60th anniversary of Israel
Today is the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel.
Among the many media pieces marking the event, I thought that this article was a good assessment of the situation.
You can read my review of a book on the Arab-Israeli conflict here.
A year ago, I visited Israel and you can read my account of the trip here. I concluded my narrative as follows:
“Israel is a country of great contrasts and contradictions. It has biblical and archaeological sites dating back 4,000 years and yet it is the most modern state in the Middle East by far. Its citizens come from all over the world and consist of the fanatically religious and the totally secular and everything in between. There is desert in the south but green hills in the north with the beautiful Sea of Galilee and the saline Dead Sea in between. It has a city (Jerusalem) that is especially holy to three major world religions and a church (the Holy Sepulchre) that is contested by six denominations. There is quite simply no country like it.
One has to hope that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be resolved soon and, if it is, the basis may well be a version of the Geneva Accord of December 2003. Israel has been a great success as a nation state, creating a dynamic economy and a vibrant democracy with a free media. It is not the apartheid state that some of its critics charge. But equally too it does not treat its Jewish and Arab citizens equally and the behaviour towards Arabs in the occupied territories is often shameful. Security for Israel and land for the Palestinians cannot come soon enough”