The latest fashion in Israel-bashing, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence, takes the form of pronouncements predicting the demise of the Jewish state.

Maclean’s, for example, has weighed in with a deliberately provocative headline, claiming to examine “Why Israel can’t survive,” and the Atlantic Monthly, only slightly less offensively, asks “Is Israel finished?”

The good news is that these articles and their authors will be long forgotten when Israel celebrates its 120th anniversary.

Journalists, academics, diplomats and just about everyone else have bad track records in explaining and forecasting international politics, and this is particularly true when it comes to Israel and the Middle East. Most become instant experts after a few weeks, or perhaps months, in a place whose language they don’t understand, and whose history is far too complex for them to grasp. They rely on a few carefully selected “experts,” with their own particular spin, and follow the rest of the pack.

When it comes to Israel, most pundits get stuck on the surface, without digging deeper to understand the essential nature of Zionism – maintaining the hard-won restoration of Jewish national sovereignty and equality among the nations of the world. In 1948, the experts, including the major military and political leaders of that time, confidently predicted a quick end to the newborn State of Israel, which they said would quickly be crushed by the Arab armies. The 600,000 Israelis who defeated these attacks, at the very high cost of more than 6,000 deaths – one per cent of the entire population – recognized that there was no other option for the Jewish people.

Fifty years later, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat made the same mistake, believing the newspaper articles, including Israel’s own self-deprecating and politically correct talking heads, that propounded “post-Zionism.” Yes, Israelis appeared (and still seem to be) very divided and seemed to have become absorbed in European (and North American) consumer culture. But when the Palestinian mass terror attacks mounted, everyone reported for duty, and, under former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s leadership, the Israel Defence Forces did what was necessary to restore security and defeat this campaign.

This is not to say that Israel doesn’t face serious challenges over the next 60 years – we still have more than our share, and many of them are of our own making.

An outdated electoral system has produced a generation of corrupt and incompetent politicians, and both the process and the personalities are likely to be replaced in the next few years. From the outside, the Middle East remains a very hostile and violent region. Iran and its allies – Hezbollah and Hamas – are the latest variation on the late Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser’s threat to “push the Jews into the sea.” Nearby, the chaos in Iraq threatens to spill over into Jordan, while the Egyptian military regime, which is Israel’s other (problematic) peace partner, may be on the verge of internal collapse. But these are all threats that Israel can deter, defeat or pre-empt.

The Maclean’s article, like most overly clichéd journalistic and diplomatic accounts, focuses on the Palestinians, the “occupation,” demography and what is presented as the inevitable clash between Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state. But as often happens in such ideologically targeted analyses, the dynamics of history are erased, and what Palestinians refer to as the “one-state solution” is presented as inevitable. The author, Michael Petrou, has selected a few people for quotation in order to “prove” his pre-determined conclusion. And in the process, he has created a very misleading tableau.

In reality, for many years, Israelis have recognized that the “one-state solution,” and the potential for a majority Palestinian population in 60 years, is a political attempt to “wipe Israel off the map.” As in the case of the threat posed by a nuclear Iran, we know that our survival depends on a strategy that will avoid Palestinian “rejectionism,” through a combination of hard-nosed diplomacy and unilateral actions, such as the construction of the West Bank separation barrier.

After 2,000 years of exile, the Jewish people have no intention of losing our very hard-won independence, sovereign equality among the nations, and the ability to control our own destiny.

Now, as in 1948, there is no other option.