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This is John Pudhor, it's the editor of Commentary Magazine, the 73 year old monthly of intellectual analysis,

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Hi John and Sorobamari are senior writer high Sorob. Good morning and working the board Stephanie Roberts are a redoubtable jack of all trades here at

Commentary Magazine.

So gentlemen Israel last week and the America oddly enough

sort of in the middle of May

celebrated its 70th birthday the 70th anniversary of its founding in 1948

and here's what I heard in the run-up from people I know in Israel.

It was a very contentious run-up to the 70th anniversary celebrations as you know Israel is politically very divided.

There are the sort of the BB Net Nyahu camp and the anti BB Net Nyahu camp the right wing camp, the left wing camp, the peace camp which is very small but very loud

and the kind of religious versus the secular and there was just a lot of ugliness in who is going to speak and where they were going to speak and who is going to have two

minutes and who is going to have ten minutes and then when the actual festivities and celebrations and commemorations began the whole country

sort of came together in a moment of deep emotional wonderment at the miracle that has taken place this country that sort of created itself and was created almost

literally ex nihilow in every sense of the term and there they are eight million people living in a first world country with major cities, major industries,

a remarkable quality of life, great efforts to preserve the past and to preserve the access to religious sites for all three of the major Abrahamic religions

and despite all the divisions and all the fights and everything attending to that that happens in that country simply as a matter of course, there was a startling unity which I can only connect in my own experience to 1976 when you know out of the depths of the loss of the Vietnam War

and terribly economic problems and a crime wave and everything like that the United States kind of froze in place around the bicentennial July 4th and had a moment of genuine common patriotic fervor that was very spiritually important.

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