List: '62 more things I love about Israel'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. Since Farmdoc’s Blog began on 21 April 2008 (damn – I forgot to do a post on the biennial milestone), I’ve posted 45 lists (including today’s). I haven’t kept note of the length of these lists, but today’s would have to be one of – if not the – longest. Last Monday was Israel’s 62nd birthday. I wrote of her 61st birthday here [1]. To celebrate this marvellous milestone of a tiny nation state that’s been under continuous violent attack for all of her 62 years, one Benji Lovitt’s written a Guest Blog for the Jerusalem Post. It’s titled ‘62 more things I love about Israel’ [2]. And it follows his similar offerings on Israel’s 60th and 61st birthdays. I (with Sweetheart Vivienne and our then three daughters) lived in Israel for over a year in the late 1970s. It’s quaint to think that was about the halfway mark in Israel’s 62-year life to date. Though we’ve visited since then, tourists get only a taste of life there, and the quirks and qualms of Israelis. Despite this, I understand and appreciate most of Lovitt’s 2010 Guest Blog. And I just love it (pun intended). It’s perceptive, insightful, ironic, and downright hilarious. You can’t blame Israelis for being idiosyncratic. Jews have waited patiently for over 5,700 years for a national homeland, and we’ve had one for only the last 62 years. So happy birthday Israel. And thank you Mr Lovitt. I look forward to your 2011 63-item list. Very much.

farmdoc's blog post number 374

As surely as day follows night, thunder follows lightning and spring follows winter, Yom Ha’atzmaut – Israel’s Independence Day – today follows Yom Hazikaron yesterday. The sequence of these two days is clear: Israelis owe their independence – the very existence of their State — to the soldiers and others who sacrificed their lives for it. Yom Ha’atzmaut’s celebrated on the 5th day of the month of Iyar in the Hebrew calendar – the anniversary of the day Israel’s independence was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion publicly reading the Proclamation of the establishment of the State of Israel. This followed the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine which was adopted by a UN General Assembly vote on 29 November 1947, resulting in UN General Assembly Resolution 181. In 1948 the 5th of Iyar was 14 May – the second last day of the British Mandate of Palestine. The Hebrew word Ha’atzmaut is derived from the stem etzem meaning ‘inner and essential’ – which tells you the exact value Israelis place on their independence. Today, on her 61st birthday, Israel’s still under existential threat from the lunatic revisionist amnesiacs of the Arab/Islamic world and their sycophantic allies. Just as millions of Jews survived Hitler's Final Solution, so will Israel survive – and prosper – long after the said amnesiacs and their allies have gone and been forgotten. As surely as day follows night.