Three Independence Days ago, The Jerusalem Post editorial board called the state of Israel a hard-won miracle. That was the spring of 2023, before the October 7 massacre, and the word “miracle” still had something unguarded about it.
Two Independence Days ago, the country could barely mark the day. The Mount Herzl ceremony was pre-recorded without an audience. Tel Aviv canceled its celebrations. In Binyamina, families of hostages held an alternative ceremony under the banner “no hostages, no independence.” We had no language for a celebration that year.
A year ago, we found one. The torchlighters carried the weight of the day for a country still raw from war: a bereaved Olympic judoka, a returned hostage, a Druze combat commander, and a reservist mother who lost her son. The editorial board called that the true face of Israel and meant it.
Tonight, on the eve of the 78th Independence Day, we reach for something different. Torches were needed when the country could not speak for itself. With the Iran campaign closed, it can speak again. What most needs saying, after three years of shock and conditional hope, is also the simplest: Israel was built by optimists and will be rebuilt by them.
Three and a half years after the death marches, orphaned teenagers built a state. They had every reason to lie down. They drained swamps instead. They argued over bus routes and water rights, married each other, raised children, and opened bakeries. All of it had to be earned every morning, against the worst evidence any generation has ever been handed. Mood had nothing to do with it.
Their successors made the same decision in every wave that followed. A Russian engineer who landed at Ben-Gurion Airport in 1990 with a chess set and a physics textbook. An Ethiopian boy who walked across Sudan. A French family who moved to Netanya the week after their synagogue burned. None of them came because the math was in their favor. They came because Israel was the one address where Jewish optimism could become national policy.
The pattern has held against every sober prediction. Through the weeks of the Iran campaign, with missiles crossing Israeli skies, Nefesh B’Nefesh kept landing planes at Ben-Gurion.
Roughly 180 North Americans moved here while the war was on. Nearly 50 more arrive this week, in time for Independence Day. They are signing leases in a country just out of its longest war, doing what the founders did with worse Hebrew, and reaching the same conclusion: the Jewish future runs through Israel.
Israel still places high in World Happiness Report
The macro data says the same. The latest World Happiness Report places Israel eighth in the world. Israeli youth, the cohort carrying the war on its back, rank third. A Costa Rican has no army to mobilize. A Finn does not lie awake listening for incoming fire. Yet Israelis are happier than the Finns, the Danes, and almost everyone else.
A certain school of Israeli commentary finds this embarrassing. Columns appear in Haaretz explaining that Israelis are happy because they have “adapted to a life of loss of hope,” or because they have “grown accustomed to the unbearable.”
The simpler explanation, which those writers refuse to entertain, is that Israelis have eyes. They live in the only country where Jewish sovereignty is the baseline condition, and they know what their grandparents would have given for one ordinary Tuesday in it.
Now comes the harder part: the rebuild. Communities not yet fully home, an economy under strain, a regional order redrawn around us, and a society that now has to argue out its own internal accounts. None of that closes itself. It will be closed by the same posture that drained the swamps, won the War of Independence, and absorbed a million Soviets in five years.
Pessimism has never built anything in this country, and it is not going to rebuild it now.
So, a small suggestion for the year ahead. By all means, mourn the ones who leave, but carry the new arrivals in on your shoulders. Understand the pessimist if you must, then go follow the optimist. Nobody else has ever moved this country forward.