Israel was created for two primary reasons:
1) to provide a secure place for Jews after The Holocaust
2) to fulfill the promise of God (as they see it) of a Promised Land
In creating Israel, the United Nations imposed itself on a territory largely occupied by Palestinian Arabs. Not only did this anger the Palestinians, who had lived in relative peace with their Jewish neighbors for centuries. It was also widely resented by the other Arab and Islamic countries of the Middle East and elsewhere, who viewed Israel as the creation of a quasi-European state in their midst without their consent.
Clearly, the creation of Israel has destabilized the Middle East, with some Islamic countries (Iran comes to mind) devoting themselves to the eventual destruction of Israel. Resentments run so deep against Israel and its allies that almost all of the major terrorist attacks against Israel itself, Jews wherever they may be—and Israel's backers such as the United States, the UK, France and Spain—can be traced back to resentments over Israel.
If there ever is a Third World War, it's easy to imagine that it, too, will have Middle Eastern roots.
So, what are your thoughts: Was the creation of Israel a horrendous mistake?
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.