An Israeli youth dances during Independence Day festivities in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Israel’s 60th Independence Day began at sundown Wednesday with a great sense of pride but also uncertainty about its future and doubts about prospects for peace with the Palestinians.

JERUSALEM — The Jewish people are marking the 60th anniversary of their national rebirth, the founding of Israel, today with the usual military flyovers, flag buntings and televised reminiscences of aging pioneers.

But there is another form of celebration planned, and its sponsors believe it says something about the national character: a three-day conference of some of the best minds from around the world on some of the biggest challenges facing humankind — and especially Jews — in the coming decades.

“The brain enriches the pocket, not the other way around,” Shimon Peres, Israel’s president and the patron of the conference, said in an interview.

“We are a small land and a small people, but we can become a daring world laboratory, and that is our desire and plan.”

Nearly 700 guests are expected to take part next week in 35 discussion groups. They include statesmen like Henry A. Kissinger, Vaclav Havel, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer, but also Sergey Brin of Google, Terry Semel of Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch, along with seven Jewish Nobel laureates and President Bush.

Given the guest list, the topics are naturally big and ambitious, including the shift in global power from West to East (and south), nuclear proliferation and climate change. But much of the focus will also be on topics closer to home like Islamic extremism, the rise of Iran and sovereignty in Jerusalem.

In fact, what are billed as global challenges — terrorism, Iran — seem to be somehow especially Jewish and Israeli ones. The organizers say this is not coincidental or unusual and point as an example to Hitler, who posed an enormous threat to the world but focused particularly on Jews.

“Cataclysms always seem to affect Jews first,” remarked Stuart Eizenstat, a senior official in the Clinton and Carter administrations, who wrote an essay that forms a basis for the conference. “Go back to the Black Plague. It was not a Jewish issue, but it had particular impact on Jews because they were blamed for it.”

‘No other option than survival’

Sixty years after its founding, Israel boasts a powerful military, vibrant economy, modern cities and 62 colleges and universities. It is home to more than 7 million people — 5.5 million of them Jews — nine times the population in 1948.

Yet, to many Israelis, the country is more threatened than ever. Palestinian militants in Gaza fire homemade rockets nearly every day into southern Israel. The Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, is reportedly rearming after fighting Israel to a stalemate two years ago. And Israeli media reported last week that Iran may be about a year away from producing a nuclear weapon.

What, then, will Israel look like in another 60 years?

Despite the odds, will peace, at last, take hold and transform Israel and its Arab neighbors into a prosperous region built on commerce, trade and intellectual cooperation? Or will conflict spiral into nuclear war, leaving the Middle East an uninhabitable radioactive desert?

Or is Israeli in 60 years most likely to be where it is now — hoping for peace, but struggling to define its relationship with the Palestinians?

“Jews understand there no other option than survival,” said Gerald Steinberg, chairman of the political science department at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. “Sixty years is a long time, but it’s hard to see the essential issue of Israeli Jewish sovereignty changing. That’s the bottom line.”

Modern Israel’s permanence can be seen in Tel Aviv’s high-rise office towers, Jerusalem’s condominium building boom and the world-class high-tech corridor, known as Silicon Wadi.

Three-quarters of Israelis believe their nation will exist to celebrate its centennial, according to a public opinion poll published last week in the daily newspaper Israel Hayom. But half of those surveyed said Israel is “moving in the wrong direction.”

Israel is still an island in the Middle East. Peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan 15 years later have not led to peace with Palestinians, or the wider Arab world. And as Iran pursues nuclear power, it has threatened to annihilate the Jewish state.

“We will live and possibly die by our sword for many, many years,” Ofer Shelah, columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest circulation daily, said in an interview. “Sixty years after its independence, Israel is still seen by most of its citizens as a refuge, as a fort in a way.”

Many Arabs mourn as Israelis celebrate

At the upcoming conference, there will be a number of senior officials from Central Europe and Africa, including the presidents of Georgia, Poland and Burkina Faso.

Missing from the conference will be any serious Arab representation. Arab leaders and thinkers from Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian areas have been invited, but none have confirmed partly because simultaneously the Arab world will be marking Israel’s 60th anniversary as a catastrophe known as “Nakba Day,” which will involve their own conferences and demonstrations. The organizers in Jerusalem are still hoping a few will come.

Peres said the idea for him was to bring thoughtful Jews and non-Jews together in the perhaps idle hope of “making the Jews more worldly and making the world more Jewish.”

He gave as examples Israel’s innovative approach to irrigation and its strong presence in medical equipment production worldwide.

“In China, they may not know who Moses was, but they do know about our drip irrigation systems,” he said.

Speaking of Israel and China in the same breath, which will occur many times at the conference, raises some complex questions and offers some staggering contrasts. According to Eizenstat’s paper, Israel has more engineers per capita than any country in the world — 135 per 100,000. (There are 85 per 100,000 in the United States.) But even so, the total number of Israeli engineers — nearly 100,000 — is tiny compared with the number China is producing every single year, about 600,000.

The back work for the conference has been done by a relatively new institute known as The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, which was the brainchild of a former Israeli journalist named Avinoam Bar-Yosef and whose chairman is Dennis Ross, the former top Middle East peace negotiator for the United States. The institute seeks to incorporate strategic planning into Jewish life here and abroad and to make sure that Israel and world Jewry understand their common interests.

One significant development of recent years that will be discussed here is the shift in the relationship between Israel and diaspora Jewry. For decades, Israel was the needy child depending on contributions and support from abroad as it struggled to survive.

Today, Israel’s Jewish population of 5.5 million is the world’s largest, just ahead of that of the United States, which is slowly declining through low birth rate and intermarriage. Israel has in fact become the center of Jewish life and is increasingly being asked to act like the older brother to Jewish communities elsewhere.

“This imposes certain responsibilities on Israel as the center of Jewish culture, literature and religious thought,” Eizenstat said. “Because Israel has been so focused on its security, it has not reached out enough in the past to strengthen the diaspora. Such a move also ran counter to Zionism, which foresaw all Jews moving to Israel. But that is not going to happen, and Israel is starting to understand that a weak Jewish diaspora means a weak Israel.”

Bar-Yosef said for him the point of the gathering was to nurture the hope of change in Israel, “to have the willingness to repair what needs repairing and also to take a breath and acknowledge what has been accomplished in just 60 years.”

A future in doubt

In the 60 years since its contentious post-Holocaust founding, Israel also has carved out a delicate bubble for itself in the Middle East. But its achievements have come largely in isolation from the surrounding realities that threaten to burst Israel’s bubble.

Though it has made peace with two vital neighbors and fought off every invasion attempt, Israel has failed to resolve the issue at the foundation of its creation: settling its seemingly intractable conflict with the Palestinians.

“Israel is a bubble in the Middle East,” said Benny Morris, the Ben-Gurion University history professor who authored “1948,” a new book on the historic war at Israel’s foundation.

Israel has now spent two-thirds of its existence as an occupying power that controls the fate of 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1967 war and its aftermath have provided ample fodder for extremists across the globe, fueled the growth of Islamic hard-line groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and served as ammunition for Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Even if Israel and the Palestinians do agree on their borders, few realists think that a deal would assuage extremists who refuse to accept the idea of a Jewish nation in the Middle East. And the wounds will not be easy to heal. Both sides can cite a long list of legitimate grievances that make reconciliation difficult.

“I don’t think that we can achieve a real reconciliation without solving the practical problems,” said author David Grossman, a longtime peace activist whose youngest son was killed in southern Lebanon during Israel’s war with Hezbollah. “And I will tell you that even when the practical problems will be solved, first it will take many years until the wounds and the hatred will cure. … It can be generations — the trauma is so deep.”

— McClatchy-Tribune News Service