The campus of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology on Mount Carmel, Haifa. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this week, surgeons at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Medical Center accomplished something that would have sounded like science fiction not very long ago.

Using a groundbreaking transorbital approach, they successfully removed a rare skull-base brain tumor through the patient’s eye socket, avoiding the need to open the skull altogether.

The procedure was an extraordinary medical achievement. It was also a reminder of something larger: what the Jewish people chose to build when, after nearly 2,000 years, they regained sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.

For generations, Jews lived — and often died — without armies, political power, or even the most basic security. Jewish communities survived at the sufferance of rulers who could expel them, dispossess them, or murder them with little warning and usually little consequence.

Yet even in exile, Jewish civilization remained preoccupied with the preservation of life.

Following Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt 65 years later, the Jewish people faced a civilizational challenge. Most ancient peoples disappeared when they lost their land, their capital, and their sovereignty.

The rabbis responded with one of history’s most remarkable acts of cultural adaptation: If the Temple could no longer stand, learning would.

The center of Jewish life shifted from priests to scholars, from sacrifice to study, and from institutions tied to the Temple in Jerusalem to texts that could be carried anywhere.

The rabbis transformed Judaism into a civilization rooted in books, law, memory, and learning. The Torah was joined by the Mishnah and the Talmud. Debate became a sacred activity. Study became a religious obligation. Communities scattered across continents could remain part of the same people because they remained connected to the same texts, traditions, and conversations.

The Torah, the Mishnah, the Talmud, legal scholarship, philosophy, medicine, science, and debate became the infrastructure of a nation in exile.

What walls, armies, and governments could no longer provide, texts increasingly did.

Jewish children were taught to read at a time when literacy was rare. Questions were encouraged. Study was revered. Scholars occupied places of honor. Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers in history, was also one of the most accomplished physicians of his age.

When political Zionism emerged and Jews began returning to their ancestral homeland in large numbers, they did not merely build farms, roads, and homes in Ottoman and later British-controlled Palestine. They built schools, laboratories, hospitals, and universities.

Long before the modern State of Israel became independent in 1948, Jewish institutions had already established the foundations of a modern scientific society.

The Technion opened in 1924. The Hebrew University opened in 1925. Hadassah hospitals, agricultural research centers, scientific institutes, and medical schools followed.

A people returning home after centuries of statelessness made a remarkable choice. They invested not merely in survival, but in knowledge.

The institutions that emerged in modern Israel were not created from scratch in 1948. They were the expression of values cultivated over centuries in exile.

Civilizations reveal themselves through what they create. They reveal themselves through the institutions they build, the values they transmit, and the contributions they make to humanity.

The record here is difficult to ignore.

Israel helped pioneer drip irrigation, allowing crops to flourish in arid regions around the world. Israeli researchers helped develop breakthrough cancer treatments, advanced prosthetics, cybersecurity technologies, emergency medical systems, water recycling systems, desalination technologies, and countless other innovations that improve and save lives far beyond Israel’s borders.

Israeli hospitals routinely treat patients regardless of religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Israeli scientists collaborate with researchers across the globe, and Israeli universities consistently rank among the world’s leading research institutions.

All of this was built by a country that spent much of its existence under threat of annihilation.

The contrast with many of Israel’s adversaries is striking.

Since 1979, the Iranian regime has devoted enormous resources to exporting revolution, sponsoring terrorism, developing ballistic missiles, financing proxy armies, and spreading instability across the Middle East. Its proxies dug terror tunnels beneath schools and hospitals, stockpiled rockets in civilian neighborhoods, and glorified martyrdom as an ideal.

The contrast is not merely between governments pursuing different policies. It is between societies making fundamentally different civilizational investments.

One society devoted scarce resources to universities, hospitals, scientific research, and technological innovation. The other devoted vast resources to missile arsenals, proxy militias, and ideological warfare.

While Israeli scientists, physicians, and engineers were developing new ways to save lives, Iran and its proxies were devoting vast resources to finding new ways to take them.

The modern Jewish state was born into war and has spent much of its existence defending itself against enemies that openly sought its destruction. Yet despite that reality, Israel became one of the world’s leading centers for medicine, biotechnology, agriculture, desalination, emergency response, artificial intelligence, and scientific research.

Those achievements reflect values. They reflect a people who learned, often through bitter experience, just how precious life is.

The world often judges Israel through the lens of the wars it is forced to fight. Wars dominate headlines, but they are not the entirety of the story.

The story is also found in hospitals, laboratories, classrooms, and research centers. It is found in the institutions that grew out of a civilization that survived not through power, but through learning.

When the Jewish people finally regained sovereignty, they built institutions that reflected those values.

The people who carried texts built a country that saves lives — not only its own, but countless others around the world.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.