Happy birthday, Israel, 60 this month. Or, rather, happy birthday, Israels. For there are two Jewish states. The first is a vigorous democracy, with a vibrant civil society, a robust independent judiciary and an aggressive free press. It’s a multicul-tural society, boasting Arab members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament; Arab diplomats and university professors; soldiers and beauty queens; and even a Muslim cabinet minister.

Its universities produce world-class research and teaching, especially in the sciences and high technology. Its economy grew by 5.3% last year, beating the UK, US and Japan. Property prices are soaring in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Penthouse apartments overlooking the sea cost millions of dollars. The country has absorbed millions of Jewish refugees from around the world and moulded them into a new nation, with a vibrant Hebrew language and culture – a miracle of near-Biblical proportions.

Then there is the second Israel, whose security fence snakes beyond the Green Line, the pre1967 border, cutting deep into Palestinian territory. That Israel subsidises the settlers’ para-state, which has its own water and electricity supplies, its roads forbidden to Palestinians – all guarded by the Israeli army.

Much of the settlers’ land is simply stolen from its Arab owners. According to the United Nations, a third of the West Bank is off limits to Palestinians. A web of Israeli army barricades and checkpoints further atomises what remains of Palestinian society and economy. Successive Israeli governments have proved unwilling to evacuate the outposts that even they admit are illegal. So, perhaps not such a happy birthday.

And despite their many success stories, the Arabs living in Israel proper – about 20% of the country’s 7.3m population – remain second-class citizens, nonJews in a Jewish state. It is almost impossible for them to buy state-owned land. There are deep disparities in employment, health, welfare and education. Welfare budgets are unequal.

Many Arabs who were displaced from their villages in the 1948 war, and are full Israeli citizens, are still forbidden from returning home. Little wonder then that Raleb Majadele, the minister of science, culture and sport, said that he would stand for the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, which lauds the “Jewish soul”, but would not sing it.

How, then, did this strip of land, about the size of Wales, become one of the world’s most combustible flash-points? In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a Jewish journalist living in Vienna, published Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, the primary text of political Zionism. It argued that antiSemitism was immutable, no matter how much the Jews assimilated. The answer was the establishment of a Jewish state, where Jews would no longer be an anomaly.

The Viennese Jewish community dispatched two rabbis to Palestine to investigate. They cabled back: “The bride is beautiful but she is already married.” The “husband” was the native Palestinian population. Like Europe’s Jews, the Palestinians too were developing a national consciousness. The awakening of the Arab nation and Jewish nationalism, wrote the Arab writer Najib Azoury as early as 1907, “are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins”.

The Palestinians demanded that Jewish immigration be halted. But the Jews came anyway, their numbers boosted by the rise of Nazism. The violence ebbed and flowed. In November 1947, after the Holocaust, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. The Arabs rejected the proposal, the Jews accepted it and on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, declared independence. Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria soon invaded.

Abd al-Rahman Azzam, head of the Arab League, declared: “It does not matter how many Jews there are. We will sweep them into the sea.” During the fighting 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, an episode they call the “Nakba”, the catastrophe.

Israel was not swept into the sea either then or in the subsequent wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973. Instead the defeated Arab states took out their fury on their own Jewish populations. From north Africa to Iraq, millennia-old Jewish communities, many of which long predated the arrival of the Arabs and Islam, were stripped of their possessions and thrown out. That too was a Nakba, both for the Arab Jews and the whole Middle East.

It’s darkly ironic that Israel was the first state to be created by the United Nations and ever since has endured a unique and sustained campaign of attempted delegitimisation. For the dictatorships and sclerotic monarchies that rule much of the Arab world, criticism of Israel is the best diversion from examining their own dismal human rights records.

Was Israel born of a war in which some civilians were forcibly expelled? Yes – but it was a fight for survival. The details have been chronicled by Israeli historians such as Benny Morris and Tom Segev, who have based their accounts on Israeli military and government archives. No Arab government has opened its archives. The works of the Israeli “new historians” make for disturbing reading, especially for those brought up on the now discredited myth that all the Palestinians simply ran away.

Israel is hardly alone, however, in being born of war and population displacement. In 1947, during the partition of India, and the formation of Pakistan, a million people were made homeless and an estimated half a million were killed in inter-communal violence, often with great savagery. In 1923, the ancient Greek communities in Turkey were “exchanged” at gun-point for Turkish-speaking Muslims living in Greece. Up to 2m people were forcibly deported, few of whom wanted to leave.

The events of 1948 still shape the Middle East but are far more complex than the propagandists would have you believe. Consider the fate of Jaffa, a stunningly beautiful ancient port, mentioned in the Bible. Before 1948, Jaffa was the cultural capital of Palestine and was awarded to the Arab side under the UN partition plan. The Haganah, the main Zionist militia, did not plan to attack the city. The Irgun, the rival right-wing force led by Men-achem Begin, wanted a prize of its own, however, and launched a ferocious three-day mortar bombardment in late April 1948. Tens of thousands of Arab civilians fled.

The Irgun did not advance deep into Jaffa house by house. It did not shell the city with heavy artillery or bomb it with fighter planes. The attack stopped after three days when Britain, still the Mandate power, deployed troops. But by then it was too late. Jaffa was already emptied. And those few thousand Arabs who stayed and still live there now will tell you that Jaffa was abandoned – even betrayed – by its inhabitants.

None of this is to deny that a great wrong has been done to the Palestinians. Israel’s greatest birthday present to itself would be meaningful progress towards the construction of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.

The outline of a future peace deal has long been clear: Israel’s return to the pre1967 borders, with territorial adjustments, and compromise over Jerusalem. This would demand two concessions from the Palestinians, both unlikely while the Islamist Hamas holds sway: the recognition of Israel’s right to live in peace and security, and the acceptance that there is no right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees, only a tiny minority of whom were actually born in what is now Israel. But they can go home to a Palestinian state.

That settlement will also depend on outside factors. The rise of radical Islam, the bellicosity of Iran, the emerging “Shi’ite crescent” from Basra to Beirut, have rattled Israel’s Arab neighbours and may speed the peace process. Meanwhile, Israel must give its Arab population equal rights, and equal budgets, in exchange for civic loyalty. At a time of rising Islamic radicalism it is absolutely in Israel’s interests to bind its Arab minority to the state. Farsighted Israeli officials realise this, especially at a local level. Jaffa is now a mixed Arab-Jewish city, absorbed into Tel Aviv. It was neglected for decades and is plagued by crime, drug gangs and high unemployment. The Tel Aviv municipality is spending millions on urban renovation projects, improving education and infrastructure.

It’s working. Day to day, away from the headlines, Jaffa’s Arabs and Jews simply get on with their lives, working, living and socialising side by side. Nowhere more than at Jaffa’s Arab-Hebrew Theatre, which stages plays in Hebrew and Arabic; uncompromising theatre that explores the legacies of both the Holocaust and the Nakba.

When the politicians fail, it’s left to real people to try to make peace. “We call this place an island of sanity,” says theatre co-founder Igal Ezraty. “Each one is telling his story and each one is listening to the other’s story. We hope that if the wider society can behave like this, it’s the beginning of a change.” That is the Israel that can – indeed must – triumph.

Adam LeBor is the author of City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa. Jaffa Stories is broadcast on BBC World News today at 2.30pm and 7.30pm, and on the BBC News channel at 2.30pm

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