I was moved beyond words by the sight of Jerusalem and the fervor with which Jews of all backgrounds prayed at the Western Wall . Coming from a nation that was at the time deeply divided and demoralized , I found my Israeli peers to be unabashedly proud of their country , eager to serve in the military , and , in many cases , determined to volunteer for the most elite combat units . They felt personally involved in the enterprise of building a Jewish state , more than 1,800 years after the Romans quashed the Bar Kochba revolt , the last Jewish attempt at sovereignty on this very land .
“ I was moved beyond words by the sight of Jerusalem and the fervor with which Jews of all backgrounds prayed at the Western Wall .”
To be sure , nation-building is an infinitely complex process . In Israel ’ s case , it began against a backdrop of tensions with a local Arab population that laid claim to the very same land , and tragically refused a UN proposal to divide the land into Arab and Jewish states ; as the Arab world sought to isolate , demoralize , and ultimately destroy the state ; as Israel ’ s population doubled in the first three years of the country ’ s existence , putting an unimaginable strain on severely limited resources ; as the nation was forced to devote a vast portion of its limited national budget to defense expenditures ; and as the country coped with forging a national identity and social consensus among a population that could not have been more geographically , linguistically , socially , and culturally heterogeneous .
Moreover , there is the tricky and underappreciated issue of the potential clash between the messy realities of statehood and , in this case , the ideals and faith of a people . It is one
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