f this were a rational world, the history of the modern state of Israel would be written on one page.

Rationally speaking, there’s no way the starving, diseased, polyglot torrent of refugees who poured into the barren Holy Land in the wake of Hitler’s rampage could have beaten back the Arab attack that came just hours after the state was created. No rational person would bet on Israel’s survival for a week, let alone 60 years.

Beating the Odds for 60 Years
Israel beat the odds. How did it happen? The selfless sacrifice, the courage and the backbreaking work of the early halutzim (pioneers) started it, building the state “with their ten fingers.” Even during the dark days of food shortages, they refused to quit, instead calculating how many hours of hard physical labor a man could work if the only protein in his diet was two eggs a week.

President Harry S. Truman deserves credit, too. Israelis will never forget Truman’s courage when it counted most. The British Mandate expired on May 14, 1948, at 6 a.m., and eleven minutes after, the U.S., acting on orders from President Truman – who overrode objections from his most trusted advisors – formally recognized Israel as a state. Why would Truman take that risk? Conventional wisdom says it was a favor for Eddie Jacobson, a Jewish friend, wartime buddy and later his partner in their Kansas City haberdashery. But was Jacobson more important than Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, who pledged to vote against Truman in the next election if he recognized Israel?

A Snowball’s Chance
Success seemed remote, when you consider Israel’s 1948 population, especially when the flood of post-war refugees began flowing to the new nation. How could a war-torn, poverty-stricken, barren land with 672,000 inhabitants absorb, feed, clothe and house 1.5 million new refugees in just 10 years? Israel managed it, welcoming refugees from virtually every other country in the world. Especially needful were the children, thousands of them who came, most of them orphans. Ruth Gruber, who toured in 1950, wrote, “The children were lonely, bewildered, sick, tubercular, spitting blood, half-blind, streaming in to be healed.” Most countries reject sick immigrants. Israel welcomed them.

The 850,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Arab persecution were another population segment. Forced out of their homes in Arab lands, they fled to Israel, having abandoned everything but their souls. Today, much of the world believes the only refugees of 1948 were Arabs fleeing Israel, but displacement ran in the other direction, too. Legions of Jews and Christians were forced out by Arabs. Hard to believe? Read the text of HR 185, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives just a few weeks ago.

Even Israel’s leaders didn’t inspire much confidence. Some had military expertise from WWII, but few had any experience with democracy. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s primary architect, emigrated from Poland and was primarily a labor leader. What he knew of democracy he learned during a few years spent in the U.S., during which he met and married Paula, his Brooklyn-born wife. Menachem Begin, Ben Gurion’s primary political opponent, was born in Brest-Litovsk, went on to serve time in Stalin’s Siberian labor camps, and later made his way to Israel with the Free Polish Army. Hardly the kind of background you’d assume would create one of Israel’s finest leaders.

Then There was War
On the same day Israel gained its independence, the combined armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq attacked. Israel lost 6,000 people during that war—one percent of its population. To put that in perspective for U.S. citizens, imagine if three million Americans were suddenly killed in a war.

The world wasn’t helpful, either. The U.S. joined France and Great Britain in enforcing an embargo on weapons sales to Israel, an embargo that lasted until 1962. Israel took to the black market, however, and succeeded in buying three B-17 bombers, which proved crucial to the defense.

More entertaining are the crazy things Israelis did that spelled survival—crazy stuff that shouldn’t have worked, but did. The photo shows the entrance to a Byzantine cistern in Kibbutz Revivim, one of the early Negev settlements. When the pioneers arrived, they used irrigation pipe abandoned by the British as stabilizers in the sand, to shore up the entrance to the cistern, which served as their living quarters. During the war, it struck the settlers there as curious they weren’t bombed, but surrounding communities were. Years later, an Egyptian colonel explained that when Egyptian planes flew over Revivim, they saw the irrigation pipes sticking up, and thought they were guns. So they stayed clear—a good thing, because Revivim, with only 35 people, was virtually defenseless.

That story is replicated in virtually all of the pre-1948 kibbutzim (communities). Today, their parks display dozens of rusted metal decoys the settlers stuck out, hoping to fool the enemy into thinking they were real. They were decoys, but the attackers backed off.

Then there are improbable stories like that of the “Burma Road.” American Gen. Mickey Marcus – the first Jewish general of a military force in the Holy Land since King David – organized his Israeli forces to build on a steep hill a makeshift path winding its way into Jerusalem from its “impassable” backside. By use of the Burma Road, critically needed supplies reached Jerusalem’s military forces and civilians, and saved the city.

Ten Fingers and Hope
So how did Israel reach the ripe old age of 60? Hard work? Self-sacrifice? Gutsy leaders? Courage and determination? Of course. But the real answer lies in the sphere of miracle.

Ben Gurion’s chief of staff, Yigal Yadin – an atheist like Gurion – wrote three words across his personal file on the 1948 War: “The Great Miracle.” He had, he said, witnessed something that was simply beyond human explanation.