On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Within hours, five Arab armies crossed its borders. The new state had no air force to speak of, no heavy armor, and a civilian population that had just emerged from the ruins of the Holocaust. Most Western analysts quietly assumed the experiment would be over within weeks.

They were wrong. And in the seventy-eight years since, the world has been wrong about Israel in the same way, over and over again.

I am an American. I have never held Israeli citizenship, and I do not pretend otherwise. But Israel is the only Jewish nation state on earth – the singular place where Jewish sovereignty, Jewish culture, and Jewish continuity are anchored in law and in land. For a Jew of my generation, one who lost family in the Shoah and has spent decades working to preserve the memory of those who perished, that is not an abstraction. It is home in the only sense that transcends a passport.

Consider what Israel has accomplished since that declaration in Tel Aviv. A largely arid land with no natural resources has become one of the most........

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