and economic powerhouse with a nuclear deterrent and a firm alliance with the United States, many consider the country trapped in the same life-or-death struggle it faced during the 1948 war for independence.

Struggle and tension with Arab neighbors have never ceased, so goes the argument, and Israel is still fighting for regional acceptance just as it did the day after the proclamation of independence in Tel Aviv.

President Bush is among the international dignitaries slated to arrive in Israel today to mark the 60th anniversary. As he visits, Mr. Bush is confronting major challenges in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, while his host, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is struggling to keep his job amid a corruption investigation.

Many here trace the national mixed mood of achievement and anxiety back to the seminal founding days, when military success and the birth of a Jewish state never translated into full acceptance of Israel by the Arab Middle East.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad criticized Israel yesterday for triumphantly celebrating its birthday while still ruling over Palestinians.

“I direct my speech … to the people of Israel, to say, ‘How can you?’ ” Mr. Fayyad said, according the Associated Press. “How can you celebrate and the Palestinian people are suffering from your settlements and the crimes of your settlers and the siege of your state and the conduct of your occupying army?”

But for many Israelis, the shadow of history makes it difficult to understand Palestinian anger.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud Party, to which Mr. Steinitz belongs, often compares the threat that Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon to the danger posed by Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.

Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli historian and journalist, said Mr. Netanyahu “has not yet absorbed the fact that the Jewish situation is different. If in 1938 the Jews had a nuclear deterrent, I presume that the history of the 1940s would have looked different.”

The Zionists who pushed for the founding of Israel believed that only the formation of a Jewish state could insulate Jews from the threat of persecution and give them a chance to lead a normal existence in their own homeland.

Indeed, the Jewish state has made up for its population disadvantage compared with its Arab neighbors with a technologically superior military, an economy that increasingly rivals advanced European states, a software industry that attracts venture capital and a body of literature read around the world.

Story Continues →