1948: The Birth of Modern Israel

This post was not inspired by any anniversary or anything.  I just happened to be browsing through YouTube and found some interesting films that I wanted to post. 

As the Israelis try yet one more time for a ceasefire so many years after the vote for partition in 1947, and as they offer to trade multiple prisoners in exchange for the return of just one soldier - because to Jews each and every life is uniquely precious - I look back at Jewish history, and can't help wondering - when will Jews ever be free to live in peace?

"I hold out my hand in peace to our Palestinian neighbours in the hope that it won't be returned empty," 

"We cannot change the past and we will not be able to bring back the victims on both sides of the borders. All that we can do today is stop additional tragedies."

-Ehud Olmert, November 28, 2006

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Holocaust survivors, imprisoned, beaten down, used as slave labor, family and friends murdered, starved, sick, chased out of Europe, nowhere to go - - and  attacked by the arabs from moment one. 

Yet it must not be forgotten that not all Israelis were Europeans. There has been a continuous presence of Jews in Israel from Roman times up until the formation of modern day Israel.

From the Jerusalem Center For Public Affairs:

Israel is the only state that was created in the last century whose legitimacy was recognized by both the League of Nations and the United Nations.⁴ The League of Nations Mandate that was issued by the victorious powers of World War I did not create the rights of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine, but rather recognized a pre-existing right, for the links of the Jewish people to their historic land were well-known and accepted in the previous century by world leaders from President John Adams to Napoleon Bonaparte to British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.⁵ These rights were preserved by the successor organization to the League of Nations, the United Nations, under Article 80 of the UN Charter. The ancient, even biblical, association of the Jewish people with the Land of Israel was accepted in the Judeo-Christian tradition as a historical axiom.

From a legal standpoint, an opportunity arose to assert these historically recognized rights. Since 1517, Eretz Israel had been under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire; when the Ottomans lost to the British in 1918, in the Treaty of Sevres they surrendered sovereignty over their Asiatic territories outside of Turkey. A vacuum of sovereignty was created in which the historic claim of the Jewish people could be raised. Yet the Jewish people themselves had begun raising it much earlier.

Since the loss of the Second Jewish Commonwealth to Roman legions in 70 CE, and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish people never lost their connection to the Land of Israel (Palestine). The land, in fact, was never claimed to be the unique home of another nation, but rather was a province of other larger empires. As the renowned historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, has written:

From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger entity.⁶

In the interim, the Jewish people never stopped exercising their claim to the land. Lewis, in fact, notes "there had been a steady movement of Jews to the Holy Land throughout the centuries."⁷ In 135 CE Jews took part in the Bar Kochba revolt against imperial Rome and even re-established their capital in Jerusalem. Defeated by the most brutal of the Roman legions under the command of the emperor Hadrian, Jews were forbidden to reside in Jerusalem for nearly five hundred years. Once a year on the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, they were allowed to weep at the remains of their destroyed Temple at a spot that came to be called "the Wailing Wall." In the meantime, the Roman authorities renamed Judea as Palestina in order to obliterate the memory of Jewish nationhood.

During this period, the Jewish national center shifted from Judea to the Galilee, where hundreds of synagogues were erected from the Mediterranean to the Golan Heights. Jewish law was then codified in the Mishnah by Judah Ha-Nasi. Despite the catastrophic losses in Jewish lives during the wars against the Romans, Jews still constituted the majority of the population of the Galilee in the fourth century. In the Upper Galilee village of Pek'in there remained a continuous Jewish presence from the Roman era to the rise of the State of Israel.

With the defeat of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) by Persian armies in 614, the Jewish people recaptured Jerusalem and made it again their capital briefly. Yet Byzantine rule was soon restored and Jews were forced again to vacate Jerusalem until the defeat of the Byzantines in 638 by the Islamic armies of Caliph Omar, who again opened the city for Jewish resettlement. Eretz Israel became a part of successive Muslim empires - the Rashidun (the immediate followers of the Prophet Muhammad, who ruled from Medina), the Umayyads (who ruled from Damascus), the Abbasids (who ruled from Baghdad), and the Fatimids (who ruled from Cairo).

Under Islam, Jews were to be protected as a "people of the book," but were nonetheless forced to pay discriminatory taxes like the jizya (poll tax) and the kharaj (land tax). The crushing burden of these land taxes led to a loss of Jewish land control in the Galilee during the first several centuries of Islamic rule. During the Crusader occupation of Eretz Israel, many Jews were physically slaughtered, especially in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the great Jewish scholar and poet Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (1075-1141) still called for the mass immigration of Jews to the Land of Israel.⁸

The beginnings of Jewish recovery in Eretz Israel started with the defeat and expulsion of the Crusaders in 1187 by the Kurdish Muslim warrior Salah ad-Din who, like Caliph Omar, allowed the Jews to resettle in Jerusalem. For example, between 1209 and 1211, three hundred rabbis made their way from France and southern England to settle in Jerusalem, once it was safe again to do so. They were joined by rabbis from North Africa and Egypt. The great Jewish scholar Nachmanides (Ramban) erected a synagogue in Jerusalem in 1267 that still stands in the Old City.

In the thirteenth century, Jewish families restored the community of Safed, which would become the international center for the study of Jewish mysticism by the sixteenth century. Reinforced by their rising numbers, Jews became assertive again about their claim in Jerusalem, so that the pope forbade sea captains from transporting Jews to Palestine in 1428.⁹ Despite the hardships, Jews continued to return. The great commentator of the Mishnah, Ovadia Bartinura, left Italy to settle in Jerusalem in 1488; his tomb is at the foot of the Mt. of Olives.

The influx of Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 into the Ottoman Empire, which took control of Eretz Israel in 1517, led to a substantial expansion of the Jewish presence in Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias, where Sultan Sulaiman the Magnificent allotted his Portugese Jewish advisor, Don Joseph Nasi, land grants for Jewish resettlement. Even before the rise of modern political Zionism, Jews continued to stream into the land from Yemen and Lithuania, whose numbers included the students of the halakhic scholar the Vilna Gaon in 1809-1811. By 1864, a clear-cut Jewish majority emerged in Jerusalem, more than half a century before the arrival of the British Empire, the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, and the establishment of the League of Nations Mandate.

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The Vote For Partition:

The partition plan was approved by 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions.

The 33 countries that cast the “Yes” vote were: Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussia, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, Union of South Africa, USSR, USA, Uruguay, Venezuela. (Among other countries, the list includes the US, the three British Dominions, all the European countries except for Greece and the UK, but including all the Soviet-block countries.)

The 13 countries that chose the Hall of Shame and voted “No” were: Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen. (Ten of these are Moslem countries; Greece has the special distinction of being the only European country to have joined the Hall of Shame.)

The ten countries that abstained are: Argentina, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia.

On November 30, 1947, the day following the vote, the Palestinian Arabs murdered six Jews in a bus making its way to Jerusalem, and proceeded to murder another Jew in the Tel-Aviv - Jaffa area. This was a prelude to a war that claimed the lives of 6,000 Jews, or 1% of the total Jewish population in 1948. This toll is the per capita equivalent of today’s Canada losing 300,000 lives, or the US losing 3,000,000. In addition, immediately after the UN vote, Arabs attacks their Jewish neighbours in a number of Arab countries, the murders in Syria’s Aleppo being the best known.

Translation:

The Hope

As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,

With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,

Then our hope - the two-thousand-year-old hope - will not be lost:

To be a free people in our land,

The land of Zion and Jerusalem.