Giulio Meotti
Giulio Meottiצילום: עצמי

The residents of early kibbutzim were pioneering immigrants from Eastern Europe and South America, former members of the Nahal units (brigade dedicated to the foundation of permanent agricultural settlements) and socialist youth movements.

They were the children of a period of austerity and mass migration, before the construction of a well-equipped and highly trained Israeli army, when the civilian settlement on the outskirts of the new tiny That is the main scandal in the international arena today: Israel is the only Western country going against the new faith in a humanity without borders.
Jewish enclave was the main tool of establishing borders, defending the land and absorbing immigrants.

It was also a time when European collectivist ideas of social solidarity and community life dominated political and intellectual life. That spirit dominated the pre-1948 Israel. Between 1948 and 1967, Israel had to defend itself. After the Six Day War, the Jewish State took again the mission of keeping the land by returning to Judea and Samaria.

That is the main scandal in the international arena today: Israel is the only Western country going against the new faith in a humanity without borders. Israel’s major battle today lies in its right to Judea and Samaria.

From the Golan Mountains to the deserts of the Negev, from the ultra-modern city of Tel Aviv to ancient Jerusalem, Israel is surrounded by enemies like no other country in the world. The war is on the land and the existence of the Jewish people. Only the land made it possible to begin to put an end to the Jewish Diaspora.

If Israel were to disappear today, Iran and its allies would extend their influence to the Mediterranean. Imagine the consequences for the entire Western civilization.

Western culture looks with indifference, perplexity or contempt on the Jews of Israel clinging to their land. Israel has become the least acceptable state and culture on the planet for the dominant culture in the West, which is that of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history". Israel is a democratic and Western state but centered on nation, land and religion, while the post-national, post-family and post-religious West dreams of building an international liberal empire of markets and rights.

Israel is the only Western country still turning the deserts into greenhouses and building new cities and it is doing everything with a gun pointed at the head.

Israel is a tragic paradox. There is no other nation that since its foundation had to sacrifice thousands of its citizens and soldiers and yet every year it attracts tens of thousands of immigrants, people who kiss the land on arrival.

Upon arrival in Tel Aviv, the plane descends from over the Mediterranean. The glance captures traces of the yellow sandy soil that at the beginning made each village an oasis. The Sharon plain is as green, dense with crops and houses, where the desert extensions once were. The Carmel wooded promontory, which encloses the bay of Haifa, has been filled with new towns. Traveling along the Upper and Lower Galilee, inhabited for large stretches by Israeli Arabs, descending into the fertile plain of the Emek Jezreel, which was a swamp when the first kibbutzim arose, or approaching the mystical mountain landscapes suspended on Lake Tiberias, the populous and well-cultivated land often gives an illusion of a small Italy.

The ground dries up and flattens towards the Negev desert: another world, a kind of Phoenix. In Beersheba, little remains of the town founded by the Turks as a remote railway junction between Europe, Egypt and Arabia. The new industrial and scientific city is large and prosperous. David Ben Gurion went to live in one of the first kibbutzim that arose in the Negev indicating the way for the reconstruction of the new homeland of the Jews.

Every corner of the land of Israel amazes the visitor.

In 1948, green areas occupied less than 2 percent of the area. That figure will exceed 10 percent in a few years. A land that has been synonymous with erosion, desertification and human neglect, it is now enjoying unparalleled environmental renewal. In Judea and Samaria, you arrive on a hill, and there are two cities ahead. The one on the left is an Israeli “settlement”, as the malignants called these, and on the right there is an Arab village. It is full of trees on the left and no trees on the right.

The dispute over the land of Israel has nothing to do with the territory. If it were, the conflict would have been resolved long ago. Instead, the land of Israel is at the center of a global struggle for identity and is the hope of the free world.

Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.