Whats so special about a countrys 64th birthday?
Well, in the case of most nations, perhaps not all that much, unless the country happens to be Israel, which celebrates its birthday this year on April 25 and 26.
Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only UN member state whose right to exist is regularly challenged, whose elimination from the world map is the aim of at least one other UN member state, Iran, and whose population centers are deemed fair game by Hamas-controlled Gaza and Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. Thus, Israels sheer act of survival from year to year is itself noteworthy.
None of the countries that are serial human-rights violators not Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Sudan, or any of the others gets anything near the relentless, obsessive, guilty-till-proven-innocent scrutiny that democratic Israel receives from UN bodies, with their built-in, anti-Israel majorities, in New York and Geneva.
No other country is the target of such non-stop, well-funded, and highly-organized campaigns to discredit, delegitimize, and demonize a sovereign state.
No other country faces such systematic attempts to launch boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions against it, not to mention flotillas and flytillas, and all the while those behind the efforts, claiming to speak for human rights, blithely ignore places like Syria, where thousands were killed in the past year alone, because they cant claim an Israeli connection.
And no other country has its right to self-defense challenged as Israel does, even though it does no more than any other nation would do if confronted by periodic terrorist assaults and deadly missile and rocket attacks.
I have enormous admiration for Israel for its resolve, resilience, courage, and ingenuity.
Other nations might have succumbed, after 64 years of uninterrupted hostility, to the enemies trying everything under the sun to destroy them and, short of that, to demoralize and isolate them. But Israel has not flinched. It refuses to cave. It keeps confounding its foes.
Happy 64th Birthday, Israel! | Jerusalem Post - Blogs