On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Within hours, five Arab armies crossed its borders. The new state had no air force to speak of, no heavy armor, and a civilian population that had just emerged from the ruins of the Holocaust. Most Western analysts quietly assumed the experiment would be over within weeks.

They were wrong. And in the seventy-eight years since, the world has been wrong about Israel in the same way, over and over again.

I am an American. I have never held Israeli citizenship, and I do not pretend otherwise. But Israel is the only Jewish nation state on earth – the singular place where Jewish sovereignty, Jewish culture, and Jewish continuity are anchored in law and in land. For a Jew of my generation, one who lost family in the Shoah and has spent decades working to preserve the memory of those who perished, that is not an abstraction. It is home in the only sense that transcends a passport.

Consider what Israel has accomplished since that declaration in Tel Aviv. A largely arid land with no natural resources has become one of the most innovative economies on earth. Israeli researchers have made foundational contributions to medicine, agriculture, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. The country that once rationed food and water now exports technology and know-how to nations many times its size. In a region where democratic governance remains the exception, Israel has held free elections – contentious, raucous, sometimes maddening – without interruption for nearly eight decades.

None of this was inevitable. All of it was earned.

Israel has fought for its survival in every decade of its existence – in 1948, in 1967, in 1973, and in the many conflicts since – including October 7 and war ongoing since. Each war was supposed to be the one it could not survive. Each time, it did. What has changed in recent years is something the founders of the state could hardly have imagined: that nations which once sent armies to destroy Israel are now coordinating with it. When Iran launched a massive drone and missile assault in April 2024, it was repelled not by Israel alone but by a coalition that included Jordan and Saudi Arabia providing critical intelligence and logistical support. For the past two months we have seen these alliances continue to grow and deepen. Former enemies, acting in common cause. That is not a minor diplomatic footnote. It is a transformation in the strategic landscape of the Middle East that would have seemed like fantasy a generation ago.

The Abraham Accords formalized what geography and common interests had long been pointing toward: that Israel’s neighbors have more to gain from its success than from its destruction. The degradation of Iranian power – its proxy armies weakened, its air defenses exposed, its regional ambitions set back by years – has accelerated that realignment. A Middle East that once defined itself by opposition to the Jewish state is, slowly and unevenly, beginning to define itself alongside it. It will take time, but when the dust of the war settles, change will happen. There is still hard work ahead. The challenges of extending that regional architecture further, of securing durable arrangements on Israel’s borders, and of combating the resurgence of antisemitism in Western cities and on university campuses, demand sustained vigilance. Peace in this region has never arrived fully formed, and it will not now.

But on this seventy-eighth independence day, I find myself genuinely – not performatively – optimistic.

Israel is not the fragile experiment the world dismissed in 1948. It is a mature, powerful, innovative democracy that has internalized the lesson its enemies have refused to learn: that pressure does not break Israel – it forges it. Every generation has faced its defining test. Every generation has come through stronger than the one before.

The next seventy-eight years will bring challenges we cannot yet imagine. They will also bring breakthroughs we cannot yet imagine – in medicine, in technology, in the not-impossible prospect of a Middle East that has moved fully beyond war as its default mode of interaction. History does not move in straight lines, but it does move.

To Israel at seventy-eight: you were told, again and again, that you could not survive, could not prosper, could not hold. You have spent nearly eight decades proving otherwise. Happy Independence Day – Yom Tazmuat Same’ach – and keep going.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)