Israel’s national bird is not the mighty eagle or the muscular vulture which many countries select. It is not a predator circling above the desert in effortless dominance. Instead, Israelis chose a small, cinnamon-colored creature with a zebra crown — the hoopoe.

The hoopoe is striking without being fearsome, regal without being tyrannical. Its crest rises like a tiny crown, not in arrogance but in alertness. Its quiet confidence is perhaps the most Israeli trait of all.

Ancient Jewish texts and Middle Eastern folklore saw in the hoopoe a messenger of wisdom. King Solomon, in one Midrash, learns from the bird’s insight. In Islamic tradition, it is the hoopoe who spots the Kingdom of Sheba and brings word of distant realms. Small in stature, large in perception — the bird was never the warrior; it was the one who saw.

And in that, too, there is something deeply familiar. Israel has always survived less by size than by awareness, less by brawn than by vigilance. The hoopoe does not conquer terrain; it adapts to it. It finds food in the hardest soil. It endures heat and drought. It survives because it is resourceful, not ruthless.

It is also fiercely protective through a strange biological ingenuity. When predators threaten its nest, the hoopoe emits a foul-smelling secretion that drives them away. It is a defense born of determination: My family will not be harmed.

That combination — gentle but unyielding, peaceful but protective — resonated in the public vote that crowned it Israel’s national bird in 2008. Israelis did not choose a symbol of domination. They chose one of resilience, devotion, and wisdom. They chose a creature that guards life rather than takes it.

Israel didn’t know in 2008, when it voted for the hoopoe, that Hamas would launch war after war with openly genocidal intent. It didn’t know that October skies would fill with rockets, or that invasions, massacres, and kidnappings would carve themselves into the national psyche. But the country understood something deeper — that, like the hoopoe, it would have to adapt to danger, live alert, and protect its family with whatever tools it had.

A small bird in a vast desert landscape.
A small country in a vast expanse of Arab and Muslim nations.

The hoopoe survives not by dominating its predators, but by outsmarting them, outlasting them, and never abandoning its young. Israel, too, has learned to persist in a world that often misreads its vigilance as aggression and its survival instincts as provocation.

The national bird turned out to be prophetic.

Israel may be small, but like the hoopoe, it adapts, endures, and protects its own — even when surrounded, even when threatened, even when the world insists it should fold its wings and pretend it is safe.