Israel at 60: reasons to celebrate

Israel is about to mark its sixtieth anniversary.

Some friends say they're in no mood to celebrate. The timing isn't right, they complain. The country's political circuitry is overloaded. Danger lurks on the Gaza and Lebanon borders. Iran's nuclear ambitions - and annihilationist threats - loom large. Disputes over the current peace talks with the Palestinian Authority are daily fare. Israel continues to take a beating in UN forums. The drumbeat of anti-Zionism grows louder. A fractious social climate creates long-term and seemingly insoluble fissures between Arab and Jew, not to mention Jew and Jew. And global market volatility spells trouble for the Israeli economy.

All true, perhaps. But the story mustn't end there. Milestone anniversaries offer the chance to step back, however briefly, from the news of the moment and take stock of the larger picture.

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Hamas: words and deeds

There's the story of the mother determined that her five-year-old wunderkind should be well-educated and one day headed for a top university. She decided to pump him with new vocabulary words each day. When little Charlie came home from school, his mother promptly said, "Charlie, what's the difference between ignorance and indifference?" To which he, totally uninterested in the exercise, shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "I don't know and I don't care."

At times, that's the sense I get from the world about Hamas.

It's as if there is an ignorance, perhaps a willful ignorance, about what Hamas, which rules Gaza, really means.

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Top ten good news stories of 2007

Amidst all the Sturm und Drang, some positive things did happen in the past 12 months. They're worth recalling, if only to remind ourselves that the landscape is not unremittingly bleak.

Here's my top ten list:

First, at long last, the United States Congress passed, and President George Bush signed, a comprehensive energy bill. In this case, better late than never. The bill may not be perfect, but it's a big step in the right direction. America's dependence on imported oil from hostile countries is the nation's Achilles' heel. It undermines national security big time, because our addiction inevitably leads us to kowtow to someone and send massive sums of petrodollars into the wrong hands. This bill alone won't solve the problem, but it serves as a wake-up call for a nation that slept far too long. Its provisions for increasing fuel economy standards and other measures are designed to help wean us from that addiction.

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Et tu, Mr. Erekat?

Let me see if I get this straight. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, summarily dismissed the prospect of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

His reasoning? "No state in the world connects its national identity to its religious identity." That, of course, is utterly preposterous. What, for example, do Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen have in common? You guessed it. Islam is the official religion, though many, such as Malaysia, have significant non-Muslim minorities.