The birth of Israel nd
On the 76th anniversary of the birth of Israel (May 14, 1948), I would like to quote the following extract from O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre:
“The long road followed by the Hebrew people led at last to a simple stone building on Rothschild Boulevard in the heart of Tel Aviv. There on a humid afternoon in May 1948, the leaders of the Zionist movement prepared to accomplish perhaps the most important gesture in the history of their people since an obscure warrior king named David brought the Ark of the Covenant ‘with shouting and with the sound of trumpets’ from Abou Gosh to a tabernacle in Jerusalem.
“Outside, a detachment of Haganah military police meticulously checked the credentials of the 200 selected guests who would be privileged to witness the ceremony scheduled to take place there. The backgrounds of those men were as diverse as the race they represented. They came from Minsk, Cracow and Cologne, from England, Canada, South Africa, Iraq and Egypt.
“They were bound together by a common faith, Zionism, a common heritage, Jewish history, and a common curse, persecution. The Jewish people were about to have a state of their own.
“At precisely four o’clock, the Jewish leader, David Ben-Gurion, rose and sharply rapped a walnut gavel on the table before him. Clad in a dark suit, a white shirt and, in deference to the solemnity of the occasion, a tie, he picked up a scroll of white parchment. Indicative of the haste with which this ceremony had been prepared was the fact that the Tel Aviv artist commissioned to prepare the scroll had had time to finish only the decoration. The text Ben-Gurion was about to read had been typed on a separate piece of paper and stapled to the parchment.
“‘In the Land of Israel, the Jewish people came into being,’ he began. ‘Here they lived in sovereign independence. Here they created a culture of national and universal import and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.’ He paused an instant to insure a properly purposeful tone to his delivery. Always the realist, Ben-Gurion was not carried away by the exultation of the moment.
“’Exiled from the land of Israel,’ he said, ‘the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom. Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood.’
“In recent decades, he reminded his audience, ‘they returned in their masses. They reclaimed the wilderness, revived their language, built cities and villages.’ It was, he continued, ‘the selfevident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in their own sovereign state. Accordingly, 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’.
“One by one, he set out the principles that would guide the new nation: ‘principles of liberty, justice, and peace as conceived by the Prophets of Israel’; full social and political equality for all citizens without distinction of religion, race or sex; freedom of religion, conscience, education, language and culture; safeguarding of the Holy Places of all religions; and the loyal upholding of the principles of the United Nations charter’. To some of those present the intense silence of their gathering would seem a mystic evocation of their six million dead.
“Ben-Gurion read: ‘We appeal to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its state and to admit Israel into the family of nations. We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and peoples. Our call goes to the Jewish people all over the world to stand by us in the great struggle for the fulfilment of the dream of generations and the redemption of Israel. We trust in the Almighty.’ He concluded: ‘We set our hand to this declaration at this session of the Provisional Council of State... in the city of Tel Aviv on the fifth day of Iyar, 5708, the fourteenth day of May, 1948’.
“When he had finished, he said, ‘Let us all stand to adopt the Scroll of the Establishment of the Jewish State’. Then BenGurion announced that the British White Paper of 1939 with its restrictions on Jewish land purchase and immigration was annulled. Otherwise, all mandatory laws would remain in effect for the time being. It was 4:37 p.m. The entire ceremony had taken barely half an hour. The state of Israel had come into being.”
On the 76th anniversary of the creation of Israel on Tuesday, it is surely more than overdue that a solution to the longpromised two-state solution of Palestine and Israel is found, based on principles of full social and political equality for all their citizens without religious distinction, if long-term peace in this volatile area is to be established.
A two-state solution is needed based on principles of full social and political equality for all their citizens without religious distinction