YOM HA’ATZMAUT, 5772
Baruch Cohen
In loving memory of Malca z’l
“And what glory awaits the selfless fighters for the cause! That is why I believe that a wonderful breed of Jews will spring up from the earth. The Macabees will rise again.”—Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, Herzl Press, (N.Y., 1970), p. 110.
Theodor Herzl was the father of the modern Zionist movement. He, more than any other, shaped and channelled the millennial, theological yearnings of Return to Zion into a modern political movement: Zionism.
Of all the revolutionary national ideologies that sprang onto the political horizon during that time, the Herzelian Vulcan forged Zionism into the most triumphant, one which flourished and eventually evolved into the State of Israel, and which alone survives until today.
Theodor Herzl’s dream became a reality due to the sacrifices of all of Israel’s daughters and sons, who adhered to the principles and values of Zionism and Jewish national Peoplehood.
As Am Israel today celebrates its 64th birthday, let us commit ourselves to ensuring that Israel always remains strong, powerful, successful, and, above all, true to Jewish history and Jewish values—to the fulfillment of Theodor Herzl, David Ben Gurion, and Menahem Begin’s dreams.
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
APPRECIATING THE ACHIEVEMENTS
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, April 24, 2012
As Israel turns 64, we have much to be proud of. But we do not always appreciate our many achievements.
We agonize over the Iranian nuclear threat, endlessly debating the pros and cons of a preemptive military strike against an Islamic Republic run by apocalyptic mullahs who have expressed their desire to wipe Israel “off the map.” But we, a people who just last week commemorated the Holocaust—the ultimate price paid for Jewish powerlessness—forget to appreciate having the option of launching such a strike single-handedly if we need to. And while we are the strongest military might in the region, we are also the most restrained and most moral.
We take to the streets to protest the high cost of living, skyrocketing housing prices, and the general difficulties of making ends meet every month—and the government does its best to listen, a testament to democracy in action. But we forget to appreciate our low unemployment rate, brisk GDP growth and general economic stability at a time when much of the western world—in particular the US and Europe—is in the throes of one of the worst economic downturns in recent history.
We lament the sorry state of our education system but take in stride the fact that Israel is over-represented in the number of patents it produces per capita, in the number of PhDs, published scientific papers, companies listed on NASDAQ, or start-ups per capita.… Not surprisingly, emigration of American Jews to Israel has been growing incrementally and now stands at more than 3,000 a year. And in recent years the number of Israelis coming home after an extended stay in America has doubled and now stands at about 9,000 a year. With all the criticism leveled against it, Jews are voting with their feet.…
Unfortunately, too much emphasis has been placed on Israel’s faults while ignoring the Zionist movement’s tremendous achievements over the past 64 years.… On one level this propensity for complaining and finding fault is a very Jewish trait. After all, we are a people who believe in tikkun olam, repairing the world. The world cannot be fixed without first acknowledging its flaws. We have, therefore, developed an acute sensitivity to injustices, particularly those said to have been perpetrated by fellow Jews.…
But there is another central idea in Judaism called ahavat yisrael—love of Israel. A hypercritical approach to Jewish sovereignty must be buffered by equally strong expressions of love, commitment and appreciation for the Jews living in Israel.… [And] do [our hypercritics] believe that we, who suffer the direct consequences of the ongoing conflict, do not wish to live in peace with our neighbors?
As Israel turns 64 the Jewish people has much to be proud of. Let’s all learn to appreciate the achievements while recognizing the challenges.
TRUMAN’S RECOGNITION: THE US-ISRAEL RELATIONSHIP IS BORN
Jeff Dunetz
The Lid, April 24, 2012
Sixty-four years ago Israel declared her independence. Israel’s independence would have been short lived were it not for the strong will of President Harry S. Truman, who became the new Jewish State’s first international supporter, not because of any political stance, but because he thought it was the right thing to do.
When Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Isaac Herzog, visited the White House after Israel declared her independence he told Truman, “God put you in your mother’s womb so that you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after 2000 years.…”
“What I am trying to do is make the whole world safe for Jews,” Harry Truman wrote as he agonized over his decision to recognize a Jewish state in Palestine. Secretary of State George Marshall was just as opposed to the creation of Israel as Truman was for it. Clark M. Clifford, Special Counsel to President Truman at the time, remembered the internal US fight regarding the recognition of the Jewish State—the final discussion in the oval office.
The meeting turned out to be an angry battle with Clifford and the President on one side, Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett on the other. The argument used many of the same memes as used today.
Lovett first argued that Truman was supporting Israel solely for political gain and he warned the president that the move would lose more votes than it would gain. When that didn’t work, Lovett tried another approach: the red scare:… “Mr. President, to recognize the Jewish state prematurely would be buying a pig in a poke. How do we know what kind of Jewish state will be set up? We have many reports from British and American intelligence agents that Soviets are sending Jews and communist agents into Palestine from the Black Sea area.…”
When Lovett was done speaking it was Marshall’s turn…: “If you follow Clifford’s advice and if I were to vote in the election, I would vote against you, [he said].…” But Truman’s mind was made up.…
At 4 p.m. Friday May 14, 1948 just before the start of Shabbat, David Ben-Gurion read a 979-word declaration of independence in front of a small audience at the Tel Aviv Art Museum. He finished in his usual terse manner: “The state of Israel is established! The meeting is ended.” At midnight, British rule over Palestine lapsed; 11 minutes later White House spokesman Charlie Ross announced U.S. recognition.
In 1961, long after he was out of office, Truman met with Israeli PM David Ben Gurion in New York. Ben Gurion said this about the meeting:
“At our last meeting, after a very interesting talk, I told him that as a foreigner I could not judge what would be his place in American history; but his helpfulness to us, his constant sympathy with our aims in Israel, his courageous decision to recognize our new state so quickly and his steadfast support since then had given him an immortal place in Jewish history.
“As I said that, tears suddenly sprang to his eyes. And his eyes were still wet when he bade me goodbye. I had rarely seen anyone so moved. I tried to hold him for a few minutes until he had become more composed, for I recalled that the hotel corridors were full of waiting journalists and photographers. He left. A little while later, I too had to go out, and a correspondent came to me to ask, ‘Why was President Truman in tears when he left you?’
“I believe that I know. These were the tears of a man who had been subjected to calumny and vilification, who had persisted against powerful forces within his own Administration determined to defeat him. These were the tears of a man who had fought ably and honorably for a humanitarian goal to which he was deeply committed. These were tears of thanksgiving that his God had seen fit to bless his labors with success.…”
WHY 1948 MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
Alex Safian
Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2012
Of all the events surrounding modern Israel’s rebirth—the rise of the Zionist movement, the first and second aliyahs, the building of pre-state institutions in the Yishuv—by far the most important, at least for the prospects for peace, spring from the War of Independence itself, because the competing “narratives” about that period lie at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
If, as is believed almost uniformly throughout the Arab world, Israel was born in original sin, if the Jews really did ransack placid Arab villages, murdering children in front of parents and parents in front of children, and expelling whoever was left, then Arab hatred for Israel and Jews would be understandable, as would their fundamental refusal to really make peace with Israel.
But the Arab narrative (which is often shared by Europeans) is wrong. Israel was not born in original sin.… Even as early as 1937, in a letter to his son Amos, Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion wrote: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places. All our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven throughout all our activity…that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”
Ten years later [December 1947], even after much violence and conflict, Ben-Gurion’s core beliefs about living in peace with the Arabs had not wavered: “In our state there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without exception.… The attitude of the Jewish state to its Arab citizens will be an important factor—though not the only one—in building good neighborly relations with the Arab states.”
Despite the Yishuv’s attempts to live peacefully with their neighbors, the leader of the Palestinians, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, chose to make common cause with the Nazis, meeting Hitler and Himmler in Berlin and pushing them to accelerate the slaughter of the Jews, and helping to create Muslim SS units in the Balkans that committed bloody war crimes against both Christians and Jews.
The Mufti’s actions directly implicated the Palestinian movement in the Holocaust, but the Jews still tried to reach an accommodation with their Arab neighbors. When the United Nations in 1947 passed a resolution to partition the Palestine Mandate (or what was left of it, since most of the original territory had been lopped off by Britain to create Jordan) into a Jewish and an Arab state, the Jews supported the plan despite being deeply disappointed with how little land they would receive. The five Arab states in the UN all denounced the resolution (UNGA 181), voted against it, and together with the Palestinian representatives vowed to go to war to kill it.
At the UN in May of 1948, just weeks prior to partition, Abba Eban once again urged all parties to support the world body’s proposal and to avoid war, “…much suffering and grief can still be avoided by seeking the way back onto the highway of the partition resolution.”
Unfortunately for all involved, the Arabs ignored Eban, and launched a brutal war against the Jews, in which more than one percent of the Jewish population was killed. Expecting an easy victory, the Arabs were surprised to meet stiff resistance, and when the Arab armies began to fall back from their initial victories (an Egyptian armored column had penetrated up the coast to within 21 miles of Tel Aviv), the Palestinians panicked and began to flee, thus creating the Palestinian refugee problem that endures to this day.
Had the Palestinians accepted partition, a Palestinian state would have been created side-by-side with Israel in 1948, and there wouldn’t have been a single Palestinian refugee.
This Palestinian refusal to accept statehood was no fluke—they have refused statehood at least two more times since 1948. In the summer of 2000, President Bill Clinton presented his plan (the Clinton Parameters) at Camp David, which would have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with a shared Jerusalem and free passage. Israel’s Ehud Barak accepted the Clinton plan, but Arafat refused it, and rather than making a counter offer instead returned home and launched the second intifada, or violent uprising, in which more than a thousand Israelis were killed.
Despite this, in 2008 the Israelis tried again, when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his own peace plan, which would have uprooted tens of thousands of Israeli settlers, abandoned Hebron, divided Jerusalem, and even offered some accommodation to the Palestinian claim to a right of return. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, refused the peace proposal and once again failed to make a counter proposal.
In the face of the documented truth that it is the Palestinians who have repeatedly run away from a negotiated peace and statehood, it is astounding that both the Palestinians and many Europeans act as if Israel refuses to make peace, as if Israel stands in the way of a Palestinian state. Until the Palestinians and the Arabs abandon their myths and face reality, until they accept the hard truths that they have been their own worst enemy, the prospects for peace will be dim indeed.…
(Alex Safian is associate director of CAMERA.)
ISRAEL, A NATION ONCE AGAIN
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield Blog, April 25, 2012
Israel’s Jewish population is approaching six million. If current birth rates hold steady that significant milestone will be reached in time for next year’s Independence Day.…
In the sixty-four years that the revived country has existed, there has been a dramatic population shift. Western and Eastern Europe and Russia, where the majority of Western Jews once lived, now hold a fraction of the Jewish population. The Muslim world, former location of the majority of Eastern Jews, is barely worth mentioning.
Globally the Jewish population is divided between Israel and the United States. Israel is the home of the majority of the world’s Jews, but the combined Jewish Anglosphere is still larger, not so much because of the United Kingdom, but because of North America, which holds the largest number of Jews. In a development that would have been all but incomprehensible a century ago, the majority of Jews in the world speak English or Hebrew. Smaller numbers speak French and Spanish, but in a generation hardly any will speak Russian or Arabic.…
Had Europe not imploded so badly in the twentieth century, the history of the Jewish State might have been quite different. Israel’s Second Commonwealth didn’t manage to attract a majority of the Jewish population from Babylon and the various Greek states. Israel’s Third Commonwealth was in better shape, despite the tiny borders and constant threats, but it is doubtful that it would have the population that it does today, if Jewish life in the Eastern Hemisphere had not become so impossible.
To survive the hostility and chaos of the Eastern Hemisphere, Jews crossed the ocean to the Americas and rebuilt a fortified republic in their homeland. In the natural course of events, the republic would have mainly picked up idealists, nationalists and the devoutly religious. It would have been a viable country, but a smaller one, with more in common with Ireland than its energetic overcrowded self.
Israel’s composition is a fossil record of various periods of persecution, Russian Jews, German Jews, Middle Eastern Jews and then Russian Jews again.… Israel has been defined as much by that external pressure as by its idealism—and that combination is perhaps the truest summary of the Jewish experience.…
Jews are a peculiar people, there is a great deal of talk about them, good and bad, but like most of the peoples of the world, they simply are. They exist and have gone on existing to the irritation of that part of mankind which was aware of them. There are prophecies about them, in their blood runs the veins of the prophets and kings whose words and deeds are on the lips of even those who hate them. But still they go on living their day to day lives until it seems as if there is nothing particularly special about them, and then unexpectedly they do something extraordinary, cure a disease, unlock the mysteries of the universe or build a country that stands as a bulwark against all the rage and hate of the East.…
[Israel] won its independence as an infant, at 19 it defeated seven armies. At 40 it launched its first rocket into space. At 44 it made a terrible life decision that it has still to recover from. It is 64 now, and yet booming with life, with anger, love, doubt, fear and a thousand other human tremors. It has gathered to itself the dead lost in the ashes and seen them born again amid its rebuilt ruins. It has stood on ancient mountains and reseeded the land and made it green again. It has reclaimed a legacy of a lost people and a lost land better than even its dreamers and visionaries could have imagined.
Who knows what it will do next?
