Modern Israel's 60th Anniversary

In 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of the Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Arab League rejected the two-state plan and Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq launched a massive military attack designed to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean. But on May 14, 1948, the Jewish provisional government declared Israel's independence and the nascent country was able to defeat the combined armies that invaded. Meanwhile, Jordan had taken control of the West Bank and Egypt took control of Gaza. The Palestinians living in those regions did not attack Jordan or Egypt, nor did they demand their independence nor complain that they were being oppressed or occupied by foreign imperialists.

The current issue of Commentary Magazine responds to current criticism of the only democratic and free country in the Middle East:

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.

Read the whole article: 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians: Annotated Text, by Efraim Karsh