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Holiday
Dates: Israel Independence Day 2011 (Yom HaAtzmaut)
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Tuesday,
May 10, 2011 / 6 of Iyyar, 5771 |
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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.
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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 |
|
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 |
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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."
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.
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."
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