by Patrick J. Buchanan

As Israel enters its 61st year, Israelis may look back with pride. Yet, the realists among them must also look forward with foreboding.

Israel is a modern democracy with the highest standard of living in the Middle East. In the high-tech industries of the future, she is in the first rank. From a nation of fewer than a million in 1948, Israel’s population has grown to 7 million. In seven wars — the 1948 War of Independence, the Sinai invasion of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and the Lebanon wars of 1982 and 2006 — Israel has prevailed, though some of these wars were, as Wellington said of Waterloo, “a damn near-run thing.”