As the week began, the Jewish state was outpacing the UK and U.S. in vaccinations per capita by more than seven to one. To explain this remarkable efficiency, some observers have cited the country’s highly centralized healthcare system, others the decentralization of authority to give vaccines. Perhaps, writes, Ira Stoll, it’s some combination of the two. Stoll also cites some additional reasons:

One factor is that the Jewish religion that shapes Israel’s values places a high value on saving lives. . . . Another factor is that Israel is a democracy.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while long-serving, is in what seems like a perpetual battle for political survival. . . . Netanyahu wants re-election and credit for Israel’s voters for doing a good job with the vaccine. Politics and public-health incentives are aligned. The Israeli health minister, Yuli Edelstein, . . . grew up in the Soviet Union, which sent him to the Gulag on phony charges after he applied to migrate to Israel. For someone who has defeated the KGB and the Soviet Communist superpower, tackling the coronavirus may seem less daunting.

Relatedly, Israelis are not shy about putting their own country first. They are generous in aiding other countries in need, from Africa to Haiti. But when one’s own small country has served as a refuge for Jews fleeing brutal persecution and hardship in places such as Europe, Iraq, Ethiopia, and Yemen, one accumulates a certain hard-earned contempt for the perils of waiting for help from the United Nations or the World Health Organization. Israelis realize that their lives depend on their own hustle. That is what Zionism, the idea of a Jewish state, is all about: Jewish self-reliance and national responsibility for Jewish security.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that the Israeli national identity includes Israeli Arabs and Druze. Many Israeli doctors are Arab—to the point where campaigns are underway to get smart Arab high-school students to think about going into the high-tech start-up sector instead of following the well-worn path to medical school.

Go to enough anti-Israel protests in the U.S., and you’ll inevitably see a few members of the stridently anti-Israel haredi group Neturei Karta, which has taken to mimicking the slogans of radical leftists and Islamists. Elliott Abrams observes that left-wing Jewish anti-Zionists share with these religious opponents of Israel the basic assumption that “a Jewish state cannot exist until the messianic age arrives because the one we have, built by men and women, is not pure enough.”

This view exhibits what Abrams calls “moral blindness,” which he illustrates with an anecdote about the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertesz, told by the Jewish activist Andres Spokoiny:

During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, “How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?” “Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,” he answered.

For Kertesz, moralizing about the existence of a Jewish army made little sense when the alternative was the mass murder of Jews. But for today’s generation of American Jews, who share the liberal leanings of their parents and grandparents and face anti-Israel sentiment of unprecedented ferocity, Kertesz’s straightforward answer will seem anything but obvious. And they will have to make difficult choices, especially since, as Abrams writes, the principles of liberalism are themselves changing:

we have seen the many efforts to redefine them on American campuses since October 7. No doubt this was a joyous moment for many leftist Jews, as they watched tent encampments built, classes disrupted, and Israel defamed. But for other American Jews, not quite so far left, it was no doubt painful. Among Jewish students themselves, many had to choose between supporting the Jewish state and the Jewish people—or being ostracized by former friends, excluded from clubs and cliques they had happily joined, and even facing physical danger.

The American Zionist movement dates back to the end of the 19th century and the Zionist consensus dates back over 80 years. The anti-Zionist efforts now underway to shred it are the most energetic, the best financed, and the most dangerous American Jews have experienced. . . . Will younger American Jews see a model for how to live as a Jew and a moral human being in their behavior—or in the siren song of the left as it maneuvers to undermine the Jewish people and the Jewish state?