complained to the world that they were destitute and had begged America and England for money, somehow found $272,000,000,000 to spend for their six-year war. Hitlers do not come cheap.
This chapter in ignominy is now completed. How do the Jews feel about this episode in their history? In the main, their feelings can be summed up succinctly. For the Nazis: contempt for abasing man below the level of the beast. For the Germans: pity for not having had the courage to fight the cancer that debased them. For the world: shame at its failure to fight for the dignity of man until forced to fight for its own life. But there is also a grim moral in this wholesale betrayal of the Jews. Those who curried favor with the Nazis betrayed not only the Jews but also their own people. Those who collaborated most with the Nazis in the end became their victims.
Since the war, holocaust museums have been set up all over the world to commemorate the dead-in Europe, in the United States, in Israel. But this history of the Jews in Nazi Germany would be little more than the story of a meaningless interlude of murder if we failed to place it in a larger context. If we do not bury these dead millions with honor, safeguard their dignity, and give meaning to their sacrifice, then future generations will regard them merely as so many sheep led to the "slaughter-bench of history," like the forgotten millions murdered by Attila. We must recognize the fact that Nazism was not just anti-Semitic but anti-human. Because Nazi beliefs of racial superiority had no basis in fact, Nazism was like a nightmare, unfolding without a past or future in an ever-moving present. Because none but German Aryans were qualified to live in the Nazi view, it stood to reason that everyone else would be exterminated. The chilling reality is that when the Russians overran the concentration camps in Poland they found enough Zyklon B crystals to kill 20 million people. Yet there were no more than 3 million Jews left in Europe. The ratio of contemplated mass killing was no longer 1.4 Christians for every Jew, but 5.3 Christians for every Jew. Nazi future plans called for the killing of 10 million non-Germanic people every year.
The world will perhaps disbelieve this as it once disbelieved the existence of gas chambers and death camps. The imagination of the rest of the Western world could not encompass such antihuman concepts, because the Western mind was still imbued with Jewish and Christian humanism and concerned with spiritual values, whereas in Germany these had been expunged by Nazism. If the Christian reader dismisses what happened in Germany as something which affected a few million Jews only, he has not merely shown his contempt for the 7 million Christians murdered by the Nazis but has betrayed his Christian heritage as well. And, if the Jewish reader forgets the 7 million Christians murdered by the Nazis, then he has not merely let 5 million Jews die in vain but has betrayed his Jewish heritage of compassion and justice. It is no longer a question of the survival of the Jews only. It is the question of the survival of man.
Once out of the Nazi cul-de-sac, Jewish history regrouped its forces and continued toward its previously announced goal of creating a new Jewish state. The motivating force behind this course was Zionism, which had its origins in the Haskala and Western Enlightenment. We therefore must return to nineteenth-century Europe to retrieve the ideological strands of Zionism which Jewish leaders wove into a design for Jewish survival.
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TWENTY-NINE
THE WILL TO WIN: FROM ZIONISM TO THE STATE OF ISRAEL
May 15, 1948, was a bad day for the United Nations. On that day the armies of five Arab countries-Egypt, 77 Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon-invaded Israel with the avowed intention of annihilating that new state, which only the day before had so proudly proclaimed its independence. It was clear, of course, that there was nothing the United Nations could do. Helplessly it closed its eyes and braced itself for the inevitable. Poor Jews! They had again met tragedy. But such, alas, seemed to be their fate!
After a few weeks, however, the sound of shooting took on the ominous quality of a Jewish victory. Alarmed, the United Nations opened its eyes and saw the Arabs losing the war. Means for quick action were found. The General Assembly met in special session and Count Folke Bernadotte was dispatched on a peace mission to Israel before a Jewish victory could take the Jews to Cairo.
From the attic of their history the Jews had taken down the symbolic shield of David and the armor of bar Kochba. Once again, after 2,000 years, they were marching under Jewish generals giving commands in Hebrew. Shattered was the stereotype held by the West of the Jew as a man of meekness. What had happened?
What, indeed, had happened? The Jews had had no armies of their own since 135 A.D., when bar Kochba had led them in their third uprising against Rome. Where had these Jewish armies advancing on Cairo come from? Since the sixth century A.D. the Jews had been a minority in Palestine. Now they were fast becoming the dominant majority. As late as 1900, Palestine had been a barren, stony, cactus-infested patch of desert. Now it was a modern agricultural and industrial state, its desert serrated by fertile fields and planted with beautiful cities. Where had the scientific farmers, the industrial workers, the managerial and professional hierarchy who had wrought this transformation come from? Here was a modern democratic state, with a parliament, a Supreme Court, and an independent judiciary. How had all this come about as if overnight? The world had seen revolutions before, but never one like this.
Contrary to popular opinion, revolutions are not started by the oppressed masses, nor are they overnight phenomena. They are generated by intellectuals who come from the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy. Revolutions also have long incubation periods, which often take half a century before the infecting idea breaks out into the rash of revolt.
Before a successful revolution can deliver its promised state, it must undergo three stages of gestation, each in charge of a set of specialists whom we shall call "intellectuals," "politicals," and "bureaucrats." First come the intellectuals, who question existing institutions, point out their inefficiencies, and draw blueprints for a new society The intellectuals behind the French Revolution were such men as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Condorcet. The ideas which inseminated the American Revolution belonged to a quartet of English philosophers-Locke, Hobbes, Bacon, Burke. The intellectual parents of the Russian Revolution were Marx and Engels. These intellectuals were not the offspring of workers and peasants, but the progeny of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy
The ideas of the intellectuals slowly germinate in the minds of other men, giving birth to the politicals, whose function it is to carry the new gospels to the people, organize them into armed opposition, and establish the new state. The politicals are, as a rule, "hotheads" who keep events in constant turmoil, hindering the establishment of a stable government. In due course, the politicals in France, America, and Russia seized the revolutionary ideas of their respective mentors and fomented their revolutions-Robespierre, Danton, and Marat in France; Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Franklin in America; Lenin, Trotsky, and StalinZ& in Russia-none, incidentally, workers or peasants.
The task of the bureaucrats, who sooner or later must supplant the politicals to insure the success of the revolution, is to restore tranquillity and to institutionalize the radical new ideas into a normal way of life. French history after the entry of Napoleon is too complicated to be summarized in one sentence, but the revolutionary ideas which he codified were so firmly established that they survived more than a century of turmoil. Fifty years after the American Revolution, the revolutionary principles of 1776 were so firmly embedded in the national consciousness that an era of good feeling welded together the diverse elements of the nation's heterogeneous population. In Russia, bureaucracy was so firmly entrenched thirty years after the revolution that the Russian premier could leave the country without fearing it would be stolen from him during his absence.
The war in Israel was also the symptom of a revolution-the Zionist Revolution-which, except for one unique difference, followed the classic pattern. The difference was the addition of a fourth set of specialists, the "motivators," who were essential to the Zionist Revolution. To Robespierre's axiom that "omelets are not made without breaking eggs," we must add the maxim that revolutions cannot be made without people. The Zionists were fully aware that there were not enough Jews in Palestine to establish a nation. The historic task of the Zionist motivators was to motivate enough Diaspora Jews to migrate to Palestine to assemble the parts for a new Jewish state.
The Zionist Revolution, just like the French, American, and Russian Revolutions, began with the work of intellectuals. The Haskala Zionists were the revolutionary intellectuals who criticized the existing state of Jewish affairs and outlined the idealistic blueprint for a new state. Next, the motivators went to work, diverting waves of European emigrants to Palestine. They, in turn, were followed by the politicals, who spread the new gospel of Zionism among the Jews. After they had established the new state of Israel, the bureaucrats, following historic precedent, took over.
Actually, "Zionism" was a new name for an old ideology; it simply signifies "a return to Zion"72-that is, a return to Jerusalem. The idea of such a return has permeated Jewish thinking ever since the earliest days of the Diaspora. Though the Jews had lost physical possession of Palestine, they had never given up their hope of someday again establishing their capital in Zion. Modern Zionism differed in one important respect from this old aspiration. Until modern Zionism, most Jews had always thought that a messiah would lead them back to the Promised Land. The Zionists shifted this responsibility from the shoulders of a messiah to the shoulders of the Jews. Having saddled themselves with this responsibility, the Zionists reap-praised this "Zion," this future homeland of the Jews. What had happened to Palestine, since the days of the abortive rebellion of bar Kochba in 135 A.D.?
Palestinian history from Emperor Hadrian in the second century to Ben-Gurion in the twentieth century is a fascinating study in the rape and conquest of a country that refused to acquiesce gracefully or die expediently. After Hadrian's death the Jews returned to Jerusalem, acquired Roman citizenship, and shared in the spirit of amity which suffused the third-century Roman Empire. This era of domestic tranquillity, exemplified by the progressivism of Emperor Alexander Severus, who kept statues of Moses and Christ in his private chapel, came to an end in 325 with the accession to power of the Christians.
Forty years later the two royal brothers, Valens and Valentinian, split the Roman world in two. Palestine, after six hundred years of Western influence under the Greeks and the Romans, was taken back to Orientalism by the Byzantine Empire, as the eastern half of the Roman Empire was then called. During two and a half centuries of Byzantine rule, the Jewish population in Palestine for the first time dwindled to a minority through death and migrations. Palestine became a battleground for clashing Byzantine and Persian armies, a stage for warring Christian sects, and the scene of an intense relic hunt. The first two were physically dangerous; the last was psychologically enervating.
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Especially ferocious was the Athanasian-Arian controversy regarding the homoousian or homoiousian nature of Christ-that is, whether Christ was "consubstantial" or "of like nature" with God. "The furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited," to use the words of Edward Gibbon, led to the slaughter of tens of thousands of Christians and of any stray Jews who got in the way of the argument.
With the hardening of Christian dogma, the belief grew that if part of a saint or martyr were placed in a church or a cathedral, that edifice would become sanctified. As most early saints and martyrs had died in the Holy Land, Palestine became the scene for the most intensive hunt for relics in the history of man. Throughout the land the search went on for an arm, a finger, a toe, even a single bone with which to consecrate an altar or a sacristy.
The Jews and Christians who remained in Palestine welcomed the Persian victors in 614, but they barely had time to become acquainted when, in 638, they had a new set of masters, the Muslims. The subsequent five-hundred-year Arab rule was broken by the Crusaders when they captured the Holy Land in 1100. For almost two hundred years the Crusaders held on to their precarious toehold, until they were ousted by an incredible species of men known as Mamelukes-the Arab name given to the Turkish slaves in Egypt.
The Mamelukes rebelled against their Egyptian masters in 1250, seized power in Egypt, defeated the Crusaders, made Palestine an Egyptian province, stopped the Mongol invasion of Genghis Khan, and held the frontiers of Egypt intact for 267 years. They were fine horsemen, but incapable of political organization. Forty-seven Mameluke sultans, either illiterate or insane, held the throne of Egypt for an average tenure of less than six years each, and as a rule vacated the throne the way they had acquired it by assassination. Yet they built magnificent universities and mosques, made Cairo the showplace of the world, and without effort reduced the populations of Egypt and Palestine by one third. Their end came in 1517 when the Ottoman Turks annexed Egypt and Palestine to their ascending empire.
A century of magnificent Turkish rule brought tranquillity and Jews back to Palestine. Marranos, Kabalists, Talmudists flocked to that country to build businesses, establish schools, write books. Then the Ottoman Empire, aided by corruption and privilege, settled on a course of steady decline. Jewish hopes for an amelioration of conditions revived briefly in 1798 when, having bypassed Lord Nelson's fleet in a Mediterranean fog, Napoleon landed in Alexandria with 32,000 men, the number Alexander the Great had used in conquering the ancient Eastern world. Napoleon captured Jerusalem and drove north to Acre but was forced to retreat when he could not take that stronghold. Palestine was recaptured by the Turks, and by 1860 the "land of milk and honey" was a barren desert which could barely support 12,000 Jews. It was at this juncture of Jewish Diaspora history that the idea of transforming the Palestinian desert back into a land of milk and honey took hold. Under the stimulus of Zionism, the Jews again became active agents in Palestinian history. But it was not until the 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire was disbanded by the Allies after World War I, that the Arabs, too, became active agents in Palestinian history.
World events and the needs of the Zionists embraced each other at the most propitious moments as if on a divinely prearranged "planned parenthood" schedule, fostering five Palestinian immigration waves at the right times and in the right succession. In the first wave of 1880-1900 came the tillers of the soil to break the ground. In the second wave of 1900-1914 came the scientific farmers and laborers to build the country's agriculture. In the third wave of 1918-1924 came the young people, the entrepreneurs, and the speculators, to build cities, found industries, organize an army, and establish educational institutions. In the fourth wave of 1924-1939 came the intellectuals, the professionals, and the bureaucrats, to draw blueprints for democracy and statehood. In the fifth wave, after World War II, came Jews from every walk of life to fill the gaps in all ranks. By 1948 the Zionist intellectuals, motivators, and politicals had accomplished their tasks. The Jews had an army and a blueprint for their state. An idea for survival had been forged into a tool for survival.
The chain reaction from the idea of Zionism to the reality of Israel was touched off about 1860, at which time the messianic concept of a "return to Zion" began to change into the political concept of a "return to Palestine." This change in Jewish outlook coincided with the beginnings of the transformation of the anti-Jewishness of the Middle Ages into the anti-Semitism of the modern Age. Jewish intellectuals divined the difference between anti-Jewishness and anti-Semitism. They maintained that the Jew could no longer find peaceful existence by fleeing from one country to seek asylum in another, but could save himself only by establishing a country of his own. In the way the rhapsodic Prophets had taught that God wanted morality, not sacrifice, so the political Zionists taught that God wanted self-reliant Jews, not submissive ones.
The road from the Diaspora back to Jerusalem was paved with a succession of ideas contained in a series of books published between 1860 and 1900, the first of which was prophetically entitled Rome and Jerusalem, an intensely Jewish book written in 1862 by Moses Hess (1812-1875). Handsome, fiery Hess married a French prostitute to show his defiance of orthodox Jewish traditions. Contrary to dire predictions, Hess lived happily with his grisette, who dearly loved her strange Jew and his strange life in a world of ideas she had never known existed. Hess, strongly influenced by Spinoza, had argued as early as 1841 for a humanistic United States of Europe, had joined the Socialist movement, and was for a while associated with Marx and Engels. He had participated in the German Revolution of 1848 and had been sentenced to death, but had escaped to Paris.
Because Hess viewed socialism as a humanitarian ideal, he could not accept the communist materialistic interpretation of history or the idea of class war. He broke with the left-wing movement, returned to Judaism, and brooded upon the problem of the Jews. The result of his cogitation was Rome and Jerusalem. Its ideas foreshadowed Zionism and influenced the future leaders of the movement. In this book Hess advocated the return of the Jews to Palestine, there to create a spiritual center for Diaspora Judaism.
These ideas were polished and refined by Russian-born Peretz Smolenskin (1842-1885), another refugee from orthodoxy. At the age of eleven, Smolenskin had seen his slightly older brother impressed into the Russian army by "choppers"; 80 at the age of twelve he had absorbed the Talmud by rote and rod; by the time of his bar mitzvah (confirmation) he had had enough of shtetl life and ran away from home. For twelve years he wandered across the face of Russia. At the age of twenty-five, Smolenskin appeared in Vienna, where he became an intellectual. There he founded the Hebrew literary monthly in which he published his now famed essay The Eternal People, asserting that the Jews were a nation of intellect, kept together by the Hebrew language. Smolenskin also prophesied that Jewish intellectual values would someday become the cherished possessions of mankind, and that Palestine would once again become a world center where Jewish genius would flourish.
In the 1880s Zionist intellectuals began to run into Zionist motivators, such as Rabbi Samuel Mohilever (1824-1898), who launched the first Zionist immigration wave to Palestine. Mohilever founded a political action organization, Lovers of Zion. A plank in its platform called for the purchase of land in Palestine for its members, and its slogan "On to Palestine" echoed through the shtetls of Russia and Poland.
The Lovers of Zion found one of its most able leaders in a Haskala intellectual, Judah Pinsker (1821-1891), a former officer in the Russian Medical Corps. Seeing his fellow Jews massacred in the Odessa pogrom, even as he preached the integration of Jews and Russians, Pinsker executed an about-face and denounced assimilationism as a futile sop to the anti-Semites. In a pamphlet, Auto-Emancipation, he urged the Jews to seek territorial independence and to return to a Jewish national consciousness. Anti-Semitism, said Pinsker, was a peril which no Jew could escape by migrating from a minority status in one country to a minority status in another. He also raised a new, or rather old, battle cry, that of Rabbi Hillel of Roman days-"Im ayn anee lee, mee lee?" (If I am not for myself, who is?) It was a call to stand up on one's feet and fight instead of sinking down on one's knees to pray. The way had been paved for Theodor
Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of what is now termed Zionism.
Herzl, the pampered son of a wealthy half-assimilated Jewish family in Budapest, was raised in an atmosphere of luxury and German culture. He was greatly attached to his mother; his only playmate as a child was his sister; and his adolescent heroes were Goethe, Napoleon, and Bismarck. He studied law in Vienna, but became a journalist.
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JEWS, GOD, AND HISTORY
As one views the portraits of this strikingly handsome, unsmiling, prophetic figure, dressed in elegantly tailored suits, it is hard to imagine that during his early manhood he was a successful playwright, author of cream-puff bedroom comedies in which wives were constantly being seduced by handsome young rakes and husbands made amiable cuckolds. As a journalist, Herzl affected a supercilious, cynical literary style which made him the darling of Viennese society. One simply had to read Herzl every morning with one's croissants and coffee.
The turning point in Herzl's life was the Dreyfus Affair. Herzl had been sent to France by his Vienna employers to cover this celebrated case. At first, he felt certain that Dreyfus was guilty, but, after becoming convinced of the captain's innocence, he joined the Dreyfusards. A prevailing cliché about Herzl is that the Dreyfus Affair made him aware for the first time of the existence of anti-Semitism. Actually, anti-Semitism had been one of Herzl's constant problems and he had even toyed with the idea of baptism as a way out. L'Affaire Dreyfus made him come to grips with his problem.
For the first time Herzl realized that anti-Semitism stemmed from the social structure, and that personal salvation could not be gained through baptism. Once Herzl chose to identify himself with the Jews and Judaism, he became great almost overnight. Once he turned to the problem of Jewish survival, all superciliousness, all mocking pretense left him. With a cry of the French mob, "Death to the Jews," still echoing in the depths of his soul, Herzl sat down to write his Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), published in 1896. In this slim book he outlined the Zionist ideal, turning the messianic currents of longing for a return to Zion into a political force. The book created a sensation.
Herzl threw himself into the task of organizing an international Zionist movement and in 1897 convened the historic First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland. To a wildly cheering delegation, Herzl proclaimed the aims of the Zionist movement "to create for the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine secured by public law." Zionism was not to be a trickle of individually subsidized Jews returning to Palestine, but a mass movement of farmers and workers, managers and entrepreneurs, scholars and intellectuals.
The world at large took little note of this Zionist Congress in Basel. To the world press it was only a crackpot Jewish organization holding another meeting. Nor did the world note the replica of the Jewish coin used in the days of the bar Kochba rebellion against Rome, which each member in the Zionist organization received. But the Basel Congress touched off a conflagration among the mass of Jews. The rich Jews, the assimilationist Jews, rejected Herzl and his Zionist ideas. Many Reform rabbis attacked him. But the poor, the ignorant, and the orthodox flocked to his banner. It was no accident that Zionism originated in the West, not in the East; out of the European Enlightenment, not the Jewish Haskala. It was not the Jew in Herzl but the universal man in Herzl that brought forth secular Zionism. But it was the Jews from the East who gave it dimension. They did not look upon Zionism as mere nationalism; they looked upon it as a continuation of the Jewish tradition, thus making it something that it was not but what it was to become.
What was the hold this man Herzl, this rich, handsome ex-assimilationist, had on the imagination of the poor, the oppressed, the orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe? It was threefold. First, there was a grandeur and a dignity in Herzl's concept of a voluntary exodus, not to a wilderness, but to a Jewish state from which the voice of the Jews would again be heard in the councils of the world. Second, there was an impelling majesty in his entire approach-an impatience with caution, a lofty disregard for detail. The strength of Herzl was his total ignorance of Judaism. His mind was not confused by irrelevant facts. He had a vision that made all old facts irrelevant as it created new ideas. Herzl's Zionism was not a piecemeal program, but a total concept. By merely identifying themselves with this as yet nonexistent state, the impoverished Jews in Eastern Europe gained status in their own eyes. And finally there was Herzl himself, his stately image, his commanding appearance, and his imperious knock that opened the doors of royalty. To the Jews, Herzl was already the ruler of this state-to-be, their Herzl hamelech-"Herzl the King."
Herzl committed one great blunder before he died, but such was his popularity that, although this blunder would have proved fatal to anyone else, it was overlooked in him. A split had developed in the ranks of the Zionists between the Herzl motivators, who felt that persistent diplomacy would win the fight for a Jewish state, and the Zionist politicals, who felt that not "hat-in-hand" but "gun-on-shoulder" would decide the issue of Palestinian independence. At the Zionist Congress in 1903, when Herzl proposed that the Zionists abandon Palestine for Ugandal (where the British government had promised him land), a magnificent furor broke out. The great Herzl was accused of being a traitor. Realizing his blunder, he joined the opposition in order to preserve a unified Zionist organization. He died the following year, at the age of forty-four.
The Zionists decided to redeem Palestine by buying land on a grand scale for all Jewish settlers. Suddenly, the scraggy soil of Palestine, neglected for fifteen centuries by its alien custodians, acquired value. Though prices asked by Arab and Turkish landholders were outrageous, the Zionist Jewish National Fund paid them. By 1948, when the State of Israel was founded, the Jews had paid millions of dollars for 250,000 acres of desert land, had settled 83,000 Jews on the land, had founded 233 villages, and had planted 5,000,000 trees on soil which but fifty years previous had been barren. Before 1880 there had been about 12,000 Jews in Palestine, mostly the pious and orthodox who had come to live out their days and be buried in the Holy Land. From 1880 until World War I, Hess's Rome and Jerusalem, Smolenskin's The Eternal People, Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation, and Herzl's The Jewish State motivated 115,000 Jews to settle in Palestine. The "intellectuals" and the "motivators" had done their work. After World War I the "politicals" took over.
World War I almost killed the Zionist movement. Britain had counted on Turkey to come into the war on the side of the Allies. Instead the Ottoman Empire sided with the Germans, portending calamity for both the British and the Jews. To Britain it meant that her Suez Canal lifeline was in danger. To the Palestinian Jews it spelled physical disaster. Every Jew suspected of sympathy with the Allies-the knowledge of a little English was considered proof of sympathy-was hanged; 12,000 Jews were deported because they were not Turkish citizens; and Zionism itself was declared illegal.
During World War I the now famed Balfour Declaration was born. It was an expression of gratitude from the British government to the Jewish people for the part they played in the Great War. England's brilliant chemist, Chaim Weizmann, had been called into the British War Office to find a way of producing synthetic cordite, an explosive essential to the British war effort, previously manufactured from acetone, a chemical imported from Germany before the war. Weizmann discovered such a process and turned it over to the British government.
Weizmann was both a chemist and a Zionist, and he knew little beyond these two disciplines. He was a man of dignity and strength. The Jewish masses viewed him, like Herzl, with awe-a Jewish scientist who could mingle with the elite. He spoke flawless English, but he also spoke the Yiddish of the Jewish masses. He was a Jew, yet he walked with gentiles. His wit was that of a Jewish ghetto man, parochial and universal. American Zionists viewed with suspicion his love for Britain; indeed, he saw British democracy through the eyes of the upper classes-he did not see their soldiers with bayonets on the frontier of empire. Regarded with misgivings by many Jews, he was tolerated by them because he was the only one who had easy access to British ministers. And, in fact, though outwardly democratic, he thought his own judgment infallible. He could mimic the masses, but underneath it all he had a contempt for them. His love was for the aristocracy. Yet he remained a Jew-unashamedly so-and a staunch Zionist.
When, therefore, in 1917, Weizmann approached the British government with a request that it assume a protectorate for a national Jewish home in Palestine, Jewish contributions to the British War effort (his among them) helped assure a favorable reply Through Lord Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, the British government let it be known on November 2, 1917, that "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people...." As a deeply religious man, Balfour felt that Christianity owed the Jews an immeasurable debt. He was a Christian Zionist who, like Lloyd George, J. C. Smuts, Sir Mark Sykes, and many other Englishmen, saw the Bible as a living thing and believed fully in its divinity. To them, instead of sounding like preposterous nonsense about the Jews returning to Zion after a 2,000-year absence, it sounded like fulfillment of prophecy. 82 Jubilation among the Jews was great. "We hear the steps of the Messiah," Weizmann exclaimed after the signing of the Balfour Declaration.
During World War I, in exchange for the promise of an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Britain secretly also gave her qualified support for Arab independence. The artificial boundaries in the Arab world that we now regard as engraved in stone did not exist until after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was neatly dismembered by England and France in a series of clinical lessons known as "peace conferences." The divisions were not made
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The White Paper led to the first open Jewish defiance of the British. Young Jews volunteered to serve in Jabotinsky's underground army. The attitude of the Irgun was that the British, in preventing Jewish immigration, had allied themselves with the Arabs and were therefore as much a target for attack as were the Arabs themselves. Arrogantly, Irgun youths tweaked the tail of the British imperial lion. The British lion roared in pain and went out in an Irgun hunt. But the Irgun was as agile as the lion was relentless. Jews and British were caught in an enmity neither had desired but which events had forced upon them.
When Britain became embroiled in World War II, 130,000 Jews clamored for enlistment in the British Africa Corps. The wary British feared to arm so many Jews. Nevertheless, out of sheer necessity, Britain did accept 30,000, who fought as independent companies. Grudgingly the British admired the courage of these Jewish soldiers; ruefully, Rommel's Afrika Korps found out that against Jews armed with guns they were not supermen.
As the British had suspected, the Jews fought not only for the pleasure of meeting the Nazis in combat, but also to train themselves for the inevitable future showdown in Palestine. Once the war was over, everybody jockeyed for position. When the curtain rose again in 1945 on the Palestinian drama, the actors sprang to life, taking the same parts they had in 1941; British policy was still the White Paper; Arab policy was still to oppose all Jewish immigration; and Jewish policy remained that of unrestricted immigration.
Terror again erupted in 1946 when the British refused to admit 100,000 Jews from Germany, as proposed by United States President Harry S. Truman. Enraged by the British policy of barring Jewish refugees from Palestine and by the detention of refugee Jews on the island of Cyprus, Irgun leaders determined to force a showdown on the issue. Irgunists dynamited the King David Hotel, the Jerusalem headquarters of the British, killing eighty British officers and men, and wounding seventy others. Goaded into reprisals, the British ordered a boycott of all Jewish shops. Far from shattering Jewish unity, however, this solidified Jewish sentiment against British rule.
The British repeated history by embarking on the same futile policy that they had in American colonial times when the Americans had defied British rule. Instead of reexamin ing their policies in Palestine, instead of listening to the voices of conciliation in their own Parliament, the British imposed fines on anyone suspected of having helped or harbored a Jewish immigrant. In spite of this, in five years the Jews smuggled 113,000 immigrants into the country under the guns of the British. When Britain protested this mass violation of law to the Jewish Agency, it replied with some acerbity that the British were violating human law by denying the homeless European Jews their rightful sanctuary.
Britain retaliated by disarming the Jews, by mass arrests, by hanging Jewish leaders. But new weapons seemed to grow in the desert (where the Jews had hidden them), mass arrests bred mass defiance, and the hanging of Jewish leaders gave birth to an Irgun "law of talion" the hanging of a British officer for a Jewish noncom, a higher British officer for a Jewish officer. The entire country was a seething camp of rebellion. In 1947, harassed Britain, beset with even more serious troubles in other parts of her empire, declared she had had enough of the Palestinian problem and dropped it in the lap of the United Nations.
The United Nations, meanwhile, had sent a special committee to Palestine to investigate the situation. It came back with basically the same recommendations made by the Peel Commission in 1937-that the British Mandate be terminated and that Palestine be partitioned into an Arab and a Jewish state. On November 29,1947, the General As-. sembly voted 33 to 13 for partition. The Jews accepted the decision; the Arabs defied it. After twenty-six turbulent years, the British Mandate had come to an end.
In spite of what happened, in spite of the White Paper and the reprisals, the British must elicit our admiration. Under the most trying circumstances, they had behaved like civilized soldiers representing a civilized nation. They fought hard and lost courageously They were not animated by evil intent or inhuman policies, but by affairs of state and the will to preserve their empire. The fact that friendly relations exist today between Israel and Britain testifies to the realization of the Israelis themselves that Britain had been a formidable foe, not an anti-Semitic enemy, and that Israel had won not because she was mightier, but because Britain was beset with other, more pressing problems.
As evacuation day, May 14, 1948, drew closer, Arabs began to flee. Between February and May before the British had left, thousands of Arabs had already fled. The first to flee were their leaders and the upper and educated classes. Why? Arabs say the Jews had frightened them with their threats of massacres. The Jews said the Arabs simply heeded the commands of their leaders to leave so the Arabs could "drive the Jews into the sea," after which the Arabs would return to reclaim their land, implying that those who remained would be regarded as renegades. Thus was laid the groundwork for the Arab refugee problem.
The State of Israel was officially born at 4:00 P.M., Friday, May 14,1948, at the Tel Aviv Museum, where the Jews listened to Ben-Gurion proclaim the independence of the State of Israel. "By virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine to be called Israel." After the declaration, Ben-Gurion issued a plea to the Arab states to cooperate with the Jewish nation, which was "prepared to make its contribution to the progress of the Middle East as a whole." Instead, Egypt sent a cable advising it would invade the new state to put an end to it. Three other Arab states-Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria-did not bother with formalities but followed Egypt's lead.
President Harry Truman, two hours after Israel was founded, was the first to recognize the new state. Four communist countries followed: Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
That evening the Israelis toasted their new homeland. The next morning they manned the front lines to defend it. Years later, I asked Ben-Gurion what he had thought on the eve of independence. Did he believe Israel could win? His answer indicated the seriousness of the situation but also the courage and will to win that prevailed at the time. He said he had believed firmly that the Israelis could win but that they would suffer 60,000 casualties. (They lost 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians.) There was, he said, great apprehension. He had been informed that General Marshall had given President Truman an appraisal of Israel's chances of winning a war against the Arabs, the gist of which was that Israel would best be advised to forget about the state and come to an understanding with the Arabs who, numbering 30 million and with vastly superior arms and manpower, would annihilate the Jews in a horrible bloodbath. Most people at the time seemed to agree with General Marshall. But Ben-Gurion added that even after listening to this statement, Israel's governing body decided to stay the course.
The Israeli War of Independence (1948-1949) contained all the elements of drama, intrigue, and luck that one associates with a historical novel. This clash of destinies began when the British Empire folded its Palestinian tents, hauled down the Union Jack, and departed. Five Arab armies, led by the spiritual successor to T. E. Lawrence-General John Bagot Glubb, honorary Pasha-immediately swooped down upon Israel from all directions, announcing in their first communiqué that within a week the fighting would be over and the Jews driven into the sea.
And, indeed, it looked as if the Arabs were right. Of Israel's total population of 758,700, on the second day of her independence she had only 19,000 men to stem the invaders on five fronts. Many of the defenders who had never held anything in their arms except wives, children, and Torah, now held Bren and Sten guns. The Jews were outgunned by the modern weapons of the Arabs, acquired from British sources. In that first onslaught, Jewish lines first wavered, then fell back. On May 20, Old Jerusalem fell to the Arabs.
The mistake the British and the Jews had made in 1918 in underestimating Arab nationalism, the Arabs now made in 1948 in underestimating Jewish nationalism. A will to win swept Jewish ranks and the tide of battle turned. The Jews became imbued with the historic spirit of their struggle. Here, in this land, their ancestors had fought Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Sassanids, and Seleucids. Here they had challenged Rome in three uprisings. The tempo of fighting changed from desperate defense to confidence in victory. Lines solidified. Not an inch of soil was to be yielded; there would be no retreat, only advance. The Arabs ran into this wall of psychological resistance and were hurled back; they could not understand what had happened. As the French
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The White Paper led to the first open Jewish defiance of the British. Young Jews volunteered to serve in Jabotinsky's underground army. The attitude of the Irgun was that the British, in preventing Jewish immigration, had allied themselves with the Arabs and were therefore as much a target for attack as were the Arabs themselves. Arrogantly, Irgun youths tweaked the tail of the British imperial lion. The British lion roared in pain and went out in an Irgun hunt. But the Irgun was as agile as the lion was relentless. Jews and British were caught in an enmity neither had desired but which events had forced upon them.
When Britain became embroiled in World War II, 130,000 Jews clamored for enlistment in the British Africa Corps. The wary British feared to arm so many Jews. Nevertheless, out of sheer necessity, Britain did accept 30,000, who fought as independent companies. Grudgingly the British admired the courage of these Jewish soldiers; ruefully, Rommel's Afrika Korps found out that against Jews armed with guns they were not supermen.
As the British had suspected, the Jews fought not only for the pleasure of meeting the Nazis in combat, but also to train themselves for the inevitable future showdown in Palestine. Once the war was over, everybody jockeyed for position. When the curtain rose again in 1945 on the Palestinian drama, the actors sprang to life, taking the same parts they had in 1941; British policy was still the White Paper; Arab policy was still to oppose all Jewish immigration; and Jewish policy remained that of unrestricted immigration.
Terror again erupted in 1946 when the British refused to admit 100,000 Jews from Germany, as proposed by United States President Harry S. Truman. Enraged by the British policy of barring Jewish refugees from Palestine and by the detention of refugee Jews on the island of Cyprus, Irgun leaders determined to force a showdown on the issue. Irgunists dynamited the King David Hotel, the Jerusalem headquarters of the British, killing eighty British officers and men, and wounding seventy others. Goaded into reprisals, the British ordered a boycott of all Jewish shops. Far from shattering Jewish unity, however, this solidified Jewish sentiment against British rule.
The British repeated history by embarking on the same futile policy that they had in American colonial times when the Americans had defied British rule. Instead of reexamin ing their policies in Palestine, instead of listening to the voices of conciliation in their own Parliament, the British imposed fines on anyone suspected of having helped or harbored a Jewish immigrant. In spite of this, in five years the Jews smuggled 113,000 immigrants into the country under the guns of the British. When Britain protested this mass violation of law to the Jewish Agency, it replied with some acerbity that the British were violating human law by denying the homeless European Jews their rightful sanctuary.
Britain retaliated by disarming the Jews, by mass arrests, by hanging Jewish leaders. But new weapons seemed to grow in the desert (where the Jews had hidden them), mass arrests bred mass defiance, and the hanging of Jewish leaders gave birth to an Irgun "law of talion"-the hanging of a British officer for a Jewish noncom, a higher British officer for a Jewish officer. The entire country was a seething camp of rebellion. In 1947, harassed Britain, beset with even more serious troubles in other parts of her empire, declared she had had enough of the Palestinian problem and dropped it in the lap of the United Nations.
The United Nations, meanwhile, had sent a special committee to Palestine to investigate the situation. It came back with basically the same recommendations made by the Peel Commission in 1937-that the British Mandate be terminated and that Palestine be partitioned into an Arab and a Jewish state. On November 29,1947, the General As-. sembly voted 33 to 13 for partition. The Jews accepted the decision; the Arabs defied it. After twenty-six turbulent years, the British Mandate had come to an end.
In spite of what happened, in spite of the White Paper and the reprisals, the British must elicit our admiration. Under the most trying circumstances, they had behaved like civilized soldiers representing a civilized nation. They fought hard and lost courageously They were not animated by evil intent or inhuman policies, but by affairs of state and the will to preserve their empire. The fact that friendly relations exist today between Israel and Britain testifies to the realization of the Israelis themselves that Britain had been a formidable foe, not an anti-Semitic enemy, and that Israel had won not because she was mightier, but because Britain was beset with other, more pressing problems.
As evacuation day, May 14, 1948, drew closer, Arabs began to flee. Between February and May before the British had left, thousands of Arabs had already fled. The first to flee were their leaders and the upper and educated classes. Why? Arabs say the Jews had frightened them with their threats of massacres. The Jews said the Arabs simply heeded the commands of their leaders to leave so the Arabs could "drive the Jews into the sea," after which the Arabs would return to reclaim their land, implying that those who remained would be regarded as renegades. Thus was laid the groundwork for the Arab refugee problem.
The State of Israel was officially born at 4:00 P.M., Friday, May 14,1948, at the Tel Aviv Museum, where the Jews listened to Ben-Gurion proclaim the independence of the State of Israel. "By virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine to be called Israel." After the declaration, Ben-Gurion issued a plea to the Arab states to cooperate with the Jewish nation, which was "prepared to make its contribution to the progress of the Middle East as a whole." Instead, Egypt sent a cable advising it would invade the new state to put an end to it. Three other Arab states-Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria-did not bother with formalities but followed Egypt's lead.
President Harry Truman, two hours after Israel was founded, was the first to recognize the new state. Four communist countries followed: Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
That evening the Israelis toasted their new homeland. The next morning they manned the front lines to defend it. Years later, I asked Ben-Gurion what he had thought on the eve of independence. Did he believe Israel could win? His answer indicated the seriousness of the situation but also the courage and will to win that prevailed at the time. He said he had believed firmly that the Israelis could win but that they would suffer 60,000 casualties. (They lost 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians.) There was, he said, great apprehension. He had been informed that General Marshall had given President Truman an appraisal of Israel's chances of winning a war against the Arabs, the gist of which was that Israel would best be advised to forget about the state and come to an understanding with the Arabs who, numbering 30 million and with vastly superior arms and manpower, would annihilate the Jews in a horrible bloodbath. Most people at the time seemed to agree with General Marshall. But Ben-Gurion added that even after listening to this statement, Israel's governing body decided to stay the course.
The Israeli War of Independence (1948-1949) contained all the elements of drama, intrigue, and luck that one associates with a historical novel. This clash of destinies began when the British Empire folded its Palestinian tents, hauled down the Union Jack, and departed. Five Arab armies, led by the spiritual successor to T. E. Lawrence-General John Bagot Glubb, honorary Pasha-immediately swooped down upon Israel from all directions, announcing in their first communiqué that within a week the fighting would be over and the Jews driven into the sea.
And, indeed, it looked as if the Arabs were right. Of Israel's total population of 758,700, on the second day of her independence she had only 19,000 men to stem the invaders on five fronts. Many of the defenders who had never held anything in their arms except wives, children, and Torah, now held Bren and Sten guns. The Jews were outgunned by the modern weapons of the Arabs, acquired from British sources. In that first onslaught, Jewish lines first wavered, then fell back. On May 20, Old Jerusalem fell to the Arabs.
The mistake the British and the Jews had made in 1918 in underestimating Arab nationalism, the Arabs now made in 1948 in underestimating Jewish nationalism. A will to win swept Jewish ranks and the tide of battle turned. The Jews became imbued with the historic spirit of their struggle. Here, in this land, their ancestors had fought Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Sassanids, and Seleucids. Here they had challenged Rome in three uprisings. The tempo of fighting changed from desperate defense to confidence in victory. Lines solidified. Not an inch of soil was to be yielded; there would be no retreat, only advance. The Arabs ran into this wall of psychological resistance and were hurled back; they could not understand what had happened. As the French
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stopped the Germans at Verdun in World War I, so the Jews stopped the Arab onslaught on all five fronts. The war the Arabs had thought would be over in a week exhausted them after a month. On June 11 they gratefully accepted the truce terms offered by Count Folke Bernadotte of the United Nations.
Both sides used the truce to consolidate their forces, for neither had any intention of quitting. Under pretense of neutrality, the West placed an embargo on the sale of all arms, but Israel, anticipating this move, had made advance arrangements to purchase arms from Czechoslovakia. 83 In an airlift known as "Operation Black" because it was carried on at night, Israeli pilots shuttled rifles, machine guns, 75-mm artillery, and tanks to the Israeli front in a buildup for the next showdown. Jews who had served in the British and American air forces shuttled Flying Boxcars, Hurricanes, and Messerschmitts from the four corners of the world to Israel, refueling at bases clandestinely arranged for them in England, France, Corsica, and Yugoslavia by former comrades in the service. Impatiently the Jews waited for the Arabs to break the truce.
The Arabs were even more impatient for the truce to end. They had greatly improved their positions with British-made artillery and tanks. A recruitment drive increased their forces from 24,000 to 60,000, whereas Jewish strength increased only to 20,000. There was no doubt that this time victory was within Arab grasp.
The moment the month-long truce ended, the Arabs launched an attack that carried them irresistibly forward, right into the muzzles of Israeli guns. Arab lines sagged; the Israeli counterattack swept everything in front of it, carrying the war into enemy territory. The second round of the war lasted but ten days. The Arabs cried for a truce, and the obliging Count Folke Bernadotte came running with white flags and a cease-fire order-without a time limit.
As with the first truce, the second one too was shamelessly violated by both sides. The Jews wanted just one more bout with the Arabs to consolidate their position. The Arabs, convinced their rout had been a fluke, wanted one more go at the Jews to finish them off. More arms poured in on both sides.
Only on the Egyptian front had the Arabs been successful. Here the Egyptians were in possession of the Negev Desert. Confident the next thrust would take them to Jerusalem, they broke the truce. The Jews were waiting for them. The momentum of the counterattack carried the Israeli armies across Egypt's borders to the outskirts of the main Egyptian army base of el-Arish on the Mediterranean. Its fall and capture would have left Egypt defenseless. England let it be known that if Israel did not retreat, it would mean war with England. Israel retreated. Egypt sued for peace, and one by one the other Arab nations followed suit. The war was over. Israel had been redeemed, not by money this time, but by the blood of her sons. God had been on the side of the better, not the bigger, battalions.
Even as the War of Independence was being fought, Israel's statesmen concentrated on building the new Jewish state on old Jewish democratic principles. The first national elections were held in 1949, and a new Constituent Assembly was proclaimed, with David Ben-Gurion as Prime Minister and Chaim Weizmann as President. 84 Weizmann was not in Israel when the state was declared, nor does his name appear on the Israel Declaration of Independence. Just as Herzl had reached the summit with the first Congress at Basel, and Weizmann with the Balfour Declaration, so Ben-Gurion reached his zenith with the Declaration of Independence and the victory of 1948.
Ben-Gurion was a casting director's dream for the part of Israel's Prime Minister. White-haired and sun-tanned, shrewd and sentimental, tough and benign, Ben-Gurion played with historic conviction each of the four roles demanded by the Zionist revolutionary cycle. Born in Plonsk, Poland, in 1886, Ben-Gurion rebelled early in life against shtetl Judaism, exchanging it for the Haskala and Western Enlightenment. He fell easy and willing prey to the Zionist intellectuals, joining the movement and "motivating" himself to Palestine in 1906, where he became a tiller of the soil and where, in 1910, he founded a political party and a newspaper. In 1912, he was ready to change his role from a motivator to a political. He matriculated at the University of Constantinople Law School, but when he returned to Palestine he was promptly expelled by the Turks as a potential troublemaker. During World War I, he helped recruit Jewish fighters for Jabotinsky's battalions, and then enlisted himself. After World War I, Ben-Gurion became one of Palestine's most influential politicians, guiding, prodding, influencing members of the League of Nations and United Nations, his magnetic personality playing a great part both in the establishment of a Mandated Palestine in 1922, and in the vote for an independent Israel in the General Assembly in 1947.
The moment the Israeli state was proclaimed, Ben-Gurion shed his role as a Zionist political, realizing this phase of the revolution had become an anachronism the moment victory had been achieved. He became the statesman bureaucrat. Boldly he declared the Zionist party defunct, its mission over, having "committed suicide" by success. It was time for the bureaucrats to take over to solidify gains, institutionalize new mores, and domesticate revolutionary tempers into normal activity A new democracy, based on "liberty and groceries," had to be secured.
There was to be no second-class citizenship for anyone in Israel. No Jew needed to pass tests to become an Israeli. All he had to do was to land on Israeli soil and proclaim himself a citizen. Citizenship was also extended to every Arab living in Israel. The franchise, universal education, and the right to hold jobs according to ability were granted to all, regardless of religion, sex, or previous condition of servitude. For the first time in history, Arab women could vote.
As Ahad Ha-Am, Bialik, and Tchernichovsky had preached; Israel was to be not the land of "milk and honey" alone, but also the land of education and culture. Schools sprang up all over the country. Education was compulsory. As villages, towns, and cities grew, so also museums and symphony halls, theaters and opera houses, art galleries and colleges appeared. Today a performance of Peer Gynt is attended by Israeli Arabs and Jews. The children of the "insulted and injured" sit with the children of the former Arab fellahin watching ballet or listening to a children's concert. In 1960, just twelve years after its birth as a state, Israel had more newspapers, magazines, and bookstores, more art galleries, museums, schools, and symphony orchestras per capita than any other nation.
Two factors make this achievement in so short a time even more remarkable. In 1922, Palestine embraced 45,000 square miles, which supported 750,000 people. By 1948, Palestine, through successive partitions by the British and by the United Nations, had been trimmed down to 8,000 square miles. Yet in 1960, Israel supported 2,000,000 people, of whom about 200,000 were Arabs; in 1990 there were 4,700,000 people of whom 3,800,000 were Jews and the balance Muslims, Christians, and Druze. Although only a small portion of its Jewish population is native-born, so strong is the Jewish idea that within a few years of their arrival, Jews from Yemen and Germany, Morocco and Russia, Turkey and Poland, Ethiopia and Iraq, Egypt and Syria have all been welded into a new Israeli ethos. The people which had been dispersed for 2,000 years have been reunited into one peoplehood, one nation.
But Israel was not yet to know the tranquillity of peace. In the autumn of 1956, the Egyptians, still smarting from their defeat, sent specially trained commandos, known as fedayeen, across Israeli borders to harass the Jews. They infiltrated the country at night, and, like Indians in American frontier days, put the farmhouses along the border to the torch, killed the inhabitants, and then vanished in the night to the safety of their own country.
As the Soviet bloc poured more arms and munitions into Egypt, the Egyptians became bolder in their attacks. The three Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria formed a military alliance under a unified command, Gamal Abdel Nasser announcing again, over worldwide radio, that he would destroy the Israeli state. Instead, in eight days, world headlines told a different story. What began as a hope for a quick victory for Egypt almost erupted into a third world war.
Quickly Israel mobilized her army, and on October 29, 1956, rushed it to the front in the Sinai in trucks, taxicabs, and private vehicles, greeting the surprised Egyptians with a clash of tanks, roar of airplanes, and an infantry advancing at will, taking vital positions near the Negev-Sinai border. Within three days the Israeli Army outmaneuvered and outflanked the Egyptian Army, slashed its way into the Sinai Peninsula, seized Egypt's stockpiles of military supplies, and stood poised at the Suez, ready to invade Cairo. The actual fighting was concluded in 100 hours. The Egyptian High Command ordered their troops to retreat on November 1, which turned into a rout.
However, events suddenly took a turn that could have destroyed Israel. The war entered an international phase. In July, Egypt had nationalized the formerly international Suez Canal; England and France attacked to regain the canal in October. This action brought the United States into an unanticipated international fray.
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On the afternoon of October 30, the Anglo-French forces sent an ultimatum to Egypt and Israel to withdraw to ten miles from the immediate vicinity of the Suez Canal so their soldiers could station themselves along the banks of the Suez. Israel accepted. She did not want the canal; she only wanted the Sinai for a buffer zone. Since Egypt rejected the demand, the Israeli advance continued with infantry and armor supported by the air force toward the canal.
Luck saved the Egyptians. The United States and Soviet Russia forced England and France to withdraw from their military venture, and Britain in turn commanded Israel to withdraw her troops from Egyptian soil, which she did. By her action, however, Israel had served notice on the Arab world that any violation of her borders would bring military reprisals just as surely as would a violation of American, Russian, or English borders.
The result was that the Suez, Sinai, and Gaza were returned to the Egyptians, who were handed a magnificent victory out of a brutal defeat. 87 Never before had a defeated nation been so generously allocated the fruits of victory. For the West the consequences proved disastrous. Britain lost her power in the Middle East. For France, who had lost her status as a great power in 1940, this aborted invasion meant the end of empire. As for the United States, this debacle weakened her relationship with England and France for decades.
Israel, pressured into giving up the Sinai and Gaza, was left holding a bagful of empty promises. Before the next war, Israel was to face the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964; the first PLO raid into Israel in 1965; and continuing Arab rhetoric threatening to annihilate it.
For the Arabs, an armistice was viewed as a continuation of war by other means. Thus it came about that instead of discussing peace, Egypt and her Arab allies prepared for a third war. Despite a United Nations Emergency Force in place, in 1966, Arab terrorist attacks against Israel were intensified. Finally, on May 17, 1967, ready to unleash her "fighting tigers" on Israel, an emboldened Egypt demanded the United Nations peacekeeping force be withdrawn. U Thant, Secretary General of the UN, obliged, thereby laying the groundwork for the Six Day War.
Meanwhile, sabotage, fedayeen raids, and shelling from the Golan Heights-all encouraged by Syria-increased. Israel finally responded on April 7,1967, after an exchange of fire on the ground, striking at the artillery positions that were raking Israel. An air battle ensued. Syria ran to Egypt for help to punish the Israeli bandits who had dared to challenge her. Egypt responded by massing troops and tanks in the Sinai near the Israeli border. With the UN Emergency Force gone, Nasser was ready to strike in the south. He imposed a blockade, first in the Gulf of Akaba, then in the Suez Canal. He knew full well that Israel had repeatedly warned that blocking these straits would be tantamount to a declaration of war.
The United States stepped into the picture rather gingerly with a declaration that the straits comprised international waters and could not be blockaded. Nasser, in defiance, replied boldly that any act, by anyone, to break the blockade would be considered an act of war. The United States backed down, not wanting to go to war with Egypt over a body of water she did not need.
Encouraged by the U.S. retrenchment, Nasser taunted Israel with blood-curdling announcements, publicly baiting her to act on her threat that any closing of the straits would mean war. Nasser said he was "ready to destroy Israel." Cairo radio blared, "No Jew will remain alive." Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon chimed in on Nasser's side. The Soviet Union provided the weapons. The stage was set.
Israel knew she could not allow a war to be fought on her soil. She would have to move with ground forces head-on into the waiting Egyptian divisions.
Using air power, she would have to prevent her cities from being bombed.
Surprise was of the essence. On June 5, Israel decided to strike when radar detected planes and tanks approaching the border. The Israeli air force swooped low in a semicircle over the Mediterranean into Egypt, almost totally destroying Egyptian air forces on the ground-300 of 340 planes were left in flames, with 20 planes shot down in the air. Israel issued no anr
King Hussein of Jordan, misled by Egypt's false milita
ing the war, and disregarding a message from the
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Israeli government that Israel had no designs on Jordan, livisions could cut the narrow belt of Israel's waist in two and capture Jewish Jerusalem. Crossing into Israeli territory, he forced Israel to respond with a similarly devastating attack against Jordan. Syria's entry into the fray was met in like fashion.
In the first day of fighting, Israel lost 19 planes. Egypt, Jordan, and Syria lost 391. Israel first turned her military might against Egypt in the Sinai. On June 6, Israel recaptured Sharm El Sheikh, first by sea, then with paratroopers. After three days, the West Bank of Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai fell. On June 7, the Old City of Jerusalem was taken.
On June 8, Egypt, aware of the havoc she had brought on herself, beseeched the United Nations, through Russia, to send in a truce team. Syria, still fortified and thinking herself safe, would not accept a cease fire. Israel, again forced to protect herself, took the Golan Heights on June 10. And thus it came about that Israel, with a military might of 275,000 Jews, had been given no choice but to beat the hell out of the Arab force of 440,000 Egyptians,
Jordanians, and Syrians.
With the conclusion of the Six Day War, Israel was forced to administer the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights and prevent uprisings there. She also had to set up plans to keep the nation and the territories economically viable, as well as to train, educate, and absorb both the 372,000 immigrants who had arrived in the '60s and an equal number expected in the '70s, a total of 5.5 percent of her population. 22 In those same years the United States absorbed almost six million immigrants-only 1.5 to 1.7 percent of her population. Israel, left with territories many times larger than herself and a million more Arab inhabitants, would go on paying heavily for her victory in the years that followed.
At the time, the world was stunned by the brilliant victory and full of admiration for Israel, the new David in Jewish history. But the Arab League, meeting in Khar toum, Sudan, refused to negotiate with Israel, and the UN decided that Arab pride had to be saved-all for the ultimate good of Israel. A defeated Arab nation was a menace. The only hope for peace and harmony would be an Arab world assuaged.
The USSR and the UN agreed with this most peculiar logic. The United States did, at least, argue that Israel should not be required to withdraw from occupied territories without Arab acceptance of Israel's independence and security. But the Arabs, confident of further arms shipments from the Russians and support from the UN, haughtily refused and vowed revenge. Never before in history had the vanquished threatened a new war and the victors begged for peace! Can one imagine Hitler demanding to dictate the peace treaty and the Allies agreeing?
Israel, now trebled in size, held the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). But the most significant result of the Six Day War was that on June 27, 1967, for the first time since the War of Independence, Jerusalem was united. In 1948 Jordan had wrested the Eastern Sector of Jerusalem from the Israelis, destroyed the Jewish section including all religious buildings, and used the bricks to pave the streets. Israel now made Jerusalem its capital, much to the discomfort of the UN, the Arabs, and even the United States.
Meanwhile, the Palestine Liberation Organization remained active against Israel and eventually became a threat to Jordan. Egypt openly supported the PLO guerrillas in violation of United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions. In the second half of 1967 alone, there were 1,288 acts of sabotage and border incidents, with 281 Israeli soldiers and civilians killed and 1,095 soldiers and civilians wounded. By comparison, during the Six Day War there were 759 total Israeli fatalities. After the Six Day War, Arab guerrilla forces had also become a serious internal threat in Arab countries. Revolutions and attempts at revolutions occurred in Iraq, South Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Saudi Arabia..
At the same time, some political and administrative cooperation existed between Jordan and Israel. Israeli farmers were allowed to cross into Jordan to
sell their crops. Eventually a two-way movement of all goods was permitted and then travel to and from each side was allowed. This was known as the "open-bridge" policy Though Jordan indicated she was ready to accept Israel's right to exist, no other Arab country would consider this, which put Jordan in a difficult position.
In the West Bank, Israel's attempt to work with Arab officials came to naught. Fearful of reprisals from their Arab brethren should the West Bank be returned to Arab rule, they remembered how the Egyptians had punished the Gazans who had cooperated with Israel after the Sinai War.
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JEWS, GOD, AND HISTORY
Israel continued to administer the territories, trying to improve conditions for the Arabs, which they succeeded in doing to a great extent. The Arabs planned more terrorism and more wars, leaving Israel with no choice but to insist on a final peace settlement before she withdrew from any territory.
Even while cooperating with Israel on the "open-bridge" policy, Jordan openly said she supported the guerrillas, until they turned on her and demanded that they be allowed to use Jordan as the main base of operations against Israel. When King Hussein refused, Yassar Arafat, who had become leader of the PLO in 1969, launched an offensive in "all parts of Jordan," and King Hussein was faced with what Israel had been aware of all along: the reality of what the PLO stood for, their aims, and how they planned to achieve them. Arafat's plans called for a "scorched earth" policy to force Hussein to accede to his demand. Although most of the Arab world was against him, Hussein refused to sacrifice his country to PLO domination, and in 1970 the PLO lost all their bases in Jordan.
This conflict, called the Black September War, only one of many in which Arabs fought with Arabs, led to the PLO "invasion" of Lebanon and the eventual establishment of a "state within a state." It helped lay the groundwork for the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 and the eventual Syrian control of that country. Israelis, meanwhile, went back to running their own country, content to set up programs to administer the new territories, hoping the Six Day War would lead to peace. What came instead was yet another war.
In 1969, a change in government brought Golda Meir, an implausible character on the Israeli scene, to power. As a young woman she came to Israel from her native United States and became involved in politics, often at the expense of her personal life and the neglect of her family Because of her connections in the States, she had been instrumental in raising large sums of money for the War of Independence. She was also responsible for the extension of Israeli aid to emergent African nations and the establishment of friendly relations with them. By the time she became Prime Minister she was a grandmother, with a benign face, a golden heart, and two iron fists unsheathed by velvet gloves. She had smiled and slugged her way to power, rode in as a dark horse, and ended up an aged Jewish Joan of Arc who saved Israel in its hour of peril.
It was Saturday morning, October 6,1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year and the Arabs knew it. At 4:00 A.M., word of an imminent attack was brought to Israel's political leaders. Instead of attacking, Prime Minister Meir called a meeting, and the decision was made to contact Western leaders to seek their last-minute intervention. The reply to her request was, "Don't preempt."
For months, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President, had practiced the game of political camouflage, and Israel had been getting signals of possible attack from Egypt and Syria. Each time Israel decided against mobilization. Each time it was a major gamble to avoid both the international criticism and the staggering costs that mobilization would have brought. This time the gamble almost failed.
Numerically superior in men and materiel, the Arabs achieved a strategic and tactical advantage. At 2:00 P.M. on October 6 Egypt and Syria launched coordinated attacks into the Sinai and the Golan Heights with an advantage in infantry forces immediately engaged of 20 to 1 and a tank advantage of 5 to 1. Partial mobilization in Israel had begun only four hours earlier. In the past, Israel had relied on the preemptive strike and fast-moving offensive armor. Now, while mobilizing, she had both to contain the Egyptian thrust in the Sinai and to stop the Syrian attack on the northern front. Not until October 9 was a decisive coun terblow against. Syria successfully executed.
The Israelis had been overconfident. Though they knew the Arabs had excellent weapons, they believed the Egyptians would not know how to handle them. They were wrong. The Arabs had succumbed to their own myths as well. They believed that a man with an IQ of 160 would be defenseless against an uneducated soldier with more sophisticated weapons. They also believed they would have won the Six Day War if they had struck first, and so they did just that this time. They, too, were wrong.
As Israel's very existence was threatened, the flow of history floated through Jewish minds in two contradictory strains. One was the thought of their ancestors' sacrifices to create and maintain a nation: Joshua, a former slave and head of a nomadic people, conquering the mighty tribes and kingdoms of Canaan; the first King Saul crushing the Ammonites and the mighty Philistines at Michmash, and King David uniting Israel and Judah to establish the first Jewish mini-empire. The other strain was the knowledge of what happened after the defeat by the Romans: exile, dispersion, second-class citizenship, anti-Semitism. Never again. The spirit of their past swept through the Jewish forces and carried them on a tide of historic fervor to victory. The Egyptians ran out of steam; the Israelis rallied.
Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, then Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said after the war, "This war, like most, was decided primarily by the impact of leadership, ability, and training." It was a war of armies; neither side dared bomb each other's cities for each had the capacity to devastate the other. By October 24, when the cease fire was established, Israel had crossed the Suez Canal, seized 500 square miles of Egyptian territory, trapped 25,000 men in the Egyptian III Corps, and was free to move at will on the west bank of the Suez Canal. In Syria, Israel had moved closer to Damascus and held more ground than before the war started. Once again, it was only political pressure that halted Israel's advance.
The costs of the victory, however, were enormous. Within the first week, Israel was in dire need of military equipment. No one could have anticipated that the United States would resupply Israel, but, in answer to desperate pleas, Nixon and Kissinger responded with an emergency airlift. They sent 300,000 tons of critical weaponry between October 14 and November 14 and continued to send supplies as needed, in addition to a $1.1 billion congressional appropriation.
The U.S. Defense Department estimates that the Soviet Union's cost of the 1973 war was more than $2.6 billion, while American outlays during the war totaled nearly $1 billion, with emergency aid authorized for $2.2 billion. The cost to Israel was more than $250 million a day-two and a half times the cost of the 1967 Six Day War. Israel, in 1973, had to spend 40 percent of its gross national product on defense, all because the Arabs, the losing side, refused to sit down to talk about peace.
After the Yom Kippur War, how could the Arabs sustain the myth that they could conquer Israel if only conditions were right? They had struck first, and on a Jewish holiday, while almost everyone was at prayer. They had Russian support and sophisticated Soviet weapons. Conditions could not have been more favorable. Yet in only sixteen days, Egypt was begging Moscow and the United Nations to impose a cease fire to save the Arabs from another catastrophic defeat. And, as in the three previous wars, Israel was forced by the major world powers to stop before consolidating its victory. Golda Meir complained, "For God's sake, Sadat started the war... and he has been defeated. Then by-political arrangements, he is handed a victory." Another Israeli official added: "The realization that Egypt could start a war and the rest of the world would stop it to save her from defeat is shattering."
Then the impossible happened; Israeli politics took a conservative tilt. Likud, Israel's conservative party, after losing all eight elections since 1948, survived to win the ninth in 1977. Menahem Begin, its leader, became Prime Minister, riding into power on a wave of unpopularity
Begin found himself sitting at the poker table of state with the Arabs who had piles of chips stacked in front of them, while he had none. He knew the odds were against him. To even them, he decided to take a lesson out of American history involving the annexation of Texas: First send people to settle new territories; then the settlers ask for statehood. Begin decided to start settling the occupied territories with Jewish settlers and announced his policy boldly on his first visit to Washington. When a reporter asked him about the occupied territories, Begin answered, "What occupied territories? I only see Israel, Judea, and Samaria."
A cry of pain went through the Arab nations. All at once Begin had the occupied territories as bargaining chips. The Arabs would now have to bargain for land rather than Israel having to bargain for recognition and peace. Sadat eventually would do what no prior Labor government could do-trade land for peace.
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If Begin was a realist, so, fortunately, was Anwar Sadat. He knew his country's economic condition was desperate. He, like many of his countrymen, had come to realize that Egypt had fought for her Arab "friends" to the last Egyptian. The Arabs had saved face and gained pride; Egypt had lost men, money, and materiel. The army had been saved only through Western intervention. The country had been devastated by defeat and loss of morale in spite of all that had been done for it. It was the last hurrah for the Egyptians. Once many settlers were comfortably ensconced in the Sinai there would be no way they could be evicted. Begin was the first to make peace overtures: Sinai for recognition of Israel.
The world watched on television as Sadat came to Israel to meet with Begin and receive a royal welcome from the Israeli public. After prolonged negotiating, and with much "encouragement" from President Jimmy Carter, the agreement was made and signed at Camp David. Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, including oil fields, air bases, and settlements, in exchange for Egypt's recognition of Israel's right to exist, as well as cast-iron guarantees for Israel's southern borders with Egypt.
The Egyptian-Israeli treaty demanded heavy sacrifices. It cost Begin some of his closest political friends. But it cost Sadat his life. In return for peace, the Israelis also agreed to make concessions over the West Bank and even Jerusalem. But once again, without even attempting to negotiate, the Palestinians and the other Arab countries threw away the opportunity. They rejected the Camp David Accords, thus forcing Israel to continue to retain control over Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.
The growth of Arab influences was great in those years. The Arabs tripled the price of oil, making huge sums of money-not to improve the life of their people, but to purchase arms, to finance terrorism, and to finance their leaders' luxurious lifestyles while keeping the Palestinians in refugee camps.20 The UN passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism; Yassar Arafat was recognized by the UN as a head of state and appeared on its platform, gun in holster, as he gave his anti-Israel talk, making it clear that all of Israel was included as part of his plan for a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Iraq had built a nuclear reactor, a "clear and present danger" to Israel. In June 1981, Israel bombed that reactor before it could be activated. The world was dismayed at this preemptive strike, viewing it as against international law. That dismay, of course, turned to pleasure when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
After failing to take over Jordan, and after Syria would not have them, the PLO moved into Lebanon in 1970. They demanded the end of government restrictions against them, freedom of commando movement and supply in Lebanon, and that they be allowed to use the country as a base for attacks against Israel. In essence, they wanted what they could not get in Jordan, a "state within a state," and they eventually achieved that end. The Lebanese ambassador warned the UN that if the PLO was granted this request, there would be a strong response from Israel. Lebanese President Charles Helou said the guerrillas must leave Lebanon and warned that if they used Lebanon's southern border, Israel would seize part of the country. Both warnings were ignored.
Thus the PLO had the freedom to infiltrate Israel and to launch their attacks into the northern part of Israel from Lebanon. And then there was the Syrian problem. At first Syria provided support for opponents of the PLO. Then, fearful that the Palestinian militias, allied to the more radical Lebanese militias, might push Syria into a new war with Israel, for which Syria was unprepared, Syria sent in an expeditionary force to restrain them, only to protect itself, not Israel. But neither Lebanon nor Syria stopped the PLO raids or the shelling of Israel. The situation became intolerable, and the Israelis decided to act. Their objectives were to stop the raids and shelling with Katuysha rockets and to destroy the infrastructure of the PLO so that the raids and shelling could
not soon be resumed. The Israelis were welcomed with open arms and cheers by the Lebanese in the south, who had been abused and intimidated and had their property stolen and their country devastated by the PLO. The Israelis had come to rescue them, and they did temporarily. When, along with the cache of arms and ammunition controlled by the PLO, the Israelis also found the PLO plans for the destruction of Israel, they were sure their mission was none too soon.
But once again the world could not stand by and watch an Israeli victory. Israel had almost succeeded in ousting the PLO from Lebanon when outsiders-the United States and the UN-interfered. 21 The United States pres sured Israel to withdraw, conditioned on the Syrian withdrawal from the Bekaa Valley and a treaty was signed between Israel and Lebanon even while Israel warned the United States that without Syria's approval the treaty would fail. And it did. Syria did not withdraw. Under pressure from Syria, Lebanon canceled the accord in March 1984. The result was more shelling, bombing, and the near total political destruction of what was left of Lebanon. When the United States sent in a contingent of Marines to separate the warring factions in Beirut, an Arab car bomb leveled the American compound and killed two hundred forty-one marines. As a result, the United States withdrew its troops. The final irony was that the United States was left with a brutal hostage crisis in Lebanon that lasted from July 1982 to December 1991. Syria said it could do nothing. However, when it served Syria's purpose, after the Gulf War in 1991, the country assisted in the release of the American hostages and was thanked by the United States for doing so. But the crisis in Lebanon has remained central to the problems in the Middle East.
The Lebanese war did break the PLO and turned Arafat from a dominant factor in the Arab world into a beggar living in Tunisia. He eventually regained some of his power but not the political or military power he had before the war. The war in Lebanon, called Operation Peace for Galilee by Israel, did cut down the shelling of northern Israel and weakened the PLO militarily. Conversely, terrorism increased, and Islamic fundamentalism became stronger, growing into a danger to the Arab countries themselves and threatening to overthrow their regimes.
Why, after thirty-five years and four wars with the Arabs, did Operation Peace for Galilee create so much anger and accusation both inside Israel and out? For the Israelis, Lebanon both attracted and repelled. On the one hand there was clearly a need to defend the country and to protect the Jews in the northern section of Israel as well as the Christian Arabs in southern Lebanon. On the other hand, Israelis have always found the killing role of the state hard to accept, and the casualties and costs were particularly onerous when international action prevented a clear-cut result. As to the rest of the world, it is hard to understand why Lebanon's destruction by the PLO and its takeover by Syria were allowed to go on with so little effort to prevent them, with nowhere near the level of anger expressed against Israel. And it is hard to understand why the world could watch Arabs threaten and murder and terrorize each other as well as Israelis and Westerners but often only object when Israel fought back.
Was this a just war? If you ask the PLO, the answer is no. If you ask a citizen of the Galilee or a Christian Lebanese in southern Lebanon, the answer is yes. Henry Kissinger told the Washington Post, "Whatever our opinion... of the official reason given by Israel... there is no argument over its strategic justification. No sovereign state can tolerate endlessly the strengthening along its border of a military force wishing to destroy it."
Mr. Kissinger's statement could as well stand as a description of Kuwait's situation just before the Iraqi invasion in January 1991. The world, of course, had little difficulty deciding to act in that situation, but Saddam Hussein made the decision even easier by invading and destroying Kuwait, another Arab state, and one of the main oil producers in the region, and by threatening to invade Saudi Arabia and control the world's largest source of oil.
In an unprecedented move, an alarmed United Nations, led by the United States, voted against Iraq and approved the use of military force to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Behind this move lay not only the fear of Iraqi control of oil supplies, but the fear that Hussein might have an atomic bomb.
The world had loudly decried Israel's swift surprise air strike in 1981 against Iraq's nuclear reactor. It now viewed that act in a much better light. But the fear remained that Iraq had replaced that loss and also increased its supply of poison gas, a gas it had already used on its own people.
After unsuccessful negotiations with Saddam Hussein, U.S. President George H. W. Bush mobilized a coalition of Arab and world leaders to face Iraq with armed force. Hussein was forced to withdraw from Kuwait, and much of Iraq's infrastructure and industrial capacity were devastated, but not before Iraq had set fire to the oil fields of Kuwait, inundated the Persian Gulf with a huge oil slick, and fired Scud missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Though Israel was not directly a part of this Arab-against-Arab conflict, Hussein counted on decades of knee-jerk anti-Israel sentiment as part of his strategy to dominate the Middle East. By attacking Israel with missiles, he expected to gain the automatic support of nations like Jordan, Syria, and perhaps even Egypt, thus breaking up the coalition and stirring up further anti-American and anti-Saudi feeling among the Muslim masses.
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Would this plan succeed? Jordan felt the pressure from her large Palestinian population and refused to join the coalition. Israel, ready to defend herself like the Jews in biblical times, now faced a dilemma. The coalition, especially the United States, implored her to ignore the danger, suffer the casualties, and do nothing. But Israel had always been saved by her insistence on defending herself; in the Middle East, any sign of weakness could be fatal. Should she strike back at Iraq to protect her cities, or was destabilization of the coalition the greater danger? Would the Arab world's anti-Israel reflexes once again lead them to disaster? Would they actually consider Israel a greater danger to the Arab world than Saddam Hussein?
In the end, threats by Israel to retaliate against Iraq were not carried out as a result of military and diplomatic initiatives by the United States. President Bush, after two phone calls to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger to Israel. At a meeting with Shamir and Defense Secretary Moshe Arens, he was assured that Israel would not retaliate at that time and pledged to consult with the United States before taking any action. While reserving the right to see to their own defense, the Israelis decided to trust their enduring friendship with the United States and wait out the Iraqi attacks. They accepted the American argument that this war had the potential to change attitudes in the Arab world, and they decided the possibility was worth the risk.
Though Saddam Hussein remained in power, the Gulf War was brought to a more or less satisfactory conclusion, with the U.S.-led UN coalition intact. And it did lead to actual peace talks-Arabs and Israelis sitting face to face, trying to solve the region's problems, just what Israel had been asking for since the War of Independence in 1948. The first tentative agreement between Israel and the PLO was signed on September 14,1993. The next day, an agenda was agreed upon for Israeli-Jordanian peace talks. It is, of course, not yet possible to know if old attitudes will be rekindled or if the talks will finally lead to enduring stability and cooperation.22
The State of Israel has been established and has now endured for more than half a century. Will the peace talks lead to the fulfillment of Jewish destiny or are they just another chapter in the inexorable march of Jewish history?
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