Today is Earth Day, the day when everyone promises to do something good for our planet in the coming year. In Israel, its Earth Day every day!

Companies are constantly working on ways to be greener and more research and development is being invested into finding alternative energies. It is from Israel that the message of electric cars came to make our planet a better place.

When more then hundred years ago, Jews were motivated by the Zionist movement, they decided to redeem and develop their Homeland. Swamps where dried to combat Malaria and trees where planted to give more shade and to help filter the air.

Indeed Israel is the only country in the world where more trees are planted every day then being cut. Almost 300 million of trees have been planted in Israel over the last century to revive the woods.

Today anyone can hike in the nice oak and Terebinth (Pistacia palaestina) forests, like at the time of the biblical King David. Extinguished animal species were reintroduced; a new ecosystem was created, reintroducing biblical wildlife.

An ambitious program by the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority has reintroduced several of the herbivore mammal species that were extirpated in the region. Reintroduction is carried out worldwide in order to increase the range and the likelihood of survival of endangered species.

Moreover, reintroduction also raises public awareness about the importance of nature preservation. Finally, in addition to rescuing the wildlife itself, reintroduction is also an effective way to preserve natural habitats.

David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of the State of Israel affirmed in an interview on CBS (5 October 1956): “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”

So let us believe in miracles flourish the desert, develop green energies and make our region greener for the benefit of all its inhabitants.

To learn more about “Green Israel,” watch CNBC Thursday, April 22 at 8 pm EST.

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“If you will it, it is no dream.” With these words Theodor Herzl concluded his novel “Old-New Land” in 1906.  Indeed, 42 years later it was no longer only a dream.  Millions of Jews once again had a homeland. It’s a uniqueness in world history, for no other people that were sent for extinct were able to reassert its sovereignty and its national life.  For 2000 years, the Jewish people were yearning to return to its homeland.  It was because of this dream and this history that they willed the dream to be a reality, “If you will it, it is no dream.”

Once the Jewish people established their new state, they made the dessert bloom.  It was not only a resurrection of a nation but also of its land.  It was because of the strong belief of “If you will it, it is no dream.”

Since the first hours of Israel’s national revival of its land, and until this very day, the Jewish people were forced to defend its land and its people; to fight the ones who denied its very existence and right of self-determination.  Israel found itself out-numbered by its enemies.  The Jewish people paid a high price for its independence, but succeed in turning back the incoming forces because they believed that: “If you will it, it is no dream.”

From a scarce economy based on agriculture, Israel became one of the strongest economies in the world.  Our inventions and innovations are found everywhere – from cell phones and solar panels to medications and research.  We managed to grown and succeed because we believe that: “If you will it, it is no dream.”

Since Israel’s independence, it has been a vibrant democracy, where every citizen, regardless of color, religion or gender, has the right to vote and to be elected. Israeli newspapers are filled with discussion of Israeli politics and you can hear arguments regarding policy at every street corner, in every cab, and at every marketplace.

Israel is a place where gay couples walk hand-in-hand along the shores of Tel Aviv and Hassidim dance at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. It is the place where Muslim women place a ballot to elect new municipal leaders and members of the Knesset because all citizens of Israel believes that: “If you will it, it is no dream.”

For 62 years, Israel has extended its hand for peace to all its Arab neighbors. Some, like Egypt and Jordan, have taken our hand and have, understanding that peace benefits all.  We are hoping for the day that all our neighbors understand this and accept our ever standing offer of peace.  We understand that this is not easy and that great emotion exists on both sides. However, a solution must come.  Israel understands this.  It is our will to come to a peace agreement with our Palestinian neighbors which will end the conflict between our nations: A Palestinian state for the Palestinian nation and a Jewish state for the Jewish nation.  If you will it, it is no dream.

Happy Birthday Israel.

By Joel Lion, Spokesperson and Consul for Media Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York

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Yom Ha’atzmaut- 2010, Ambassador Michael B. Oren

One freezing dawn during Israel’s War of Independence, fifty youths in their late teens and early twenties, bearing pickaxes and shovels, climbed a rocky hill in the Galilee, barely a mile from the Lebanese border. They were about to establish a kibbutz, one of the communal settlements fostered by the Zionist movement to reclaim and cultivate the hardscrabble Israeli countryside. Similar scenes were being enacted throughout the newly created state—in the Negev, on the Sharon Plain, and in the Jerusalem Hills.

But this one was different: These fifty young people were all Americans. They came from across the United States—from Los-Angeles, Brooklyn, and Chicago. More than a few were hardened combat veterans of World War II. Many had sacrificed a comfortable college experience for sunup to sundown agricultural work and long nights of guard duty.

They came because they believed. They believed in the ideals and values they had learned as Americans and that had instilled in them a sense of responsibility for Jewish freedom everywhere. “The world in which we played hopscotch and baseball and grew to maturity was dominated by Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler,” one of the youths wrote, “The one represented Protection and Welfare… and the other… a horror… in which every Jew was a potential blood offering.”
They came, like the American pioneers centuries before, to build a state and secure its frontiers. After training at an agricultural camp in New Jersey, they departed by boat and arrived in Israel to another kibbutz founded by Americans, Ein Hashofet—the Spring of the Judge, named for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

Brandeis, who was also the president of the American Zionist Federation, had said that every Jew, in order to be a patriotic American, must be a Zionist. And these fifty young American Jews were, indeed, patriots, the embodiment of the principles that lay at the foundation of the U.S.-Israel alliance.

They climbed the hill and broke ground for the first of a huddle of drafty shack— their new homes. And they called their kibbutz after an ancient Jewish town that had existed on that very site. They called it Sasa. Today, sixty-two years after Sasa’s founding, the kibbutz is a thriving community with a beef herd and fruit orchards.
But Sasa has changed. Along with the agricultural work started by its founders, the kibbutz today produces technical and home care products and is host to one of Israel’s most successful plastics factories. Furthermore, in recent years, Sasa has been working closely with American military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide made-in-Israel armor for U.S. vehicles. That armor which helps protect these vehicles from the hazards of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), has saved untold American lives.

And so, the children and grandchildren of Sasa’s founders uphold their commitment not only to Israel but to Israel’s historic alliance with the United States.

Israel, too, has changed—from a struggling agrarian society to a high tech powerhouse with more start-ups per capita, more patents, and scientific papers, and more Nobel Prizes per capita than any other country in the world. A nation that trails only the United States in the number of companies represented on the NASDAQ exchange.

Yet one aspect of Israel will never change and that is its values: the respect for democracy and the rule of law, the commitment to civic and personal freedom, and the yearning for peace. These are the values that we in Israel share with the people of the United States and that form the core of our unshakeable alliance.
We share the vision of a secure and recognized Jewish state of Israel living side by side with a stable and non-violent Palestinian state, and the Government of Israel is deeply committed to working with President Obama to realize that vision. Together with the United States, Israel will strive to create a Middle East—indeed, a world—free of the threats of terrorism and its extremist supporters, a world in which Israelis can live and interact peacefully with all peoples.

As one of Sasa’s founders wrote that first freezing day sixty-two years ago, “The kibbutz that we build will be dedicated not only to the renaissance of our own people, but to… the future of mankind, including our Arab neighbors.”

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By Joel Lion

On Monday, April 12, the State of Israel stood for two minutes in silence remembering the victims of the Holocaust, paying tribute to the 6 million Jews, 1.5 million of them young children, killed by Nazi Germany on a systematic and industrial way just because they were a part of the Jewish people. No difference was made between Orthodox and secular Jew, between liberal and conservative, between poor and rich, between celebrities and blue collars, all were killed.

But the Germans were not alone in their diabolic work, collaborators from other European nations were an active part of the killings.

In 1941, my mother’s grandparents were arrested by the Hungarian police. At that time, Hungary was a free country.  However, my great-grandparents were killed in Kamianets-Podilsky by German SS assisted by Ukrainian and Hungarian Platoons.  My other great-grandfather was arrested by the French Police , in the free French State of Vichy.  He was then transferred to the French camp of Drancy and was then sent on the French railway on Convoy 51 to the death camp of Sobibór, where he was killed.

In both cases, my family was killed because the ideology and the power of the Nazis  that gave a carte blanche to all European anti-Semites.

I ask myself if the world has learned lessons from the Holocaust.

What if Iran reaches its goal and gets nuclear weapons? The civilized world as we know it would be in danger.  As in the first half of this century in Europe, the power and the ideology of the actual Iranian regime will give carte blanche to all the extremists of this world.

The warnings of Israel or the Jews shouldn’t resonate alone this time, every lover of freedom and democracy should shout loud against the Iranian regime and its nuclear ambitions.

That should be a lesson learned from the Holocaust.

Joel Lion is the Spokesperson and Consul for Media Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York

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