Zionism, Post-Zionism & the Arab Problem: A Compendium of Opinions About the Jewish State

Copyright © 2012 Yosef Mazur

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Mike Cohen

Editor

Marilyn Micki Neidich Lewis

Associate Editor

Ella Koblenz

Associate Editor

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WestBow Press rev. date: 3/09/2012

CONTENTS

Grabbing the Bull by The Horns

Why I Wrote This Book

Editor’s Note

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Appendix V

Appendix VI

Appendix VII

Appendix VIII

Appendix IX

Appendix IX

Glossary

Bibliography

Dr. Yosef Mazur

For my dear wife Shifra

For my grandchildren:

Adi, Idan, Eran, Yotam, Roni, Aya

Dr. Mike Cohen

For my children Noa Libi & Uriel Ozi

For my amazing wife Elana Beth

For my parents Chaim & Tzippy

History is a myth agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

"No two historians ever agree on what happened,

and the damn thing is they both think they’re telling the truth."

Harry S Truman

" . . . Idiot, do you really think the Middle East conflict can be resolved?!

When you discuss the Middle East conflict, use terminology for managing

it rather than resolving it. . . . "

Henry Kissinger

Grabbing the Bull by The Horns

Professor Raphael Israeli¹

Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Editor’s Note: This forward was written based on the Hebrew edition of Dr. Mazur’s book. The English volume you hold in your hands has been structured to meet the specific needs of the Anglo reader and as such differs in some ways from the text Professor Israeli was reviewing. The conclusions are, however, the same.

The people of Israel are living in days of increasing ideological dispute. The debates are serious many of them surround questions of life and death. How fortunate are we that among us is a wise, experienced elder of our tribe, Dr. Yosef Mazur, who, as part of his post-doctorate work, has cut new and daring paths of investigation through the glacier-like assembly of our nation’s core values. Dr. Mazur has reached a series of noteworthy and striking findings while uncovering the many dangers post-Zionism poses to the Jewish State.

If only his findings were to receive the attention they so rightly deserve, they would contribute significantly to the quality and substance of the argument and to the general level of debate among us.

The post-Zionist debate has many facets. Mazur’s great contribution is in his collecting of all the varied opinions: the political, diplomatic, social, economic and ideological, into an easy-to-follow anthology of writings, pro and con, that sheds a collective light on the issues from all sides.

Mazur does not suffice with quoting others, but contributes to their understanding by placing them opposite each other, allowing them to compete for the reader’s attention, mind and heart. Mazur touches not only upon the post-Zionist issue as it stands, but makes it deal with Realpolitik, with the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole and with the relevant and important issues facing the 2011 political scene. This becomes all the more important in these days that find respectable academics such as Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev (along with his son Ziv Gordon) and Shlomo Zand of Tel Aviv University firing verbal canon balls at the Zionist enterprise, senselessly boosting the catapults of Israel’s enemies and doing all they can to undermine the very ideological foundations of the state.

In the first section of this volume, Mazur introduces us to Zionism and defines the post-Zionist problem in detail, while positing it opposite our ongoing problem with the Arab world, the decisions of the United Nations and League of Nations, and the creation of the so-called Arab refugee problem, which served to eat away at our position in the world, as if its solution would be a magic elixir to solving the world’s problems.

As opposed to the post-Zionists, who carry the weight of the world’s problems on their shoulders, representing all the historic pains of the nations, other than that of their own, Mazur reminds us of the Missing Refugees—close to one million Jews of Arab lands who fled their historic homes in fear, leaving everything behind. This not only balances out the picture of what really happened in post-WWII Israel, but it also places a significant burden on the shoulders of the Arabs from both a moral and practical perspective, thus removing an colossal portion of the post-Zionists’ self-righteousness and smugness.

The post-Zionist can only see his own nation’s wrongdoing, placing all the blame for the world’s ills on its tiny shoulders—Mazur shows us that there is plenty of blame to go around and challenges them to balance the sheet.

One fascinating find is that even a New Historian like Benny Morris, who started his career shedding crocodile tears for all the sins of Israel against the Arab refugees has changed his own tune and now states that it was a mistake on Israel’s part not to complete the effort to relieve the entire land of Israel from the burden of its Arab population, a burden that gets heavier with time.

In the book’s second section Mazur introduces us to a wide rainbow of accusers and defenders and spreads the problem out, investigating it from all sides. This creates for us a thought-provoking, anthological-style compendium that clarifies beyond a shadow of a doubt the tremendous damage done to Israel by the masochistic and destructive false messiahs of post-Zionism foretold by the prophet Isaiah (49:17): Your destroyers and those who would try to break you will come from within you. No less interesting are the references to those who have turned from their evil ways (Ezekiel 33:11) as they realized the emptiness of their new philosophy.

To demonstrate the destructiveness of post-Zionism, Mazur takes us on a whirlwind tour of post-Zionism in Chapter 3. Here we learn about the various faces of post-Zionism, its ideological basis and practical political manifestations in context with Israel’s realpolitik and the Jewish State’s struggle to deal with the Arab issue, including a peek at the ever-growing entanglements and blunders Israeli political leaders have made over the 100 years of attempts at peace. Mazur finds a most tragic and recent manifestation of these errors in the so-called disengagement from Gaza, and its ramifications; a costly mistake that destroyed the lives of 10,000 Jews, brought Hamas to power and distanced any possible peaceful resolution from the horizon.

In the fourth section of this sublime work, in which the public will be inspired and moved, Dr. Mazur identifies the two most critical existential threats to the Jewish State: the first, the so-called Israeli Arabs, and the other, the rise of fundamentalist Islam, which carries as its flag Jihad against and complete annihilation of all non-believers meaning Christians, Jews and all other non-Muslims. This is a direct existential threat to the State of Israel, not only because of the depth of hate that Islam is teaching in its mosques and madrasas, but more so because of the immensity of the Muslim world which includes 57 states in Asia, Africa and Europe with a population of over 1.5 billion believers who are apt to be swept up by the tidal wave of hate that is being spread throughout their countries against Israel, the United States, the West in general and against Jews and Christians in particular. Instead of ignoring these real and present dangers and pretending they do not exist, as the post-Zionists choose to do, Mazur uncovers the reality with bravery, guts and courage and, with the precision of a surgeon, cuts into them and shows them for what they are, with all the pain that goes along with it. This is what must be done to make people take notice, to awaken the public before its too late, to ring all the bells of warning that he has researched and uncovered.

In the fifth section, which discusses possible solutions,² many of which are pipe dreams, imaginary ideas, and nonsensical foolishness, Mazur makes sure we understand the possible pitfalls and the real obstacles to peace. Among these traps are the demographic demon and the false sense of security that many Israelis feel due to the supposed strength of the IDF. Mazur not only reminds us of the ever-present option of completing the exchange of populations that started in 1947-1949 with the Jewish exodus from Arab lands but was never completed with the Arab refugees being kept in UNRWA camps to this very day but also shows how this helped ease frictions in other parts of the post-WWII world. He introduces us to the never-ending quest by some on the Jewish side to bring about a bi-national state of all its people, which is again being proposed by some Arabs and post-Zionists; to the cobweb-covered Jordanian Option, which was laid to rest long ago but is still being proposed by some; to the Arab autonomy in Israel of Menachem Begin and to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current far-reaching proposal of a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel, all the while reaching the decisive conclusion that the two states for two peoples solution is nothing but pie in the sky, baseless, unworkable nonsense—in Hebrew an ancient rabbinic and early Zionist literary term—Orva Parakh—meaning in short—stupidity and claptrap.

Mazur gives the final say to sum up this magnificent and all-encompassing work to two proficient voices: current Vice Prime Minister and former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Bogie Ya’alon and the late Israel Prize Poet Laureate Uri Zvi Greenberg, who was not only one of the first ideologues of the Zionist-left to cross the lines and join the ranks of the rightist Revisionists but the one who became their cultural flag bearer to this very day. Mazur asks both the critical question: Has Zionism completed its historic task? and tries to delineate for us an answer from their writings. From the lofty perch of his many years of living the Zionist experience, Mazur warns us to beware the dangers posed by the post-Zionists and posits that we must take heed not to allow the pioneering spirit within us to relax.

Not all readers will agree with the harsh treatment Mazur dishes out upon the post-Zionists. On the other hand no one can ignore the pain, anguish and apprehension that rise from between the pages and the hard-earned lessons of this hardened and hardy veteran scholar, who has lived in this land as an adult from a time when she was barely conceived as a reality and took an active part in the struggle to bring her into being, to independence and into the Start-up Nation she has become.

The words have been written in ink strewn with the blood, sweat and tears of over nine decades and are being brought to light at a time when they are critically necessary due to the ever-deepening of the seismic ideological fault lines in the Israeli and Zionist public, and they are destined to play a critical role in the debate surrounding post-Zionism.

No doubt, this important work will find a permanent place on the shelf of Jewish, Zionist and Israeli thought.

Rafi Israeli

Hebrew University

Jerusalem, Israel

January 2011

Why I Wrote This Book

Dr. Yosef Mazur

On one average weekend, the family sat around the Shabbat table for our traditional meal. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren all gathered, the usual family banter slowly turning to affairs of state, of Zionist philosophy and our current situation—a typical Israeli Shabbat conversation.

And then one of my grandsons, an 11th grader, said something that shocked me to no end: I am not sure there was a Holocaust as no one has found a document in which Hitler gave an order to murder six million Jews, and that whole Exodus thing, it’s a fanciful piece of fiction—it didn’t really happen.

Where did you learn all this, my dearest? came my controlled reaction. From my history teacher, he answered.

I immediately realized that I had to do something to repair the damage, as this kind of negativity could undo all we have fought to create here. This young man, my own grandson, was going to be a soldier soon and what will his motivation be when the nation puts its very existence on his shoulders? How will he react when he is asked to put his life at risk to protect our homeland?

I recalled an old Russian proverb Nashe Delo Pravoe³—in English, Our Cause is Just which became popular as the Soviet people were called to defend their country against the Nazi invasion.

In the Jewish tradition, on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, we stand before G-d and say: Has Kategor VeKach Sanegor Mekomo (Silence the Prosecutor and let the Defender replace him). Satan, the accuser, comes to the Heavenly Court and demands that G-d’s people Israel be punished for their misdeeds. We implore G-d to shunt Satan aside and replace him with an angel that will defend the Jewish people by reading out all the meritorious deeds of that past year.

I understood that I must go on the attack against this movement of negativism that is disseminating discouraging lies among our youth—lies that find Israel guilty of the tragedy of Arab backwardness and poverty, guilty of creating a refugee class among former Arab neighbors, guilty of sending the IDF to destroy cities and towns and scatter the residents to the four corners of the earth, guilty of electing governments that refuse to allow the Arabs to return home and of evading ongoing attempts of the Arab nations to make peace; guilty of murder and massacre on scales larger than life and guilty of much of the world’s current problems.

For ten long years (starting in September 2000), I watched the daily developments in the post-Zionist field. Governments came and went in Israel and the world, leaders rose and leaders fell, but no solution to the Arab-Israeli problem was to be found. The post-Zionist movement, which had taken on a political casing as the Peace Now organization and the Meretz party, had seen its heyday after the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, and was now a shadow of itself and was continuing to lose steam as more and more Israelis came to realize that peace in our generation was a pipe dream. As Israel withdrew all its forces from Lebanon in 2000 only to have to go back in and fight Hezbollah in 2006, withdrew from the Arab towns of Judea and Samaria in 1994-5 only to have to return in 2002 to root out the barbaric terrorism, withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, destroying 8,000 Jewish home in the process only to have to return in 2009 to fight Hamas and Islamic Jihad missiles—Israelis came to understand that the peace process is more about the process and less about the peace.

This book is dedicated to future generations. To the youth that has to bear the burden of defending our nation, our people and our state. The youth MUST be sure that our cause is just.

The big question that we adults are asked is: Will we be living on our sword forever? The answer, unfortunately, is ‘Yes.’ The alternative is to be driven into yet another long exile.

We must strengthen the Israel Defense Forces, continue to build the land, build housing, absorb immigrants, develop industry and reinforce our deterrence factors until the point where the Arabs will understand once and for all that they have no chance of fulfilling their stated dream of driving us into the sea.

Only when they are convinced that they are standing before an Iron Wall that cannot be breached, will the Arabs sit down in a serious manner to make peace and recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State in the Land of Israel.

The Arab minority in Israel will always have the rights and privileges of any ethnic minority in a modern democratic society—but it must begin to accept some of the basic responsibilities that go along with those rights and privileges—namely loyalty to the sovereign state.

The precondition to our success is the recognition of the justice of our cause. Our national strength, vitality, and energy are directly related to that knowledge. We must uproot the defeatists from among us; destroy the forces that seek to infect us from within. Your destroyers and those who would try to break you will come from within you, cries out the prophet Isaiah (49:17). We must unite as one, despite our seemingly apparent differences, and move forward as one nation, as is the way of democracy.

Yosef Mazur

Mevaseret Zion

November 2011

Post-Script: Dr. Mazur’s grandchildren all read the Hebrew edition of this book published during the summer of 2011 by Gefen Publishing House in Jerusalem. While they did not change their views completely, they did express extreme displeasure with the fact that what they learned in these pages came as new information to them. They all agreed that important pieces of the Zionist puzzle had been hidden from them and thanked their grandfather for having the courage, patience and forethought to publish this work. All Israeli students need to learn this material, whether they agree with our grandfather or not was their collective statement.—MTC

Editor’s Note

Dr. Mike Cohen

On the tenth day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, the entire Jewish world comes together to face The Creator of All. We stand in plain white garb, shoeless, preparing for 25 hours without food or drink, to beg for forgiveness for our transgressions as individuals and as a nation and ask G-d to shower us with all His goodness in the coming year.

One of the highlights of the prayers is a cry to G-d to silence the prosecuting attorney at our trial and actually replace him with defense counsel. In Hebrew—Has Kategor ve’Kach Sanegor Mekomo. The ultimate in Jewish chutzpah!

Dr. Yosef Mazur has taken a page from that ancient Jewish tradition and has challenged all of us to look at the facts on all sides of a particular debate before making up our minds. For this purpose, and with a firm belief in the Zionist enterprise and its narrative, he has produced a volume of work that will allow us, should we choose, to replace those prosecuting Israel with newly branded defenders.

My parents tell me that I have been preaching Zionism since I learned to speak. Yet, working on this book has opened my eyes to an entire world of knowledge that had escaped my attention until now. For this I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Mazur and his dedicated wife Shifra. I must also thank my friends Michael Fischberger and Ilan Greenfield of Gefen Publishing House in Jerusalem, for asking me to assist with the Hebrew edition of this book and introducing me to the Mazurs.

As a teen I spent hours listening to the great leaders: Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzchak Shamir, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Abba Eban. I never turned down the opportunity to listen to someone who was there and thus I gathered both knowledge and sensitivity to the fact that not everyone sees the same event through the same set of glasses.

Historical events in Israel taught me to think for myself, to read as many opinions as possible, to extrapolate possibilities and reasons for actions or words and most importantly: to never, ever, believe what I read in a news headline—in print, on radio or on TV.

It is with this background that I met Dr. Mazur.

I was introduced to a man of many years, spry of foot and of mind, who lived through and experienced first-hand many of the formative Zionist events that I grew up hearing about, reading about and teaching. Yosef Mazur, born in 1919 with the advent of British influence in the region, saw it all with his own two eyes and was here to share it with me and with you. What an opportunity! Israeli society had developed, as nations tend to do, differently from the way he had hoped as a young man. His own grandchildren were questioning our right to live free in our own land, a question nary raised by Diaspora Jews prior to the 19th-century. So he set out to write an answer and in the process discovered the depth of the problem.

This volume is somewhat different from its Hebrew sister edition, which has received rave reviews from academic circles in Israel. That volume is teeming with micro details that are important internally within Israeli society and body politik. In this English edition we concentrated on the macro picture—the right of Jews to live freely in the land of their ancestors, by historic right, by legal right, by moral right and by ethical right. We have tried to present both sides of the argument within Israel, to allow you to learn as we did the complexity of the issues and the reality.

As we realized that we were developing a compendium rather than an original work, we decided to rely almost exclusively on the writings of others, the uniqueness coming from the contextual structure, stream of consciousness and gestalt. We thus owe a debt of gratitude not only to our forefathers and foremothers but also to all the many scholars who so graciously agreed to allow their work to be included in this exercise. We must also thank our publishers, The Professors for A Safe Israel and Westbow Press and Associate Editors Micki Lewis and Ella Koblenz for their dedication and care.

With a silent prayer that my children Noa and Uriel will be blessed to grow up in a world that knows only peace.

Mike Cohen

Bar-Ilan University

Ramat-Gan, Israel

November 2011

Introduction

Dr. Yosef Mazur

The term post-Zionist deserves an explanation. From a literal perspective, post is a prefix meaning behind, after, later, subsequent to, posterior to, in other words after the Zionist period. As such, a post-Zionist is taking the position that the Zionist era has ended and preparations should begin for the next era, whatever that might look like or be called.

The fundamental questions that arise from this position exist primarily in two essential areas: the political arena and the communal/social stratosphere, both touching of course upon the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Israeli body politic has been consumed with this issue since the last decade of the 20th-century. The debate over post-Zionism began in the 1970’s as a political argument; in the 1980’s it was taken up by academia and from there it was but a quick jump into the written media,⁴ and later the electronic.⁵ The obsession with the topic gathered steam after the Oslo Agreements; the intelligencia, artists, performers, poets and authors all found a reason to discuss it via their works and op-ed columns. In the Knesset,⁶ debates raged about what to include and what to exclude from the grade-school and high-school curricula, whether the post-Zionist, Arab and Palestinian narratives should be taught while removing traditional Zionist and Jewish narratives at the same time.

Post-Zionism enjoys access to many stages. Included are significant Hebrew language literary journals such as Theory & Criticism, which is published by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and Hagar, an English language publication published by the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Social Research at the Ben-Gurion University in the Negev.

Keter, Israel’s largest and most influential publishing group published a series of books edited by author Gideon Samet and titled: The Israelis. The first two books in the series are unequivocally of a post-Zionist flavor: The New Zionists by Tom Segev, and The End of the ACHSUL Hegemony⁷ by Prof. Baruch Kimmerling, The Hebrew University’s late senior sociologist.

Political developments in Israel in the first five years of the 21st-century, which included the defeat of Ehud Barak’s Labor Party and the rise of the globally despised Ariel Sharon to power, left the post-Zionist debate in the dust. The many casualties and gruesome images of suicide murders and bombings in public places during the Second Intifada (also known as the Oslo War, the Peace War, the Temple Mount War, the Temple Mount Intifada, the al-Aksa Intifada, the Sharon Intifada and Arafat’s War), and the radical movements within the Palestinian Authority, Arafat’s death, Israel’s so-called disengagement from the Gaza Strip (which included the destruction of Israeli towns and the forced removal of 10,000 Jews from their homes by the IDF and Israeli police), the Hamas political election victory and subsequent takeover of Gaza and its disconnect from Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank), the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli reservists Ehud Udi Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit by Hamas in Gaza, the Second Lebanon War The Goldstone Report and the continued shelling of Israeli towns from Gaza all took their temporary toll on the shininess of the post-Zionist aura.

For a moment, it seemed as if the reality of our neighborhood coupled with the significant and hard-felt failures during the Second Lebanon War (Summer 2006), had dealt a death blow to post-Zionism. In the 2009 elections for the 18th Knesset, the extreme-left Meretz party garnered only 3 seats (out of 120—YM) and even the moderate left Labor party was left with only 13. Yet despite all of this and the clear message of the voter and of our Arab neighbors, there are still plenty of academics, journalists, politicians and members of the Israeli bourgeoisie, who are stubborn post-Zionists who still not only hang on to the post-Zionist dream, but are willing to spend sizable fortunes and endanger countless lives in an effort to prove that they are right.

As these lines are written, in November 2011, more and more people are waking up and beginning to see the emperor in all his nakedness, realizing that the Arabs and post-Zionists have led us all astray. Thus, we see an opportunity to reassess the post-Zionist narrative and ideology, examine where it came from, its rise and its fall.

The volume you hold in your hand will review the meanings of Zionism and post-Zionism, their cores and their roots. We will follow along the paths of their lives and we will try to examine the realities of the past, the present and, of course, the future.

The post-Zionist debate pitted against one another those who wished to prosecute Zionism and Zionists, and those who wished to come to the defense of Zionism. The former believe that Zionism has had its say and should go away; the latter believe that the fat lady has yet to sing.

The main issue that charged the batteries of the post-Zionists was of course the Arab-Israeli conflict. This issue has been on the forefront of the Zionist debate since the beginning of the modern-day resettlement in the Land of Israel in the early 19th-century. In this compendium we have tried to present the positions of those who wish to place the fault for the Arab tragedy and the Arab refugees squarely on Israel’s shoulders as well as those who reject this narrative.

Because the post-Zionist narrative has not left the public debate as of yet, and in some areas outside Israel is actually gaining strength, we invite you, the reader, to peruse the various opinions, scratch the surface of the discussion, investigate the data and the details and come to your own conclusions regarding post-Zionism and the post-Zionist narrative.

Chapter 1

The Jewish State Debate:

1.1      The Jewish State

On May 15, 1944, the first train packed with Jews rounded up by evil-incarnate Lt. Col. Adolph Eichmann left Hungary for the infamous death camp in Auschwitz.⁸ Only four short years later, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Zionist movement, stood on a podium in the modern Jewish city of Tel Aviv and declared: ⁹

The Land of Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here our spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here we first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from our land, our people kept faith with it throughout our Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for our return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers¹⁰ and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917¹¹ and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations¹² which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom-and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

Accordingly we, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (May 15, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called ‘Israel.’

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL—in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months—to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream—the redemption of Israel.

Placing our trust in the Almighty, we affix our signatures to this proclamation at this session of the provisional Council of State, on the soil of the Homeland, in the city of Tel Aviv, on this Sabbath eve, the 5th day of Iyar, 5708 (May 14, 1948).

David Ben-Gurion

* Published in the Official Gazette, No. 1 of the 5th, Iyar, 5708

(May 14, 1948)

As history has recorded, eleven minutes after midnight on May 15, 1948 in Jerusalem, 06:11 Eastern Standard Time, U.S. President Harry S Truman affixed his signature to a document recognizing the renewed Jewish state, and in his own hand, replaced the second instance of the word ‘Jewish’ with the name given to the state by Ben-Gurion—‘Israel.’¹³ At the same instant, five Arab armies—Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq—bolstered by Arab irregulars and guerrillas, attacked the nascent state in an attempt to force it to be stillborn, a footnote to history.

But the physical attack on Israel was not the only one. As the Arab states were attacking Israel with arms, the academics (mainly historians, sociologists and philosophers) were gearing up to attempt to destroy the state with the power of the pen. As we will see, it took close to two decades for this effort to take hold, but today, as we stand at the precipice of the unknown, as the PLO¹⁴ stands and asks the world to recognize it as a state with historic Jewish Jerusalem as its capital, those pens may prove to be a more lethal weapon than arms.

The nations of the world collectively recognized the legal and moral rights of the Jewish people to their historic homeland in Eretz-Israel at least ten times from 1919-1922—not once did they suggest a ‘state of all its people’ or yet another Arab state with a Jewish minority. In May of 1948 President Truman recognized a Jewish state to be called Israel and not a generic state of Israel. This is the simple truth that many of the post-Zionists are trying to erase from our minds.

As Israel’s Vice Prime Minister Moshe Bogie Ya’alon puts it: The greatest challenge facing the State of Israel is to restore to Israeli society its faith in the righteousness of its path.

In Palestine as of Right and Not on Sufferance . . . 

When it is asked what is meant by the development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole, but the further development of the existing Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride. But in order that this community should have the best prospect of free development and provide a full opportunity for the Jewish people to display its capacities, it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance.

Winston Churchill

British Secretary of State for the Colonies

June 1922

"Nobody does Israel any service by proclaiming its ‘right to exist.’ Israel’s right to exist, like that of the United States, Saudi Arabia and 152 other states, is axiomatic and unreserved. Israel’s legitimacy is not suspended in midair awaiting acknowledgement… 

There is certainly no other state, big or small, young or old, that would consider mere recognition of its ‘right to exist’ a favor, or a negotiable concession."

Abba Eban, Minister of Foreign Affairs

The New York Times (November 18, 1981)

[Palestine is a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.

Mark Twain Visits Palestine in 1867

The Innocents Abroad (London, 1881)

"For the first time in history, thousands of black people are