Shimshon 9

Elder of Zion posted Proud to be a Zionist (5768 edition). I absolutely agree with him. Now that we are celebrating Israel’s 60th Birthday we shouldn’t forget that having a Jewish state is not something granted.

Here some reasons to be proud of Israel and Zionism:

1. Israel redeemed the honor of the Jewish people. Jews are no longer thought of as passive, contemptible cowards.
2. Israel is the oldest working democracy in the Middle East. Turkey and Iraq have joined us. Welcome.
3. Israel has fought for the rights of Jews in the USSR and elsewhere and has helped them to win their freedom, regardless of whether they came to live in Israel or opted to live elsewhere.
4. The Zionist community in Palestine, despite meager resources and Arab and British opposition, rescued hundreds of thousands of European Jews who would have otherwise perished in the Holocaust.
5. Israel has successfully absorbed millions of Jewish immigrants from all over the world - people of many races and backgrounds including Jews from Europe, Asia and Africa.
6. Israel is the only country in the world that has more trees at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it had at the beginning of the twentieth century.
7. Making the desert bloom is not just a slogan. In one day, the Israel National Water Carrier pumps more water than was pumped in all of Palestine in the entire year of1948.
8. Not a single Jew remained in any of the places conquered by the Jordanians and Egyptians in 1948, including the old city of Jerusalem. There are more Arabs living in Jerusalem today under Israeli rule then have ever lived there in all of recorded history.