John Rapley - FOREIGN FOCUS

United States President George W. Bush, all but forgotten back home in the heat of election season, arrived in Jerusalem yesterday to celebrate Israel's 60th birthday.

Living six decades is no mean feat for Israel. The 'people without a land' - who migrated to Palestine in the first half of the 20th century to re-create the Promised Land of their ancestors - found a land which had a people. The tensions between Jewish settlers and Arab residents produced a less-than-propitious birth: Israel was born into war, and has remained there more or less since.

Sense of insecurity

It is easy to forget, as the US and Israel celebrate their friendship, that the Americans were not always keen on Israel.

So, a sense of insecurity has arguably been bred into the country's genetic code: a conviction that in the long run, it can count on no one but itself for its continued existence.

Amid such insecurity, it is inevitable that at a milestone like this, discussion has turned to the question of whether or not, in another 60 years, Israel will still exist.

Demography does not smile kindly on Israel. Its modern founders wanted to create a secular state in which Jews, but also other peoples, would feel at home.

Yet, Israel can look like a Jewish drop in an Arab sea. With enemies on its borders, Israel also feels itself vulnerable at home.

The birth rate of the Arab population within Israel, and the territories it occupies, exceeds the Jewish one. Given time, the Jewish population of Israel will be overwhelmed from within. This confronts Israel with stark choices.

It can aggressively court Jews living across the planet to immigrate to Israel. But there are limits to this strategy.

There are only around 13 million Jews on the planet, and nearly half of them already live in Israel. Besides, the assimilation of Jewish immigrants is not always easy.

War within and without

The influx of Russian Jews which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union brought many people whose Judaism, to put it diplomatically, remains in doubt (this seems to be how Israel ended up, bizarrely, with its own neo-nazi movement).

Israel can try to withdraw behind defensive barriers and throw its identity as a secular state overboard. This might please the settler movement, militant Jews who seek to define their homeland as a religious state.

But it would be an ugly process, as it would involve Palestinian expulsions - hardly a recipe for peace.

In fact, it is sometimes said that Israel needs war on its borders to preserve peace within them. Israel's Jewish population is deeply divided along several fault lines: religious versus secular, orthodox versus reform and conservative, Ashkenazim versus Sephardic. Equally, Jews outside Israel sometimes regard their 'homeland' with ambivalence.

As Israel has grown, the condition of Jews in much of the rest of the world has worsened. This state of affairs does not necessarily ill-serve Israel's leaders for it strengthens their case that Jews must return.

So, some Jewish intellectuals suspect an Israeli strategy to deliberately antagonise the Muslim world in order to drive more Jews to Israel.

Survival in adversity

These divisions within and without Israel show up in the country's fractious politics, facilitated by an electoral system which - as the late former Prime Minister Golda Meir once put it - produces three million prime ministers.

The present incumbent, Ehud Olmert, leads a government which seems perpetually on the brink of collapse.

So, yes, it is remarkable that, despite all the omens, Israel not only exists, but even prospers. Not for the first time has survival in the face of adversity appeared to define the Jewish experience.