Hanefesh: Israel Independence Day (Yom HaAtzmaut)

THE STATE OF ISRAEL IS BORN

The official date given by the United Nations in their partition vote for the creation of the two new entities was May 15th, 1948. May 14th was to be the last day of the British Mandate. At 4 p.m., the British lowered their flag and immediately the Jews raised their own.

It was a flag designed in 1897 by the First Zionist Congress. It was white (the color of newness and purity), and it had two blue stripes (the color of heaven) like the stripes of a tallit, the prayer shawl, which symbolized the transmission of Jewish tradition. In its center was the Star of David.

Thus on May 14, 1948 at 4:00 p.m., Hay Iyar, the 5th of Iyar, Israel declared itself a state. After 2,000 years, the land of Israel was once more in the hands of the Jews. David Ben Gurion read the Declaration of Independence over the radio.

"The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here the spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world...

"Exiled from Palestine, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of the dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and restoration of their national freedom.

"Accordingly we, the members of the National Council met together in solemn assembly today and by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and with the support of the resolution of the General of the United Nations, hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine to be called Israel...

"We offer peace and amity to all neighboring states and their peoples and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all... "With trust in the Rock of Israel, we set our hands to this declaration at this session of the Provisional State Council in the city of Tel Aviv on Sabbath Eve, 5th Iyar 5708, 14th day of May 1948."

Everyone was dancing in the streets. But not for long. Seven Arab nations surrounding Israel declared war and Egypt bombed Tel Aviv.

These Arab states had previously voted against the UN partition of Palestine and now simply refused to recognize that historic and democratic vote.

The armies of seven Arab nations (whom they did not get along very well, but merely had one common enemy) marched into the new state, boasting that they would "push the Jews into the sea." Outnumbered 100 to 1, it was a devastating moment, and every one at the time thought it would be another holocaust.

Little Israel, which had virtually no heavy artillery, no tanks, no airplanes, had to defend itself against Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq! That's 600,000 Jews against 45 million Arabs, while the United Nations did nothing.

And yet the Jews won. It was nothing short of a great miracle. Israel not only repelled the invaders but acquired more of Palestine than was granted in the UN partition plan. Yigael Yadin, Israel's commander of operations in that war had a terse explanation of Israel's victory. "It was nothing more then a great miracle!"

But the victory was bittersweet. The Old City of Jerusalem -- including the Jewish Quarter and access to the Kotel, the Western (Wailing) Wall -- fell to the Jordanians. The Jews were driven out of the Old City, and their homes and synagogues looted and destroyed.

Jordanians barred Jewish access to any holy sites within the Old City, and the world again did not lift a finger to protest that the religious rights of a people were being violated.

(For fascinating details about the War of Independence, see The Pledge by Leonard Slater.)

The War of Independence held out 13 months. Nearly 6,000 Israelis died or a full 1% of the Jewish population at that time.

(If that had happened in America, proportionally, 2.5 million people would have died. As upset as America was about the Vietnam War, it lost 52,000 soldiers in that war.)

Mt. Herzl national cemetery has rows and rows of blank graves. These are graves of Holocaust survivors who just made it to Israel and was handed a gun to fight for the survival of the Jewish people. No one had time to get to know his or her names. It is a awful thing to see all these graves are marked "Plony" (which is the Israeli version of "John Doe.")

The Independence was Israel's dearest war.

The end of the war defined the borders of the new State of Israel in a radically new way. The borders were not the ones that the UN defined in their partition vote. In sum total, Israel got more land, though it lost the Old City of Jerusalem.

ISRAEL	As per UN vote	After the 1948 war
a	Narrow strip of land along Mediterranean (Tel Aviv and Haifa)	Narrow strip of land along Mediterranean (Tel Aviv and Haifa)
JEWISH CONTROL	Land surrounding the Sea of Galilee Negev Desert	Land surrounding the Sea of Galilee Negev Desert North and Western Galilee (Tzfat)
ARAB CONTROL	Entire West Bank of the River Jordan (Judea and Samaria) Gaza Strip North and Western Galilee (Tzfat)	Entire West Bank of the River Jordan (Judea and Samaria) Gaza Strip
Jerusalem	Under international control	In Jordanian hands

Popularity
At

the time the united nation partition vote, Arab residents of Palestine began fleeing in hope of war. The first to go were the 30,000 of the wealthiest. By January 1948 the Palestine Arab Higher Committee asked other Arab countries to bar entry of refugees because the Arab exodus from Palestine was so alarming.

At the time of the declaration of the State of Israel, 472,000 Arabs fled as war broke out.

At the same time, 820,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab lands such as Syria, Iraq, Iran etc. Most of the property of these Jews, many of whom were wealthy people, was confiscated, never to be returned. (Of these Jews, 526,000 settled in Israel.)

Once the war was over, the population began to rise by leaps and bounds with Jewish immigrants coming not only from Arab countries, but also from other states and more recently from Ethiopia and Russia.

1948	600,000 Jews
1956	1.2 million Jews
1973	1.8 million Jews
1999	4.7 million Jews

The population of Israel, since the founding of the state, has increased many-fold. This increase had presented a special challenge, because of the huge economic burden of absorbing such a huge number of newcomers.

However, while it was a burden, the population growth has also been a big blessing. Immigration has done tremendous things for the country. The standard of living in Israel -- which in 1948 was forced to ration food -- has gone up tremendously in the last two decades.

Never before has a nation been destroyed, its people dispersed to the ends of the earth, and then, nearly two thousand years later, re-gathered to their homeland and re-established as a nation.

Was this a miracle? Clearly. But it was also a fulfillment of prophecy.

"And the Lord, your God, shall return you from your captivity, and have compassion upon you. He shall return and gather you from amongst all the nations. And the Lord, your God will bring you back into the land your fathers inherited. He will make you even more prosperous and numerous than your fathers". (Deut. 30:3-5)

"For thus says God, "Shout with joy for Jacob, exult at the head of the nations; proclaim your praise and say: 'O God, deliver your people, the remnant of Israel!' Behold, I will bring them back from northern lands, and gather them from the ends of the world ..." (Jeremiah 31:6-7)

Not only did the "desert bloom," but in a relatively short time the once barren land was producing a surplus! This surplus was then exported to other, far more "lush" countries, like the U.S.

Another fulfillment of prophecy:

"As for you, O mountains of Israel, you shall shoot forth your branches and bear your fruit for My people Israel, for their return is close at hand. For behold, I am with you and I shall turn to you; then you shall be tilled and sown. And I will multiply men upon you, the entire family of Israel." (Ezekiel 36:8-11)

In 1997 the International Monetary Fund took Israel off the list of developing countries, because it is now fully developed. It has the 19th highest standard of living in the world, just behind that of England.

No other nation ever succeeded in making this seemingly
forsaken patch of ground blossom.

We must appreciate what it means that no other nation, no country, no people ever succeeded in making this seemingly forsaken, parched patch of ground blossom. That no one ever struck roots or created a viable, lasting home here. Conquerors came and went, blown away like leaves from yesteryear. Their ruins dot the landscape. Mark Twain, in a marvelous travelogue of his trip to the Holy Land visited Palestine (so named by the Romans in 135 CE, after the ancient Philistines, in an effort to erase the "Jews" and "Judaism" from Judea, which is what the country was called at the time of the Roman conquest, a full 500 years before the first Arab arrived in the 7th century Arab conquest.

Almost 2000 years after Roman rule, Mark Twain found a barren, empty, desolate country with a small, impoverished, scattered population. No one called themselves "Palestinians." Under Ottoman rule, Palestine was considered a section of southern Syria which roughly included today's Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

The Arabs in Palestine considered themselves part of the greater, general Arab nation. As a child, I remember my mother, a dedicated Hadassah member, working for "Palestine" and the "Palestinians" -- i.e. the Jewish inhabitants of the nascent Jewish state. The Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post; the Israeli Philharmonic was the Palestine Philharmonic.

In the final analysis
Jewish survival makes no rational sense.

On January 16, 1996, then President of Israel, Ezer Weizmann, gave a speech to both Houses of Parliament of Germany. He gave this speech in Hebrew to the Germans, fifty years after the Holocaust, and in it he beautifully summed up what Jewish history is. He said:

"It was fate that delivered me and my contemporaries into this great era when the Jews returned to re-establish their homeland ... "I am no longer a wandering Jew who migrates from country to country, from exile to exile. But all Jews in every generation must regard themselves as if they had been there in previous generations, places and events. Therefore, I am still a wandering Jew but not along the far flung paths of the world. Now I migrate through the expanses of time from generation to generation down the paths of memory ...

"I was a slave in Egypt. I received the Torah on Mount Sinai. Together with Joshua and Elijah I crossed the Jordan River. I entered Jerusalem with David and was exiled with Zedekiah. And I did not forget it by the rivers of Babylon. When the Lord returned the captives of Zion I dreamed among the builders of its ramparts. I fought the Romans and was banished from Spain. I was bound to the stake in Mainz. I studied Torah in Yemen and lost my family in Kishinev. I was incinerated in Treblinka, rebelled in Warsaw, and emigrated to the Land of Israel, the country from where I have been exiled and where I have been born and from which I come and to which I return.

"I am a wandering Jew who follows in the footsteps of my forebearers. And just as I escort them there and now and then, so do my forebearers accompany me and stand with me here today.

"I am a wandering Jew with the cloak of memory around my shoulders and the staff of hope in my hand. I stand at the great crossroads in time, at the end of the twentieth century. I know whence I come and with hope and apprehension I attempt to find out where I am heading.

"We are all people of memory and prayer. We are people of words and hope. We have neither established empires nor built castles and palaces. We have only placed words on top of each other. We have fashioned ideas. We have built memorials. We have dreamed towers of yearning, of Jerusalem rebuilt, of Jerusalem united, of a peace that will swiftly and speedily establish us in our days. Amen."

Supernatural History

When we look back at the history of the Jewish people which we have just examined at lightning speed in this series, we have to keep one key thing in mind:

The very survival of the Jewish people through recorded time is nothing short of miraculous. The very fact that Jews exist as a nation today stands in testimony to the existence of God who acts in history. By any historical measure, the Jewish people should have disappeared long ago.

The person who summed this up best was David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. He said: "A Jew who does not believe in miracles is not a realist." Why did he say that? Because miracles are the only possible explanation for the existence of the Jewish people.

After 2,500 years of persecution, massacres, pogroms, mass murder, gazed and bloodsheds the Jewish nation still remains strong and vibrant. Accounting to all laws of nature we should have been vanished long ago.
Can a nation that has been targeted for final destruction so many times manage to survive?

When the Holy Temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled, who would have expected the survival of our people. Yet we are still thriving, nearly 2,500 years later.

The Assyrians conquered and exiled half of the Jews and almost sacked Jerusalem. Not too long after, the Babylonians succeeded in conquering Jerusalem and exiling the rest of the Jews. We were attacked nearly just by everyone, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Philistines.
And yet tragedy after tragedy, destruction after destruction the Jewish nation continues. This screams out that there is a divine power in watching his chosen nation.

The History continues and there were more pogroms and massacres. Almost every major European country expelled the Jews at some point. Murders, inquisitions, blood libels and much more were inflicted on the Jews.

But here we are today, little more than 60 years after the most brutal, calculated, and organized massacre of the so-called "The Final Solution," and the Jewish people is still remain strong and vibrant.

Sociologists and historians cannot adequately explain the phenomenon of Jewish survival. While they may try, their theories ring hollow when compared to the sheer improbability of 3500 years of survival against the fiercest of foes. The only adequate theory is that God has save His people.

Over 300 years ago King Louis XIV of France asked Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher, to give him proof of the supernatural. Pascal answered: "Why, the Jews, your Majesty -- the Jews."

Mark Twain, "Concerning the Jews," Harper's Magazine, 1897.

"The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"

Leo Nikolaivitch Tolstoy, unlike Twain, was not an agnostic. He was a very religious, Russian Orthodox Christian. He is also a very famous Russian author from the last century, perhaps best known for his War and Peace. He wrote this in 1908.

"The Jew is the emblem of eternity. He who neither slaughter nor torture of thousands of years could destroy, he who neither fire, nor sword, nor Inquisition was able to wipe off the face of the earth. He who was the first to produce the Oracles of God. He who has been for so long the Guardian of Prophecy and has transmitted it to the rest of the world. Such a nation cannot be destroyed. The Jew is as everlasting as Eternity itself."

Josh detaches the plug alongside his dad's deathbed to put an end to his pain. The father returns to his son in a dream and says, have I lived just one more week with the strong illness pains, I would have cleared-up all my improper sins, prior coming up to heaven. Why people suffer only God knows, but looking at history, God awareness screams.

When the Jewish people lives up to its potential as a light unto the nations, the moral fabric of the entire world is improved.( Mesilias Yesharim, pg. 21, Feldheim edition) The nations of the world will see the beauty of Jewish values and will praise us and want to emulate our ways. (Deuteronomy 4:6; 33:9 with Rashi's explanation)

But if that light is lacking, then the moral fabric of the world quickly sinks into decay. And then it is only a matter of time before the Jews are seen as little more than an irritating reminder of an old-fashioned, restrictive morality, an enemy of the "new world order" that wants nothing to do with the Chosen People and their God.

Hear a live inspiring lecture on Jewish Survival

Jewish history is like a 6,000-piece puzzle. At the beginning you dump the pieces on the table and it makes no sense. But as we assemble piece after piece, a picture emerges. A picture that records the action of God in history. And there's no chance or randomness here. Everything happens for a reason.

By Jewish reckoning we have assembled 5762 of these pieces and have 238 to go. History is moving toward a conclusion, its final destination. That final destination was described by Prophet Isaiah in these words:

"In the days to come, The Mount of the Lord's House shall stand Firm above the mountains; And it shall tower above the hills. And all the nations shall gaze on it with joy, And the many peoples shall go and shall say:

"'Come, Let us go up to the Mount of the Lord, To the House of the God of Jacob; That He may instruct us in His ways, And that we may walk in His paths.' For instruction shall come forth from Zion, The word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Thus He will judge among the many people. And arbitrate for the multitude of nations. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall not take up Sword against nation; They shall never again know war."