Article content continued

Netanyahu’s victory, to which U.S. President Trump made a significant contribution, by moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognizing the annexation to Israel of the Golan Heights, along with the emergence of a strong and coherent opposition under a compelling leader, the Blue and White Party of Gen. Benny Gantz, marks several milestones in Israel’s progress. This is the first time the country has had two parties that between them had a solid majority since the more stressed days of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir on the right (Likud) and mainly Sephardim, and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres on the moderate left-Labour (Mapai) and mainly Ashkenazi. (Sephardic Jews are mainly of North African and Middle Eastern origin and Ashkenazi are mainly European.) Netanyahu has reconstructed Likud from the residue left after Ariel Sharon took most of the Likud Party into a new party (Kadima) more disposed to negotiate, in 2005, leaving Netanyahu holding the bag with only a handful of Likud legislators.

Palestine was never going to be a large state, but it can be a prosperous and peaceful one

In evaluating what Israel has achieved in its 71 years of history as an independent state, it is good to remember that it began as a strip of desert, the refuge for a people nearly half of whose entire population, after over 5,000 years of distinctive existence, had been exterminated in the death-camps of the Third Reich. Israel was the belated homeland for a tragically and savagely reduced people, and it set up in an ill-favoured land of (as the Roman governor Pontius Pilate said in the first century AD), “sand, camels and Jehovah”). Officially, Israel has been at war for its entire history, and yet this beleaguered, ancient, exhausted land, without resources except recently discovered off-shore oil and natural gas, and painstakingly expanded agriculture, and the inexhaustible ingenuity, dedication and courage of its people — Jews from all over the world — has flourished miraculously.