Never having been as optimistic about Israel's future as most Israelis once were, I am not as pessimistic about it as many Israelis (let alone anti-Israelis) now are. The optimism always had in it a good deal of wishful thinking; the pessimism has in it an equal share of self-indulgent despair.
It is difficult to live with uncertainty and there are those who, no longer able to believe in the certainty of success, would rather believe in the certainty of failure than have to endure not knowing how things will turn out. But we almost never know how things will turn out and Israel is an excellent example.
How many people would have believed a hundred years ago, in 1908, that 40 years later, in 1948, there would be a Jewish state in Palestine? How many would have believed in 1948 that, in another two decades this state would be a military titan bestriding the Middle East, its armies triumphantly camped from the outskirts of Cairo to those of Damascus? How many would have believed in 1967 that another 40 years would pass with the titan still at war with its closest neighbours and unable to defend its population against small groups of guerrillas belonging to organizations pledged to destroy it? How many would have believed that, in 2008, it would have become trendy to talk about its demise?
If you want to be pessimistic, you don't have to look far for reasons. Israel is a tiny speck on the map, surrounded by a hostile Arab and Muslim world that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf and beyond; that is growing all the time in wealth, influence, population, military power, self-confidence and religious zealotry; and that continues to be convinced that a Jewish state in its midst is a historical anomaly and a moral injustice that must one day be wiped out. What rational gambler would bet on this state's survival?
But one can argue the opposite side of it, too. Arab wealth and power will prove to be ephemeral products of an already doomed Age of Oil; so will radical Islam, which can never deliver on its political promises; in the long run, the Arab world will have to democratize, modernize and come to terms with Israel's existence.
And meanwhile, Israel itself, far from a failure, has been an extraordinary success, a country that has gone in 60 years from being the poor, bankrupt, imperilled home of less than a million Jews to a militarily powerful, economically thriving, financially independent state of five-and-a-half million Jews who are among the world's richest and most technologically advanced peoples. Already at peace with some of their Arab neighbours, they can hold out against the others until accepted by them as well.
History will decide -- and its decision will almost surely not come in any of the ways we might expect it to. The only thing about history that is predictable is its unpredictability.
And yet as an Israeli -- or, more precisely, as an American Jew who decided 38 years ago to make his life in Israel-- there is a sense in which none of this matters to me.
