Rosh Hashanah 2026: Israel’s 78-year miracle was never supposed to happen - opinion

SEPTEMBER 13, 2026 13:37As we start 5787, let’s take stock of the incredible times we live in.In May 1948, a battered remnant of a people declared a state on a sliver of land no one else wanted. Five regular armies crossed its borders within hours. Twenty more governments wished it were gone.The Jews inside had no oil, no great-power patron willing to fight for them, almost no heavy weapons, and a fifth column already shooting from behind. The smart money said the experiment would last weeks.Seventy-eight years later, that experiment is a regional power, a technological engine, and the most successful national revival in modern history. The odds were not merely long. They were absurd. That is precisely why the story matters.The first war was supposed to finish what the Holocaust began. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq sent trained armies against a militia that had spent the previous decade smuggling rifles in crates of oranges.It’s time for us all to put on our thinking caps and discuss how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - If not to achieve peace, at least for us to live here securely. (credit: The Jerusalem Post archives)Inside the new borders, thousands of Arabs took up arms against the government that had just offered them citizenship. The Jews absorbed 6,000 dead, 1% of the entire population, and still held the line. They have not lost a war since.In 1967, they were outnumbered on three fronts and finished the fighting in six days. In 1973, they were surprised, bled, and then drove the attackers back across the canal and the Golan.Every subsequent campaign has followed the same pattern: Israel is smaller, Israel is condemned, Israel survives and wins.Survival was only the first miracle. The second was the ingathering. Nearly a million Jews fled or were expelled from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Morocco. They arrived with suitcases and trauma.Then came the remnant of European Jewry, the Soviet aliyah of the 1990s, the Ethiopians, the Indians. Israel did not merely house them. It turned refugees into citizens, conscripts, engineers, and rabbis. No other country in the 20th century absorbed so many people, from so many civilizations, in such a short time, while fighting for its life.The economic story is almost as improbable. For decades, the Arab League enforced a boycott designed to strangle the Jewish state in its crib.Later came the BDS campaign, campus resolutions, and the ritual 69-plus-1 votes at the United Nations, the 22 members of the Arab League plus a rotating bloc of 48 African and Asian states that treat isolation of Israel as a standing agenda item.Accusations escalated from “occupation” to “apartheid” to “genocide,” language borrowed from the worst crimes of the century and applied to a country that withdraws from territory, accepts cease-fires, and vaccinates its enemies. The intended result was pariah status.Instead, Israel became the Start-Up Nation. A country with no natural resources except human capital now punches far above its weight in cybersecurity, medical devices, drip irrigation, desalination, and semiconductors.Israeli firms list on Nasdaq in numbers that embarrass far larger economies. The same people who once rationed margarine now export intelligence software to governments that once would not stamp an Israeli passport.Poverty has not disappeared, inequality is real, and the cost of living is high. None of that cancels the larger fact: a poor, blockaded state became rich by selling brains.Wishes for the new yearDiplomacy followed the same improbable arc: the US, after early hesitation, became Israel’s indispensable ally. That relationship is now so deep that it survives administrations and wars.Meanwhile, Israel quietly signed defense and commercial agreements from Colombia to Finland, India to Japan, and, most strikingly, with several Arab states that once led the effort to erase it.The Abraham Accords did not end the conflict. They proved that the old consensus, no recognition until every Palestinian demand is met, was never as solid as its advocates claimed.The least-noticed success may be the most Jewish. The study halls of Europe were ash. The great yeshivas of Lithuania and Poland existed only in memory and a handful of surviving rabbis.Today, Israel houses the largest concentration of full-time Torah scholars in history.The numbers dwarf anything that existed in Vilna or Pressburg. Kolels, women’s seminaries, and community kolels have multiplied. Hesed (kindness) networks, food, medical care, burial, and mental-health support operate at a scale the shtetl never imagined. Observance is not uniform; Israel is argumentative by nature.Yet the sheer volume of learning, the density of mitzvah performance, and the public presence of Jewish life exceed anything seen since Sinai, and, in raw numbers of people sitting before open volumes, arguably surpass it.A people that was supposed to vanish rebuilt the very institutions the murderers tried to erase.None of this was inevitable. It was the product of divine providence, Jewish resilience, improvisation, and a refusal to accept the verdict of demographics, geography, or the General Assembly.Critics will always list the failures, the uncertainty in Gaza and Judea and Samaria that has lasted too long, political divisions, high costs of war, and the unfinished conflict with the Palestinians.Those criticisms are not imaginary. They simply do not outweigh the central fact.A state that should have died in 1948, or 1967, or 1973, or under the weight of boycotts and resolutions, is still here, still growing, still inventing, and still arguing about the meaning of its own existence.The next 78 years are not guaranteed. Iran’s nuclear program, demographic trends, internal cohesion, mitzvah neglect, and the endurance of Western support all remain open questions. But the record already compiled is not a fluke. It is evidence.Small peoples with a long memory and a short list of alternatives can rewrite the odds.Israel did not merely survive. It turned the most lopsided bet of the 20th century into a massive success, and, for millions of Jews who had nowhere else to go, into a home.That is not a miracle in the sense that it required no human effort. It is a miracle in the only sense that matters: it happened when every reasonable calculation said it would not.As we start year 5787, let’s be grateful to God for the providential success we’ve enjoyed, the dedication and efforts of our leaders, soldiers, and civil servants who have made this country a success, and commit ourselves to greater Torah observance, dedication to helping our neighbors, and the growth of the Jewish nation.The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world and recently published a new book, Zionism Today.Follow us on Google