As a supporter of Israel I have been disheartened by the brutal carnage inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza.  I asked my learned brother, who moved there in the early 1980s and made a life, "Tell me some good stuff about Israel."  Here is his response:

Israel, with no natural resources, limited farming land and an insane amount of its budget of necessity going to defending its borders, first became agriculturally self-sufficient and then a regional economic powerhouse, with more companies on the Nasdaq than any other country except the U.S. and China.

After Israel’s War of Independence, Israel was an impoverished country with few allies, few resources (see above) and social upheaval.  Yet it took in almost a million refugees, including holocaust survivors, but primarily immigrants from Arab countries from which they were violently expelled after pogroms, discrimination and repression. Doubling the population with penniless immigrants was an insane act that put the survival of the country at risk, without the ability to provide the new arrivals with adequate homes, jobs, food or healthcare.  Everyone in the country (including our parents) sacrificed in order to do this because being a place where Jews can seek refuge has always been the whole raison d’etre of the Zionist movement, and the later mass immigration of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews was equally irrational but ideological.  No other country has done anything like this, and I doubt ever will.  

Israel is the first country on the scene of any natural disaster anywhere in the world, with rapid response teams, field hospitals and emergency crews that are the envy of the world.  This is not propaganda. Theoretically it’s good for Israel’s public image, but I doubt any non-Jews even know about this.  All these people, doctors, nurses, rescue teams, are volunteers.  It is a nationally sponsored act of altruism.

Israel is a world leader in several environmental endeavors.  Among other things, Israel recycles 90% of its waste water and 75% of its drinking water is from desalinated ocean water. Israel is one of the only countries in the world with more trees at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning.  Agriculturally, Israel has exported life-sustaining knowledge, equipment and innovation to the whole world (We know about Netafim because of the Kassels, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.)

Getting close to home, Mom spent her life supporting the Hadassah Hospital, which is still the leading research hospital in the Middle East, but far from the only exemplary health institution in Israel.  All of them take care of everyone.  Israel’s health system does not just guarantee health care as a right for all its citizens, but also provides healthcare for Palestinians in the occupied territories who cannot get the level of care they need from the hospitals in the Palestinian Authority.  Whenever there is a conflict in the Middle East (like the Civil War in Syria) and it is possible to help, civilians are airlifted to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

Speaking of medicine, Israel is a leader in medical research and innovation.  The list of Israeli inventions and developments that have saved lives is staggering.

Of course, it’s not only medicine.  Your life has been made easier in a thousand ways by Israeli tech innovations:  Google “List of Israeli inventions and discoveries.”  It’s mind-boggling. 

NGO’s:  Israel has hundreds of NGO’s. 

But not only NGOs that help Palestinians or promote coexistence.   NGO’s that help the handicapped, victims of sexual violence, environmental advocacy, youth at risk etc.  

But not only NGO’s.  Civil protest is a way of life here.  A half a million people demonstrated last week to stop the war, bring home the hostages and end the suffering in Gaza.  (That’s 5% of the population.  Where were the millions demonstrating to stop the war in Iraq?  Some letters to the editor maybe.  Otherwise, crickets.) 

Religious tolerance.  Israel is the home of the holiest sites of five religions.  For four of them (Jews, Christians, Bahais and Druze) their number one holiest site.  For Islam, their third holiest site.  There is freedom of religion for all.  Baha'is are persecuted all over the Middle East, and in most countries they are literally illegal.  In Israel they have complete freedom of religion.  This is often the case for the Druze as well, who are currently being slaughtered in the “new” Syria.  Muslims from every country in the world can pray in Al Aqsa (the shrine in Jerusalem that includes the Dome of the Rock) including countries with whom Israel is legally in a state of war.  By contrast, no Jew set foot in the sacred section of Jerusalem for 19 years when it was under Jordanian rule.   There are 15 million Ahmadi Muslims in the world.  This pacifist sect of Islam is hounded, imprisoned, persecuted and often completely illegal throughout the Muslim world.  As a result, their yearly international conference is in Haifa.   How about that?  The only place where Ahmadi Muslims can safely congregate is in the Zionist Entity.

Gay rights:  It goes without saying that the Tel Aviv Gay Pride parade is the biggest in the Middle East.  (Because there aren’t any others.  Lebanon tried once and then decided that they were putting too many people’s lives at risk by even staging the event.)  Per capita, with 150,000 attendees in a country of 10 million, Tel Aviv hosts the largest Gay Pride event in the world.  In spite of the macho Israeli ethos, the Israeli Army has a hands-off approach to gay soldiers and officers, and in spite of the power of the rabbinate here, gay couples can adopt, share health benefits, insurance benefits etc.  The speaker of the Knesset, Amir Ohana, is an openly gay married father of two.  

I would add that Israel is still a country that has socialist underpinnings, going much further than the US to take care of its poor, its addicts, its handicapped, etc.  Not to keep comparing to the US, but the life expectancy here is 5 years longer, and the infant mortality is less than half that of the US.  Israel is (shockingly to anyone who has been here) one of the safest countries in the world in which to drive, and as I tell all my tourists, you are twice as likely to be a victim of violence in the U.S. than in Israel, including during a war.  A poor person in Israel gets a heart transplant at the expense of the health system.  A poor person in the US who needs a heart transplant simply dies.

The back-story of Israel is what I am truly proud of.  It is inspiring.  There were always Jews here.  2,000 years ago there were 1.5 million.  But over the centuries most Jews lived in exile, in an unnatural condition, that is hard for us American-born Jews to appreciate.  It is not merely that there was anti-Semitism.  For 19 out of those twenty centuries Jews had no rights at all, no citizenship, no permanence, existing at the whim of princes, sultans and local clerics, wandering from country to country but preserving their faith, their learning, their devotion to community and their unique sense of peoplehood.  They should have simply disappeared, but they continued to yearn for their homeland.  Praying in the direction of Jerusalem, putting Jerusalem in every prayer and every religious ceremony.  (“Next Year in Jerusalem” at the end of every Seder for 2,000 years.  “If I forget thee O Jerusalem” at the end of every wedding.”)

The 19th century vision of Zionism was certainly naive, but somehow, miraculously, it became a reality. Jews became farmers again after centuries of being prohibited from owning land. Jewish cities were created, with an absolute explosion of Jewish creativity. The last hundred years here have been one of the greatest periods of cultural efflorescence in Jewish history, with the continued flowering of all sorts of diaspora Jewish culture and the creation of kaleidoscopic hybrids of things — Orthodox women rabbis, secular yeshivot, punk rock religious music — that are also so open to influences from around the world. A new theater. New music. New poetry. New literature. All worldly. All Jewish.

Hebrew was reborn.  Today it is once again spoken in its birthplace, used to write novels, teach engineering, publish newspapers, write poems and sing love songs.  Nowhere else in the world does this exist. No Greeks can understand ancient Greek, but I sing every Friday night the songs written by King David 3,000 years ago and they are in my children’s native language.

But Israel is also the refuge of the Jews of the world.  Love it or hate it, after 2,000 years no Jew has to ever worry again that he has no place to go.  

It is also the spiritual and national center of the Jewish people.  Love it or hate it, it is the only place that you can go and live according to the Hebrew calendar, in the Hebrew language, with an entirely Hebrew culture as part of the oxygen you breathe.

As you know I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and their plight, and I have a vision for our future that includes them.  But there is a simplistic view of all of this that says that Jews took some ancient fairy tales, and with the assistance of the guilt-ridden post-holocaust Europe stole land from the Palestinians and kicked them out.  The craziest accusation is that Israel is “colonialist.”  This is absurd.  Colonialism is when a home country sends a population to a place to exploit its resources, enrich the home country and kill or enslave the locals, converting them to the “home-country” culture.  Which home country sent the Jews to Israel?  What European language do they now speak in this land?  (like French in Sierra Leone and Spanish in South America).  Which home country did we enrich by “stealing” this land.  Until 1948, every square centimeter of land here was purchased by the Jewish people before settlement.  The true colonialists were the Arabs in the 7th century.  They were the most successful colonialists that ever lived, and their colonialist project lives on today throughout the Middle East, from Morocco to Indonesia. The claim that the Jews colonized here is absurd when you consider that 2,000 years ago there were 1.5 million Jews here, and there continued to be a Jewish presence here for 20 centuries.  When Mohammad’s colonialist wars reached this land half the country was still Jewish and half was Christian (the Byzantine Empire was also quite colonialist).  The Jewish population rose and fell but there was no Jewish Columbus, no Jewish Cecil Rhodes, no Jewish Genghis Khan, no Jewish Alexander the Great.  We were always here physically and those of us who weren’t here physically were here spiritually.  

In spite of everything, this horrible war, the government that I can’t stand, and of course, the injustice that I see every week in Masafar Yatta, I feel blessed to have been born in a time when I can be here, be part of this, fight what I disagree with here and cherish what I love about this place.

Hope this was helpful.

Much love,

Your baby brother...

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Thanks brother.  I needed that.