What fortune the Arabs have that they picked the Jewish State to be their enemy. Were it any other nation, they would not garner a fraction of the attention that they currently do. During Israel’s 54th year, while the UN, the EU, the Arab League and other organizations were holding emergency meeting after emergency meeting to discuss the deaths in clashes in Israel, and unhesitatingly condemned the Jewish state, similar or greater numbers of people were killed in violent clashes in Nepal, Indonesia, Colombia, India, Algeria, Nigeria, Somalia, Madagascar, Afghanistan, of course, Yemen and, I am sure, other places that did not even make it onto any media radar screen. Unfortunately, the mass attention Israel garners is not always of the best kind. Perhaps it grabs the headlines because it is a place of passionate conflict and historical grudges, religious wars and acts of sacrilege that resonate with much of the Western world.

Maybe, but I think Israel is just a good story. Not the way the journalists look at it, though. More like an epic story of constructive Good.

In the 54 years of Israel’s existence, it has changed from a place where, in the 1950’s, food and basic supplies were rationed, to a place where Israeli technology companies regularly pull down foreign investments of millions of dollars and Moody’s Investors Service has given Israel an A2 credit rating. It has developed a free press unheard of in the Middle East, as was evident even in the large number of newspapers available in pre-State times. It has reinvigorated the Jewish faith, after European Judaism was all but exterminated in the Holocaust. It has gone from a place where an immigrant’s first dwelling was likely to be a tent, to a place where immigrants are upset when they discover that they cannot import a car more than two years old. It has gone from a place where Jewish pioneers died while clearing malaria-infested swampland, to a place where modern-day Jewish pioneers are working on a cure for heart disease. It has changed from a place struggling to survive, to a place criticized for doing so too successfully.

The real secret of the Jewish state, however, is its people. Since the start of 2002 alone, 5,169 Jews have immigrated to Israel and today, Israeli Independence Day, 212 Jews arrived in Israel from Argentina, the latest of the approximately 1,500 Argentinean Jews who have come home over the past year. In the past weeks, more than 600 new immigrants arrived in Israel from the FSU and Eastern Europe, from Ethiopia and from Argentina, from France, South Africa, Germany, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, the U.S., Canada and India. Israel is an amalgam of Jews from all over the world, drawn to it by faith and nationhood, taking part in the great ingathering of the exiles. The population of Israel in 1948 was about 600,000 (similar to the number of Israelites that left Egypt in the Biblical Exodus). Within three years, the population had more than doubled, as 687,000 Jews flooded Israel’s shores. The majority of those early immigrants were Holocaust survivors from displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, much of what remained of the Jewish communities of Poland and Bulgaria, and nearly the entire Jewish populations of Libya, Yemen, Morocco and Iraq. All together, since 1948, the Jewish State has absorbed 2.7 million immigrants, all the while facing determined enemies intent on its destruction.

Above all, of course, stands the larger, dramatic story of the Jewish people, predicted in the Bible, but wholly unpredictable. A nation whose land was usurped by an Empire, then conquered and re-conquered by various other imperious nations, eventually reclaims its inheritance, after all of the conquering “eternal” empires have faded from history. The chronology of events bespeaks volumes: The Land of Israel sees its first centralized Jewish state in circa 1020 BCE; it is conquered by the Babylonians a little over 400 years later, and the Jews are exiled. The Babylonian empire eventually gives way to the Persians and, less than a generation later, the land welcomes its native sons back to rebuild the center of Jewish life, the Temple in Jerusalem. After the Persians give way to the Greeks, the Jews, under the Hasmoneans (Maccabees) establish the Second Jewish Commonwealth, about 160 BCE. That state exists for approximately 240 years, until it is eventually crushed by the Romans, who later transform themselves into the Byzantines. In 614, the Persians take the Land of Israel from its previous captors. Then, in 636 CE, the Moslem Arab hordes come from the Arabian peninsula and impose their own “occupation” on the Land of Israel. Eventually, they give way to the Crusaders in the Middle Ages. Then another “liberator” arrives from the east, the Kurdish Salah e-Din (Saladin). His rule is replaced by the Mameluks of Egypt and eventually the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Towards the end of that imperial rule, in the late 1800’s, the Jews begin to return once again, and the Land, which had remained largely fallow since the Roman exile, welcomes them back. After the British Empire takes the land from the Sick Man of Europe, it is but a short time until it is returned to the Jews once again. In 1948 CE, the Third Jewish Commonwealth is established in the Land of Israel. Throughout all of the conquests by foreign interlopers, Jews have maintained a constant presence in the Land of Israel. Thus, since the Babylonian exile of Judea, there has been no independent state constituted wholly by native sons of the Land of Israel, but those Commonwealths established by the Jews.

The Land’s original sovereigns are returning to give life to this, our Third Commonwealth. No one can halt the great story of Good from progressing. Least of all, the aging two-bit gangster from Egypt who is holed up in Ramallah.