Judged through a rational, empirical - and European - lens, Israel should have already been obliterated.
The Israelis do not fear the danger and have fun.
Israel's is the world's only country whose water devices are removed from Western buildings. The Harvard University dining services just removed the labels from its SodaStream machines and replaced them with American-made water machines.
Israel is the world's only country which can be destroyed in one day of war: a small battery of nuclear-tipped rockets can vanish it entirely.
Israel is the world's only country which hasn't seen one day of peace since its founding.
Israel is the world's only country which looks perilous and temporary, a dot on the map and a patch of near-desert.
Israel is the world's only country which has to free hundreds of assassins to see again one of her soldiers.
The country is open to offensives, with long and absurd borders; it lives in a state of siege, surrounded by dangerous enemies. The Israelis do not fear the danger and have fun. The philharmonic orchestra plays on a kibbutz along the Jordanian-Syrian border, while in Jerusalem they held competitions for young filmmakers.
A French journalist called the Israelis a people that does not smile. Perhaps. Perhaps influenced by a long history of Jewish persecution, distant and recent, of collective and personal tragedies that are the very foundation of this nation of refugees. Israel is not, probably, a cheerful country as a whole; but surrounded by enemies, the Israelis demonstrate with facts that smack of not being afraid of the future.
With the ratio of forces so disproportionate, the fact that the State of Israel continues to exist is a contradiction, or if you prefer, a permanent miracle. Israel is squeezed between the sea and five hostile nations, eighty times larger and twenty times more populated.
And Israel, the only democratic nation born from a religious idea, promoted as a refuge for the persecuted, will remain one of the most exciting human adventures.
The Holocaust closed that noble Jewish adventure in the Diaspora.
In the last century, Jews began returning to their land and rebuilt the third Jewish commonwealth. This will not fall. It cannot fall. It must not fall. Jews wouldn't survive to another exile. And a world without Jews would be a meaningless world.