Under 71 Years of Gunfire by Valerie Sobel

Happy Birthday, the one and only resilient, courageous, creative, remarkable, life-affirming Israel. 

A country only 71 years young?

A nation of a tiny 6 Million Jews, which was just awarded the status of the second most creative/innovative country on earth, second only to the USA of 329 Million (incidentally, comprised of 5.7 Million Jews - make your own deductions).

She took her first breath after a 2000-year coma (a.k.a. the exile of her indigenous people when she was known as Judea) at the 1920s-1930s arrival of dirt-poor pioneers like Golda Meir and Ben Gurion. Pioneers with nothing but shovels in their hands, post their escape from horrendous persecution of Jews in Bolshevik Russia and pogroming Poland.

The dreamer-pioneers were joined by skeletal Holocaust survivors, who were regularly shot at by the British, as they attempted to jump from ships and swim ashore in the 1940s. These survivors, having lost everything and everyone, still had Jewish dignity and hope in them.

Together they fought the Arabs and the British Mandate by the sheer chutzpah of The Haganah, a necessitated civilian "army" of children, women and men. Under the leadership of heroic men like Menachem Begin, orphaned, disenfranchised, stateless, embattled, starving European Jews of quantum physics and crying violins, took up guns and grenades in order to survive in the swampy desert of their ancestors against their dangerous haters.

Post 1917 Balfour declaration, the tragedy of the Holocaust and the advocacy/fundraising of American Jews for a Jewish State, a miracle of all miracles happened - in April of 1948, Israel was proclaimed a sovereign Jewish State by a UN vote overwhelmingly in favour (33:13).

Overnight, all 22 neighboring Arab States began immediate ethnic cleansing of their Jewish populations.

900,000 Jews from every Arab country of the Middle East were exiled, annexed from all their personal assets and possessions. The 900,000 walk (walk!) to their new home, a home with a barely established source of fresh water and no tree in sight.

And if that's not enough, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Arab Liberation army - an aggregate 63,000 warriors making up a well-established military machine, declare immediate war on Israel.

The infantile, one day old country of dirt-digging pioneers, homeless refugees and skeletal Holocaust survivors comprising the untrained, un-uniformed "army" of 30,000 under the heroic leadership of an American, General Mickey Marcus...braces, again, for another Holocaust.

...and so the battle of evil vs. good began. The same battle fought every day since and for the last 71 years and which has now taken the lives of 28,904 Jewish soldiers. Soldiers from every ethnic pedigree and language, farmers, doctors, professors, writers, lawyers, mathematicians, physicists and violinist. All thanks to Islam.

Yesterday Israel fought off 600 Palestinian rockets and buried four citizens at the same time as it tried landing on the moon and innovated more science & technology than anyone on earth except the USA.

Today Israel celebrates 71 years of its rebirth. Tomorrow it will fight another day for its survival amongst the same evil.

No other country on earth has had to fight to exist everyday of its sovereign life. Nor justify its existence by unprecedented scientific discoveries, artistic feats, academic advances, medical treatments of enemies in her hospitals, aid to every international disaster zone, world-class competitions, medical exports to the world, environmental miracles in car technology & agriculture, or any other achievements. Nor had to be besieged by 600 rockets without any room to annihilate its enemy.

Every other Judeo-Christian nation simply lives and breathes - no questions asked, nothing to prove, no Islam to fight 24/7.

Next time you're on a plane and see its landing gear, or use your cell phone, or check into a nearby hospital equipped with medical tools that will save your life, drive an electric-powered car, or when you buy flowers on streets of European capitals or chew on a cherry tomato anywhere in the world, think of Israel. Israel did that. And so much more. And all under 71 years of gunfire.

Happy Birthday, the one and only resilient, courageous, creative, remarkable, life-affirming Israel.

Am Israel Chai.