Israel at 70: there’s no failure like success

On Wednesday, Israel marks seventy years of statehood. When David Ben Gurion declared independence on May 14th, 1948—the anniversary floats about according to the Hebrew calendar—the new state’s population was 872,000. Just over 7000,000, or 80% of the new Israelis were Jewish, and they constituted about a tenth of the global Jewish population. Today, Israel’s population of nearly nine million is 75% Jewish, and contains about half of the world’s Jews.

The numbers alone reflect an improbable fulfilment of the ‘Ingathering of the Exiles’, a possibility first voiced by Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy, and subsequently given modern political form by Theodor Herzl. Nothing like this has happened in recorded history. But the quality of Israel is no less astounding than its quantity.

No other post-colonial state has remained a democracy while granting its people a developed-world standard of living. In the IMF’s 2018 forecasts for GDP per capita, Israel ($40,762) is twenty-third out of 193 states—just behind France and New Zealand, and just ahead of Japan and the United Kingdom.