Many in Israel don’t seem to be too enthusiastic about the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of independence (May 8 this year according to the Jewish calendar), and columnists are discussing the paralysis born of a tiredness that appears to be the one shared characteristic across an Israel long divided into religious vs secular, settler vs cavalier, hawk vs dove, Ashkenazim vs Sephardim, Jew vs Arab. After a miraculous survival for six decades, Israel is taking stock.

Yet, remembering Mrs Lot, Israel is afraid to look back. Forty-one years ago, till June 5, 1967, Israel was a small, nervous Jewish entity surrounded by Arab governments and armies screaming into Jewish homes over the radio. The annihilation of Israel was only a matter of time. Well, history chose, over the next six days, to vanquish the Arab military in a blitzkrieg that brought Israel territory beyond what the 1948 UN resolution allowed and established its dominance in the region. But that euphoria would turn, over the next four decades, into a renewed fear psychosis and despair. And the recognition that the ancient homeland has become one of the least safe places for Jews.

At 60, a lot of things are going right for Israel — its economy is booming and Israelis have never been more prosperous, it is a big high-tech success story, and it is beginning to extract a cultural confidence from rediscovering Jewish identity and history. And yet, secular Israelis continue to migrate for reasons of security or opportunity, darkly hinting at Philip Roth’s rather Jewish joke of a “Moses in reverse”, in Operation Shylock, leading the Jews out of an unsafe Israel into a safer Europe!

... contd.