…Anyway, it’s Memorial Day Eve. Tomorrow, thousands and thousands of Jews will visit military cemeteries, the graves of their sons and husbands, brothers and friends. The total today of dead is over 23,000 since 1948, and at the risk of being misunderstood, in a community now over 6 million-strong, I think it has been a mercifully low price to pay.

Let us instead ponder the day after, Independence Day, when the country will be covered in smoke from thousands and thousands and picnickers and barbecuers who, the most thoughtful of them, may reflect on what a wonderful life we have here certainly in comparison to the countries surrounding us: chaotic Lebanon where one political party, Hezballah, is also allowed to have its own armed gang; bloody, ruined Syria, with half the population homeless; Jordan, inundated by refugees from Syria; Egypt, floating as always on a sea of illiterate peasants, now under attack by ISIS terrorists. Israel is an island of modern, civilized, a prosperous and corrupt Western democracy, versus our Ishmaelitic enemy neighbors who deal with their homicidal envy of us by murdering us.

For sure, things could be better and less menacing — the Iran threat and all that — but otherwise, yours truly can stand back and review this country for the half-century I have known it and do so in awe. What a transformation, the product of the Jewish people, arguably as vital and charged with the energy of life as any…