THE Daily Telegraph salutes the state of Israel on its 50th anniversary - and prays that its second half-century will be more peaceful and secure than the first. We take particular pride in extending such greetings. Since the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which committed Britain to the creation of a Jewish national home, this newspaper has been one of the most consistent supporters of Zionist aspirations. Whatever the disappointments and errors of the intervening years, nothing can erase our sense of wonderment at the recreation of a free Jewish polity, after a gap of nearly two millennia. "Next year in Jerusalem", once a pious aspiration at the end of the Passover ceremony, has become a triumphant, teeming reality. When Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, put forward the idea of such a commonwealth in 1897, many laughed, but his call was answered. More than 100 years on, the Jewish population of the Holy Land has risen from a few thousand downtrodden subjects in a backwater of the Ottoman Empire to nearly five million. Hebrew, once for literary and liturgical use, has been reborn as a living language - perhaps the crucial vehicle for the reunification of the Jewish people after their long exile.
Israel has survived, against the odds. This has been bought at a tremendous price - in blood, treasure and peace of mind. Like their predecessors, Israel's current leaders know that more than 100 million Arabs can survive scores of defeats on the battlefield, whereas the Jews need only lose once to suffer either oblivion or another Diaspora. Although Israel's margins of safety are not quite as thin as they once were, they still remain too close for comfort. The large, conventional Arab armies of the past have been replaced by suicide bombers and weapons of mass destruction. As Golda Meir once put it, Israel would very much have liked for her neighbours to have been as civilised as Norway and Sweden; but instead, her region still comprises such tyrannies as Iran, Iraq and Syria. Even the 1979 treaty with Egypt has yielded only the coldest of peaces.
Yet Zionism has never been about mere survival. Its greatest exponents knew that the Jewish renascence would become meaningful only if Israel became "a light unto the nations". To what extent has this hope been fulfilled? Not withstanding the 50-year conflict with her neighbours, Israel has not succumbed to the temptations of authoritarianism or militarism. Indeed, the very reverse is the case: the Jewish state resembles the Roman republic, where martial and political virtue went hand in hand. True, its electoral system of proportional representation is a wonderful advertisement for first-past-the-post; but, for all its faults, such hyper-democracy remains preferable even to the enlightened form of despotism practised by King Hassan of Morocco. Tensions between Sephardis and Ashkenazis have, in the main, been successfully mediated by Israel's parliamentary institutions; but the growing strength of the ultra-orthodox, who increasingly refuse to contribute to this modern secular state, could well be the greatest domestic challenge to the stability of Israeli society. The judiciary is a model of independence, even though the long war against terrorism requires a level of recourse to emergency powers which, understandably, leave many uneasy.
That war owes much to the still-unfulfilled aspirations of Palestinian nationalism. Ever since the beginnings of the modern Zionist enterprise, too little thought has been given to how the Arab residents of the Promised Land would fit in with the task of Jewish state-building. The Palestinian people continue to suffer, and to be denied the freedom to be a nation that the Israelis treasure for themselves. However big a mess Arabs have made of all this, Israel is not absolved of responsibility. This point has long been made by some of Israel's staunchest friends. Winston Churchill, the greatest of the "gentile Zionists", said as much in the 1920s, when he observed that "every step you take should also be for normal and material benefit of all Palestinians. If you do this, Palestine will be happy and prosperous, and peace and concord will always reign." Let us hope that he was right and that, in the long run, Israeli actions can have so soothing an effect on their Palestinian neighbours. We wish Israel well for the next 50 years - the luck to survive and the will to act justly.
