Ra’anana, Israel — As Israel marks the 67th anniversary of its founding, I find myself reflecting on a construction sign.
With all the challenges confronting the Jewish state — from Palestinian unrest to Iranian nukes to ISIS kooks, from European disaffection to economic inequality to religious squabbling — it may seem odd to focus on an anodyne, everyday placard.
But this particular sign reflects a certain sturdy, realistic optimism that Israelis have internalized and expressed over the course of their history, and it is therefore an apt metaphor for the Jewish state’s condition.
Outside various construction sites throughout the country — of which there are too many to count — I’ve often encountered a strikingly worded warning sign, which reads: “Danger! We’re building here!” A more appropriate message could hardly be contrived.
First off, instead of saying, “Danger: Construction Site,” it uses the active Hebrew first-person-plural verb to connote that we are building here: not anonymous workmen, not a distant contractor, but we, Israelis, members of the local community. Your neighbors are making something happen, this sign proclaims.
#related#Israelis are, with some justification, known for their frankness and pride, and this sign embodies these traits. Much as a New York construction foreman might bark at a passerby encroaching on his site, “Hey, buddy, getoudadaway, we’re buildin’ somethin’ here!” so too the Israeli sign reflects the informality and feistiness of the Israeli psyche.
Second, the sign announces impending danger, an unfortunate but persistent reality for Israelis since long before the state was founded. It is less than a year ago that Israel absorbed hundreds of rockets, indiscriminately fired at civilian population centers by Hamas, which is steadily replenishing its arsenal. Iran is on the brink of having its nuclear program validated by the West, Hezbollah has stockpiled thousands of missiles on Israel’s northern border, and Sunni extremists loom menacingly on the crumbling Syrian frontier. Meanwhile, at the United Nations, the Palestinians have launched a diplomatic offensive, while their fellow travelers of the Left in Europe and America continue their campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state’s very existence.
Indeed, Jew-hatred has proven remarkably resilient, constantly evolving to suit the times. Just a few weeks ago, millions of Jews in Israel and around the world partook of the Passover Seder, in which we uttered the timeless words, “Generation after generation, our enemies seek to destroy us.” Sure enough, 3,000 years ago, it was the Egyptians; 2,500 years ago, the Babylonians, then the Persians; 2,000 years ago, the Romans; 1,000 years ago, the Crusaders. And within the last 80 years alone, the Nazis, the Communists, the Arabs, and once again the Persians have sought our destruction.
But third, and most important, the sign indicates how the Jewish people have converted the fear of destruction into a constructive force. Israel continues inexorably to build — physically, economically, technologically, socially.
Dozens of cranes populate the skylines of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and seemingly every other city and town in the country, including my own suburb, Ra’anana, where infrastructure, residential, and office-tower projects appear everywhere.
The country has also shed its earlier socialist shackles to build an advanced Western economy, centered on technological development. The recipient of more venture capital than all of Europe combined, Israel invests nearly 5 percent of its GDP in research and development, more than almost any other country in the world. It boasts the world’s second-highest concentration of high-tech companies, after only the United States, and earlier this year it was ranked fifth globally on the Bloomberg Innovation Index. The Startup Nation (or Silicon Wadi, if you prefer) has turned the Jewish state into an economic powerhouse.
Israel has also striven in recent years to equalize the playing field between rich and poor, and between Jews and Arabs, who compose roughly 20 percent of the population. The share of master’s degrees awarded to Israeli Arabs more than doubled between 2005 and 2013, and the number of Israeli Arabs working in high-tech increased sixfold between 2009 and 2014. Meanwhile, the Arab political party won a record 13 seats in the new Knesset to become the third-largest party in the country. Ethnic tensions still tremble beneath the surface, but community leaders have worked hard to calm them and to build a more just society.
And perhaps it is because Israel is building nonstop, because it has managed in such short order to transform an all-but-abandoned land of deserts and swamps into a thriving center of science, commerce, and liberal values, that the Jewish state finds itself in such great danger from the dark forces that disdain all of those things.
What a terrible waste, especially given that exactly 67 years ago, David Ben-Gurion, the new country’s first prime minister, said that Israel “extend[ed] the hand of peace and good-neighborliness to all the States around us and to their people” and promised to “make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.” That hand of peace has largely been scorned (and worse) by those same dark forces that seek to throttle the region’s advancement — and Israel’s existence.
But those threats won’t stop Israelis from building, not in the slightest. The ever-burgeoning project of constructing Jewish statehood will continue apace despite (or perhaps because of) the ever-present dangers.