AS ISRAEL turns 60 this year, the vital challenge she faces comes more from Jerusalem than from the Islamic jihad, extremist Jewish settlers, or religious fanatics of all flavours. Israel desperately needs a dose of her life-giving political chutzpah, a Yiddish word signifying something between cheek and audacity. Jewish culture, for horrifically obvious reasons, is more used to being the victim than the victor. This mindset now inhibits Israel from realising that she has fundamentally won, writes Tony Kinsella.
A trickle of radical settlers began to arrive in Palestine, then an insignificant province of the crumbling Ottoman empire, during the 1870s. Theodor Herzl published Judenstaat (The Jewish State), the work which would lay the basis for Zionism, in 1896.
Zionism first sought to negotiate with the Ottoman authorities for settlement rights. When these negotiations failed, serious consideration was given to locating the Jewish homeland elsewhere. Argentina and Uganda (the latter with some encouragement from London) were both seriously considered.
In December 1917, British forces under Maj-Gen Edmund Allenby conquered Palestine. In 1922 the League of Nations confirmed Britain's mandate. In 1947, London, facing post-Holocaust Jewish immigration, Arab resistance and Jewish settler rebellion, handed its mandate back to the league's successor, the United Nations.
Thirty years after Allenby's conquest, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Some 55 per cent of Palestine was allocated to the Jewish state and 45 per cent to its Arab counterpart. Today's Israel covers almost 78 per cent of mandate territory.
The Arab League rejected partition, and the armies of Israel's Arab neighbours poured in to destroy the infant state. Israel's fledgling forces defeated them. These combatants would clash again in 1956, 1967 and 1973, with similar outcomes.
Full peace treaties and something approaching normal relations have now been negotiated with Egypt and Jordan. The member states of the Arab League, headed by Saudi Arabia, offer Israel peace and recognition based on Israel's internationally-recognised pre-1967 borders. A deal with the militarily down-at-heel Syria was discussed in the Israel prime minister's office last week.
The fledgling Haganah of 1948 with its home-made Sten guns and, ironically, a squadron of German Messerschmitt 109s, has grown into one of the most powerful armies in the world, massively supported by the most militarily powerful nation the world has ever known, the US. Israel has also become the world's fifth or sixth nuclear power.
Israel's political leaders from David Ben-Gurion through Golda Meir to Ariel Sharon have time and again demonstrated their audacity in bold, often radical, moves.
Defence minister and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, the most decorated general in Israeli history, is the latest in a line of officer/politicians who have come to understand that Israel's ultimate victory must be political.
Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak were all generals with brilliant careers. They evolved from hard, even hawkish, positions to realise that the price of Israeli victory was a settlement with the Palestinians.
Israel has a population of some six million, including one million Israeli Arab citizens. She is also the formal occupying power of the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, inhabited by approximately four million Palestinian Arabs.
These figures illustrate Israel's immediate existential challenge. She has to choose between realising the Zionist dream and occupying territory. As the British-born Israeli writer Daniel Gavron puts it, Israelis "given the choice between sovereignty and land . . . chose land".
Israel's future challenge flows from its military dependency on the US. This is the antithesis of the Zionist principle of Jewish self-reliance. Deep US engagement with Israel dates from 1967 and the now-defunct cold war when Washington had to act to match Moscow's torrent of arms.
The harsh truth is that whatever geostrategic interest Israel once represented for Washington no longer exists. The US has significant political, even emotional, ties with Israel, but one day these may no longer be quite enough to tip the scales. Jerusalem understands that US largesse is not permanent.
The Palestinians are divided, rudderless, humiliated and in despair. Hamas runs Gaza, while the ageing Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority shares the West Bank with the Israeli army.
Fifteen years of disappointment since the Oslo accords make it easy to argue that negotiations lead nowhere. The continuing pointless rocket and suicide attacks sadly prove that desperation can be at least as powerful a motivating force as determination.
Israel's purist internal democracy, where its Knesset is elected on a list system from a single national constituency, acts as a trap for the country's leaders. Any party receiving 1.5 per cent of the vote wins seats in the 120-member assembly. This means that any Israeli government depends on minority fringe parties - and this in a country where a vociferous minority believes that they hold divine title to the land.
The shape of the deal is abundantly clear, two states based on the 1967 frontiers, a peace deal with Syria which would also neutralise Hizbullah in Lebanon and reduce Tehran's influence. The release of Palestinian prisoners including leadership figures such as Marwan Barghouti (possibly a Palestinian Gerry Adams) is a precondition for hope.
Israel's leaders desperately need a dose of political chutzpah to offer an acceptable deal. Israel's victories means that she alone is capable of taking the initiative. The initiative has to be a comprehensive deal, not an offer of further negotiations because extremists on both sides will instantly act, as they always have, to derail such talks.
An essential ingredient of Israel's very existence and her successive victories has been the audacity of her striking leaders. She needs that very chutzpah now as never before.