Noticias
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de la OCA
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How do you evaluate a whole nation when it turns 60? Even a nation as small as Israel is far too complicated for any simple evaluation.
Do you judge it by its vibrant democracy and independent judiciary, which tells even the highest officials and their families that they are not above the law? Or by its four decades as an occupying army, whose soldiers are now confessing that they routinely and brutally violate civilians' human rights? Do you judge it by its world-class universities and world-class science and technology? Or by its growing gap between rich and poor, as the utopian socialism of the kibbutz experiment collapses before the juggernaut of neoliberal corporate capitalism? Do you judge it by its vibrant avant-garde cultural scene, or by the way it marginalizes its Arab citizens and its growing population of Asian "guest workers"?
Perhaps the only fair way to judge any nation is by its own ideals. Israel makes that task easier for us as it was built upon explicit and well-documented ideals. While many nations have grown up organically, or even accidentally, Israel was a conscious project, a product of half a century of very intentional thinking and planning. Israel's elderly founding fathers had been Zionists since the movement's beginning. They imbibed their ideals from the movement's founders, whose ideals were set forth at great length-there is no mystery about what the Jewish state was meant to achieve and signify.
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