They survived slavery, ghettos, pogroms, diasporas, gas chambers and countless wars. They gave us the two most important words in the history of mankind: “wayyelekh Avram” (Abraham left). Their very existence is a miracle and something crazy, which goes against any “logic”.

We Europeans have turned our continent into their graveyard, but they do not look at us with hatred, indeed.

They have built from nothing a state that today has 8.9 million inhabitants, one of the happiest countries in the world that produces Nobel Prizes, scientific and medical discoveries, a great democracy despite having always been at war and half the world try to destroy it and to take away every meter of land and their capital.

It is a country full of life, of children, of tolerance, of different cultures, of a love that can suddenly turn into mourning, which has welcomed the refugees of three continents and which protects us Westerners in the most strategic and unstable region of the world.

Their existence reminds every human being of the inhumanity of the culture of death. It was they, in their sacred Book, that affirmed the principles that are the basis of Western civilization. Always them, their Prophets, to teach men to listen to the voice of conscience. Always them to reiterate the existence of a moral law superior to each other, and valid for all. They are, at least for me, the millennial novel of freedom against submission.

And now imagine not only the Middle East, but a world without Israel. Without its Nobel Prizes, without its flowers, without its fruits, without its skyscrapers, without its writers, without its patents, without its synagogues, without its melting pot, without its excavations and archaeological sites, without its scientific laboratories, without its museums filled with biblical scrolls. Imagine a world in which, that little frontier of civilization falls, and it is overwhelmed by barbarism. I cannot. 

Shaná Tová! Happy New Year to the Jews and to the People of Israel!