The query “Can Israel survive?” has echoed loud for Israelis—and Jews, their supporters and adversaries worldwide—since the Holocaust. the new upheavals in Egypt, Tunisia and past have raised it anew. Israeli journalist and safeguard analyst Hirsh Goodman got down to resolution it, via rigorous real overview of every of the demanding situations his nation faces, and through consulting specialists and individuals on each side of each complicated factor. yet what he discovered was once that this as soon as ‘essential query’ has turn into a deadly distraction.

during this provocative and deeply knowledgeable e-book, Goodman stocks his clarifying analyses either one of fresh political occasions and of Israel’s strategic place. He exhibits how the country’s obsession with hazards posed via open air forces has obscured the tougher matters dealing with it from inside of ever because its leaders passed over Ben Gurion’s recommendation to go away the territories captured in the course of the Six Day battle. through yoking itself to the demographic timebomb of the West financial institution and Gaza, Israel propelled itself in the direction of an invidious selection: democracy or Jewish identification. Now, Goodman argues, Israel’s survival is jeopardized extra by means of the competence of its leaders and fissures in its social and political procedure than by means of any outdoor threat—even the apocalyptic-sounding ones from Iran.

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Responsible for training the IDF’s officers’ corps and the army’s logistics was Haim Laskov, who had served with Orde Wingate’s Night Squads, fought the Nazis in Germany, graduated from the British army with the rank of major, and worked for Aliya Bet saving Jewish refugees from Europe. The chief of staff, wise and seasoned Yaakov Dori, left Ukraine after the 1905 pogrom, completed high school at the Reali in Haifa, joined the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I, headed the Haganah in problematic Haifa with its sizable Arab population, and since 1939, under the close watch of Ben Gurion, had been building the Israel Defense Forces, bringing together the Haganah, Palmach, and Jewish undergrounds into one cohesive, disciplined army serving the new sovereign government of the Jewish state.

In addition, thousands of volunteers, Jewish and non-Jewish, flooded into Israel, many graduates of action in World War II. Of the Israel air force’s 205 pilots, 180 were volunteers from 15 countries, some of whom could not speak the same language, not an uncommon problem at the time. The War of Independence, as Israel calls it, or the Nakba, “catastrophe,” in Palestinian terminology, left 6,372 Israelis dead, almost 1 percent of the Jewish population of pre-state Palestine, more deaths than in all of Israel’s other wars combined.

Be it through Holocaust denial or international condemnation, Israel’s continued de-legitimization is a peg of Iranian foreign policy, and what better tool than flooding the airwaves with pictures of Jews killing innocent Arab women and children in response to attacks from Gaza and Lebanon? The Iranians have come to understand full well that the world’s memory is as long as the last newscast. The damage to Israel from border wars is tremendous. Already the country spends 9 percent of its GDP on defense, the highest ratio in the developed world.

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