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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
A Jew wearing a tasseled cap or
simlah, shown on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser
III (r. 859-825 B.C.)
ON MAY 14, 1948, in the city of Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion
proclaimed the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of
Israel. The introductory paragraph affirmed that "Eretz Ysrael (the
Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here they
first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and
universal significance, and gave the world the eternal Book of
Books." The issuance of the proclamation was signaled by the ritual
blowing of the shofar (ram's-horn trumpet) and was followed by the
recitation of the biblical verse (Lev. 25:10): "Proclaim liberty
throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof." The same
verse is inscribed on the American Liberty Bell in Independence
Hall in Philadelphia.
The reestablishment of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine has
been the pivotal event in contemporary Jewish history. After nearly
two millennia of exile, the Jewish people were brought together in
their ancient homeland. Despite the ancient attachments of Jews to
biblical Israel, the modern state of Israel is more deeply rooted
in nineteenth- and twentieth- century European history than it is
in the Bible. Thus, although Zionism--the movement to establish a
national Jewish entity--is rooted in the messianic impulse of
traditional Judaism and claims a right to Palestine based on God's
promise to Abraham, the vast majority of Zionists are secularists.
For nearly 2,000 years following the destruction of the Second
Temple in A.D. 70, the attachment of the Jewish
Diaspora (see Glossary)
to the Holy Land was more spiritual then physical. The
idea of an ingathering of the exiles and a wholesale return to the
Holy Land, although frequently expressed in the liturgy, was never
seriously considered or acted upon. Throughout most of the exilic
experience, the Jewish nation connoted the world Jewish community
that was bound by the powerful moral and ethical ethos of the
Jewish religion. The lack of a state was seen by many as a virtue,
for it ensured that Judaism would not be corrupted by the
exigencies of statehood. Despite frequent outbreaks of anti-
Semitism, Jewish communities survived and in many cases thrived as
enclosed communities managed by a clerical elite in strict
accordance with Jewish law.
Zionism called for a revolt against the old established order
of religious orthodoxy
(see Origins of Zionism
, this ch.). It
repudiated nearly 2,000 years of Diaspora existence, claiming that
the Judaism of the Exile, devoid of its national component, had
rendered the Jews a defenseless pariah people. As such, Zionism is
the most radical attempt in Jewish history to escape the confines
of traditional Judaism. The new order from which Zionism sprang and
to which the movement aspired was nineteenth-century liberalism:
the age of reason, emancipation, and rising nationalism.
Before Napoleon emancipated French Jewry in 1791, continental
and Central European Jews had been forced to reside in designated
Jewish "ghettos" apart from the non-Jewish community. Emancipation
enabled many Jews to leave the confines of the ghetto and to attain
unprecedented success in business, banking, the arts, medicine, and
other professions. This led to the assimilation of many Jews into
non-Jewish European society. The concomitant rise of ethnically
based nationalisms, however, precluded Jewish participation in the
political leadership of most of the states where they had settled.
Political Zionism was born out of the frustrated hopes of
emancipated European Jewry. Political Zionists aspired to establish
a Jewish state far from Europe but modeled after the
postemancipation European state.
In Eastern Europe, where the bulk of world Jewry lived, any
hope of emancipation ended with the assassination of the reform-
minded Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The pogroms that ensued led many
Russian Jews to emigrate to the United States, while others joined
the communist and socialist movements seeking to overthrow the
tsarist regime and a much smaller number sought to establish a
Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism in its East European context
evolved out of a Jewish identity crisis; Jews were rapidly
abandoning religious orthodoxy, but were unable to participate as
equal citizens in the countries where they lived. This was the
beginning of cultural Zionism, which more than political Zionism
attached great importance to the economic and cultural content of
the new state.
The most important Zionist movement in Palestine was Labor
Zionism, which developed after 1903. Influenced by the Bolsheviks,
the Labor movement led by David Ben-Gurion created a highly
centralized Jewish economic infrastructure that enabled the Jewish
population of Palestine
(the Yishuv--see Glossary)
to absorb waves
of new immigrants and to confront successfully the growing Arab and
British opposition during the period of the British Mandate (1920-
48). Following independence in May 1948, Ben-Gurion's Labor Zionism
would guide Israel through the first thirty years of statehood.
The advent of Zionism and the eventual establishment of the
State of Israel posed anew a dilemma that has confronted Jews and
Judaism since ancient times: how to reconcile the moral imperatives
of the Jewish religion with the power politics and military force
necessary to maintain a nation-state. The military and political
exigencies of statehood frequently compromised Judaism's
transcendent moral code. In the period before the Exile, abuses of
state power set in rapidly after the conquests of Joshua, in the
reign of Solomon, in both the northern and southern kingdoms, under
the Hasmoneans, and under Herod the Great.
In the twentieth century, the Holocaust transformed Zionism
from an ideal to an urgent necessity for which the Yishuv and world
Jewry were willing to sacrifice much. From that time on, the bulk
of world Jewry would view Jewish survival in terms of a Jewish
state in Palestine, a goal finally achieved by the creation of the
state of Israel in 1948. The Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews,
on whose behalf the West proved unwilling to intervene, and the
hostility of Israel's Arab neighbors, some of which systematically
evicted their Jewish communities, later combined to create a sense
of siege among many Israelis. As a result, the modern State of
Israel throughout its brief history has given security priority
over the country's other needs and has considerably expanded over
time its concept of its legitimate security needs. Thus, for
reasons of security Israel has justified the dispossession of
hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, the limited rights
granted its Arab citizens, and harsh raids against bordering Arab
states that harbored Palestinian guerrillas who had repeatedly
threatened Israel.
The June 1967 War was an important turning point in the history
of Israel (see
1967 and Afterward, this ch.). The ease of victory
and the reunification of Jerusalem spurred a growing religio-
nationalist movement. Whereas Labor Zionism was a secular movement
that sought to sow the land within the
Green Line (see Glossary),
the new Israeli nationalists, led by Gush Emunim and Rabbi Moshe
Levinger, called for Jewish settlement in all of Eretz Yisrael. The
June 1967 War also brought under Israel's control the Sinai
Peninsula, the
Golan Heights (see Glossary),
the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip (see Glossary),
and East Jerusalem. From the beginning,
control of Jerusalem was a nonnegotiable item for Israel. The Gaza
Strip and especially the West Bank, however, posed a serious
demographic problem that continued to fester in the late 1980s.
In contrast to the euphoria that erupted in June 1967, the
heavy losses suffered in the October 1973 War ushered in a period
of uncertainty. Israel's unpreparedness in the early stages of the
war discredited the ruling Labor Party, which also suffered from a
rash of corruption charges. Moreover, the demographic growth of
Oriental Jews (Jews of African or Asian origin), a large number of
whom felt alienated from Labor's blend of socialist Zionism, tilted
the electoral balance for the first time in Israel's history away
from the Labor Party
(see Jewish Ethnic Groups
, ch. 2). In the May
1977 elections Menachem Begin's Likud Bloc unseated Labor.
The early years of the Begin era were dominated by the historic
peace initiative of President Anwar as Sadat of Egypt. His trip to
Jerusalem in November 1977 and the subsequent signing of the Camp
David Accords and the Treaty of Peace between Egypt and Israel
ended hostilities between Israel and the largest and militarily
strongest Arab country. The proposed Palestinian autonomy laid out
in the Camp David Accords never came to fruition because of a
combination of Begin's limited view of autonomy--he viewed the West
Bank as an integral part of the State of Israel--and because of the
refusal of the other Arab states and the Palestinians to
participate in the peace process. As a result, violence in the
occupied territories increased dramatically in the late 1970s and
early 1980s.
Following Likud's victory in the 1981 elections, Begin and his
new minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, pursued a harder line toward
the Arabs in the territories. After numerous attempts to quell the
rising tide of Palestinian nationalism failed, Begin, on the advice
of Sharon and Chief of Staff General Raphael Eitan, decided to
destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) major base of
operations in Lebanon. On June 6, 1982, Israeli troops crossed the
border into Lebanon initiating Operation Peace for Galilee. This
was the first war in Israel's history that lacked wide public
support.
Data as of December 1988
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