All Fall Down: The Uncertain Future of the Only Solution for Israel and Palestine
Since its birth as a state 65 years ago, Israel has faced one existential challenge after another: hot wars, cold wars, terrorism, and rejectionism; early near-death experiences for the fragile and unlikely Jewish state, surrounded by hostile neighbors; the persistent equation of its very rationale as a state -- Zionism -- with racism and imperialism; and beneath this, the ongoing real racism that never seems to die, a dark form of intolerance that repeatedly rises like the soul of Lord Voldemort: anti-Semitism.
As a state still heavily shaped by the traumatic circumstances of its birth, out of the ashes of the Holocaust; as a people who have come so close historically to annihilation, Israel has a natural and understandable proclivity to feel insecure and to fear the worst. When a state has fought seven wars in 65 years, and a roughly equal number of other military conflicts, it has reason to feel that its survival is constantly on the line, and to spend, tax, draft, and innovate heavily and relentlessly to defend itself. Against the long odds of these formidable challenges, Israel's development ranks by any measure as one of the most remarkable achievements of any post-World War II nation. It is a story not merely of survival but of booming success: the entrenchment of vigorous democratic institutions and freedoms, the flowering of the desert, cutting-edge scientific and technological inventions, and rapid economic development that has propelled this embattled nation of immigrants into the ranks of the world's rich, highly industrialized democracies. Today, Israel ranks 16th On the United Nations' Human Development Index.
But the dominant mood in Israel today is anxiety more than celebration. The principal source of this anxiety is not the ongoing deep internal divisions in what has long been, and has increasingly become, a deeply divided society. Neither is it the gathering international campaign, gaining momentum particularly in Europe, to "boycott, sanction, and divest" from Israel. The root of this anxiety remains what it has always been: an abiding sense of insecurity. Despite the astonishing leaps in Israel's military power and technology (as symbolized by the success of its "Iron Dome" air defense system in shooting down an estimated 90 percent of the rockets launched from Gaza last year against Israeli civilians), Israel cannot relax. At the moment it is not at war, but it is also not at peace. Much deadlier and more accurate weapons lie in the vast arsenals of a Syrian state that is slowly disintegrating in a civil war. Hence the recent Israeli air strikes on Syrian weapons caches that were apparently about to be shipped across the border in Lebanon to Hezbollah.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/all-fall-down-the-uncertain-future-of-the-only-solution-for-israel-and-palestine/275811/