Miracles
and Madness: Israel at 75
Thursday,
May 18, 2023
Tel
Aviv was founded by the Jewish community on the outskirts of the ancient port
city of Jaffa. (Getty Images)
Twenty-five years ago, my friend Rabbi
Daniel Gordis and his family packed up their house in Los Angeles and
immigrated to Israel. Those were the days when there were still people who
believed in the Oslo peace process, the Israeli left was a force to be reckoned
with, and much of Israel’s phenomenal growth had yet to happen. That was the
year of the Jewish state’s 50th anniversary.
Much has changed since then. The peace
process with the Palestinians is dead—as is much of the Israeli left. Yet
Israel has made peace with countries that would have been unthinkable not a decade
ago. And the country’s now known as the start-up nation, an economic powerhouse
famous for its high-tech scene.
On the occasion of Israel’s 75th
anniversary, marked this May week, I reached out to Danny to help make sense of
this complicated, tumultuous, beautiful, often indecipherable place: How did
the Jewish people manage to pull this off after two in every three European
Jews had been slaughtered? What does he consider Israel’s greatest achievement?
Its greatest failure? In light of ongoing political turmoil, what does he
expect a 100th year to look like?
There are few Israelis today better suited
to answer those questions than Danny—rabbi, academic, American-Israeli, and the
author of eight books, including the just-published Impossible Takes Longer: 75
Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams?
We’re thrilled to publish an essay based
on that important new book below—and to have him on this week’s episode of
Honestly:
Seventy-five years ago this week, the art
museum in the young city of Tel Aviv—which then had less than 200,000
inhabitants—was packed for an unusual ceremony. The Jewish community of
Palestine (known as the yishuv) was about to perform a resurrection: 36 men and
one woman were about to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, ending
almost 2,000 years of Jewish homelessness, and reestablishing political
sovereignty in the Holy Land for the first time since the destruction of the
Second Temple in 70 CE at the hands of the Romans.
There is a brief film clip of David
Ben-Gurion—the man who had led the yishuv for more than a decade and would soon
become the new state’s first prime minister—proclaiming with a tremulous voice,
“We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel,
to be known as the State of Israel.”
Those who have heard that clip dozens of
times may well have never asked themselves what might seem an obvious question:
Why is it that we only hear the “We hereby declare” portion of Ben-Gurion’s
reading the Declaration aloud? Why not the rest? And nothing else from the
proceedings?
The only moving picture camera around
belonged to a cinematographer who owned a company that produced weekly
newsreels. At the last minute, the government-in-waiting commissioned him to
film the momentous occasion, but he had only four minutes of film in stock to
cover a ceremony that was expected to last a half-hour—there was not enough
film to record a moment that would alter the history of the Jewish people, and
in some ways, much of the world.
Ben-Gurion therefore arranged to signal
him at the most important points in the proceedings to indicate when the camera
should roll. After the ceremony, though, the new state’s press handlers cut up
the film into four parts and sent them out to various news agencies for use in
newsreels. As a result, less than a minute of the original movie survived in
Israel.
David Ben Gurion, who was to become
Israel’s first prime minister, reads the country’s Declaration of Independence
on May 14, 1948. (Zoltan Kluger via Getty Images)
In many ways, that little story is a
metaphor for Israel itself in those early days. That the cinematographer was
contacted only at the last minute highlights the haste and cobbled-together
nature of everything that transpired in those fragile weeks. The meager four
minutes of available film reflected the scarcity felt everywhere in the country
about to be born. That most of the film was sent abroad reflects Israel’s early
need to tell its story and to justify itself—so much so that there was little
footage for the new country to keep for itself.
Scarcity was hardly the nascent country’s
only problem: even in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, international
support for the creation of a Jewish state was tepid at best.
Just six months earlier, in November 1947,
the United Nations General Assembly had voted—by the slimmest of margins—to
create two states in Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab. A majority of
two-thirds was required, and in the days leading up to the vote, it was far
from certain that the Zionist delegation had the votes.
Today, it is virtually impossible to
recapture the tension in the room. The vote took only three minutes, but what
was at stake was nothing less than the future of the Jewish people. Resolution
181, commonly known as the “Partition Plan,” passed—but barely. The vote was 33
in favor, 13 opposed, and 10 abstentions. Matters would soon get more ominous:
on April 3, Sir Alan Cunningham, then serving as the British high commissioner
to Palestine, wrote in his weekly intelligence briefing, “It is becoming
generally realized. . . that the United States [sic] aim is to secure
reconsideration of the Palestine problem by the General Assembly de novo.”
Merely four months after the vote, before Israel even existed, the United
States was spearheading a move to undo the resolution. But Harry Truman,
sensitive to the potential electoral costs of reversing the U.S. position, at
first wavered but then stood by America’s original stance in favor of
partition.
Both the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine
were disappointed by the borders the UN allocated to them, but while the Jews
agreed to the plan, the Arabs rejected it. They made clear that if a Jewish
state was created, they would attack it. When, six months after the UN vote, in
May 1948, the British were about to depart Palestine, the leadership of the
yishuv had to decide whether to act on the UN’s endorsement of the idea of a
national home for the Jewish people and declare statehood. There was nothing
easy about the decision. If they did not declare independence, the opportunity
might never return. If they did, five neighboring Arab states had vowed to
annihilate them.
On May 12, 1948, the yishuv’s leadership
asked Yigael Yadin—later a leading archaeologist but at the time, the commander
of the yishuv’s military forces—what their chances were of surviving the
onslaught that would follow if they declared independence. “Fifty-fifty,” Yadin
responded. Just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, attempting
independence might result in yet another slaughter.
Two days after they asked Yadin that
question, on May 14, Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence aloud at
the Tel Aviv Museum. Israel was born—and war did follow. Almost immediately,
the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and even Iraq (which did not share
a border with the new state) attacked Israel from every direction.
As expected, the conflict was brutal.
Approximately one percent of the civilian Jewish population died (in the United
States today, that would be 3,600,000 people). Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were
pressured to leave in some cases, and in others, expelled outright; they became
refugees, and would never return. Ultimately, though, Israel was not defeated.
It expanded its borders beyond what the United Nations had allocated, emerging
from the war with borders at least marginally defensible. And tragically,
because the Arabs rejected the UN proposal and declared war, the Arab state
that the UN had voted to create never came to be.
When the war ended in early 1949, Israel
had survived. It was poor, overwhelmed by a massive flood of Jewish refugees
from Europe, militarily far from secure, rejected by the Arabs, and far from
embraced by the international community. It was an inauspicious beginning, to
be sure. But the citizens of the young country did not need to think too far
back to know what would happen if they failed. So, in what is one of humanity’s
most astonishing stories of national rebirth and flourishing, they held on
against all odds, and step by step built the country that Israel is today.
This month, with Israel celebrating 75
years of independence, Israelis and the world are taking stock of what has and
has not been accomplished since May 1948. In many ways, what has transpired
seems virtually miraculous—those black-and-white images of a ragtag country
created in the aftermath of the Holocaust have given way to brightly colored
images of a modern, thriving country pulsing with life, creativity, and energy
that bears scant resemblance to the country Israel was not long ago.
Militarily, the fledgling army that barely
held on in the 1948 War of Independence (and again, in the early days of the
1973 Yom Kippur War) has become a military power so overwhelming that no Arab
army has dared attack Israel in the last half-century. Slowly but surely, much
of the Arab world has come to accept Israel’s existence. Egypt signed a peace
treaty with Israel in 1979; Jordan followed in 1994. The UAE and Bahrain
followed with the Abraham Accords in 2020, and then came Morocco and Sudan.
More recently, Saudi Arabia and others have been making overtures toward some
form of normalization.
Economically, the accomplishment has been
no less extraordinary. In its earliest years, Israel was out of money, and had
no way to feed or house the hundreds of thousands of Jewish displaced persons
making their way to the young state from DP camps in Europe after the
Holocaust, or the approximately 700,000 Jews from Arab lands who were
essentially expelled from North Africa and who then also came to Israel. There
was mandatory food rationing and poverty was rife. In the 1950s, an Israeli’s
standard of living was approximately that of an American in the 1800s. Though
German reparations (equivalent to about $8 billion today) in the 1950s helped
Israel avert economic disaster, the specter of economic collapse would
reappear. In the 1980s, the annual rate of inflation was 445 percent, and
again, Israel seemed on the verge of financial doom.
Today, those challenges, too, are gone.
Privatization of national companies and better fiscal policy (credit for both
of which goes largely to Benjamin Netanyahu) saved the economy, which is now
robust. Today, Israel’s high-tech sector is so powerful that only three
countries other than the U.S. have more companies registered on the NASDAQ.
The
modern miracle of Tel Aviv. (Lior Mizrahi via Getty Images)
The rebirth of the Jewish people in its
new state extends far beyond the easily measurable such as military or economic
indicators. The Jewish people in Europe were sick, early Zionists had said.
Jews were fearful. They were commonly banished. They were excluded from many
elite professions. But much of the sickness was internal, too. What kind of
people do not speak their own language? Could there be authentic Russian
culture without the Russian language? French culture without French?
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda thus took it upon
himself to revive ancient Hebrew and transform it into a modern language.
Today, the millions of Israelis who speak the language of the Bible take it so
for granted that they do not realize that an Israeli bookstore, with hundreds
of linear feet of shelves of books written in a language that not long ago
virtually no one spoke, is miraculous. Israel is home to some 55 theatrical
companies that put on over 1,000 plays a year that are seen by some three
million people (in a country of nine million). Israel has 84 recognized
orchestras and ensembles that present tens of thousands of performances a year.
There are 163 museums, visited by some seven million people a year. The Israeli
film industry, long a rather sad and unproductive story, now releases some 60
films a year, some of them world-class. Israeli publishing houses release about
8,500 volumes a year—mostly in Hebrew.
Two months ago, Israel was ranked fourth
in the UN’s latest World Happiness Scale (way higher than the U.S., which was
#15 on the list). Only three Scandinavian countries ranked higher. The Jewish
state has a higher birth rate even among secular Jewish women than any other
OECD country.
Why the happiness? Why the birth rate?
Perhaps because Israel has eradicated heartbreak as the foundational
characteristic of Jewish life.
From its outset, Zionism had been a
political movement designed to bring about a state that would breathe new life
into a people that had barely staggered out of the first half of the twentieth
century. Its goal was to fashion a Jewish people that would no longer wait to
see what history had in store for them, but instead would shape their own
destiny. Those people who assembled in the Tel Aviv Museum on May 14, 1948 were
there to begin transforming that dream into a reality.
Has Israel succeeded? Has it lived up to
its founders’ dreams? If what it sought to do was to create a new Jew, Zionism
has succeeded beyond measure.
Seventy-five years later, however, many of
the issues with which Israel grappled in its earliest days remain unresolved
and are now the foundations of some of the country’s most serious challenges.
The Arabs who fled Palestine but refused to recognize Israel are today’s
Palestinians. David Ben-Gurion’s decision not to draft young ultra-Orthodox
(Haredi) men—because he was convinced that ultra-Orthodoxy was a remnant of
European Judaism that would soon disappear—now exempts more than 11,000 young
men a year and threatens the very foundations of the image of the IDF as a
people’s army. And though the Declaration of Independence promised that Israel
would pass a constitution, that never happened—a decision that has led Israel
to the gravest internal crisis in its history.
The most glaring disappointment of the
past 75 years, the source of much of the world’s opprobrium regularly directed
at Israel, is the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which just this week
erupted once again into warfare.
Sadly, time does not heal all wounds.
Indeed, the passage of time sometimes hardens hearts. Among Israeli voters,
support for a two-state solution was at its highest in 2007, when it peaked at
70 percent. But it has fallen since then. In 2018, according to the Israel
Democracy Institute, 46 percent supported a two-state solution, while in 2021
that number had fallen to 41.5 percent. Among the Palestinians, the numbers are
even less encouraging. One highly regarded polling organization found in early
2022 that 32 percent of Palestinians favored a one-state solution, 52 percent
favored continued armed resistance, and 58 percent were explicitly opposed to a
two-state solution.
Tragically, there is no solution in sight.
But if, several months ago, most Israelis
on the eve of the celebration of 75 years of independence might have pointed to
the ongoing conflict as their biggest source of disappointment, what now has
them most concerned is the deepest—and, many believe, the most
dangerous—internal divide in Israel’s history. This time, the crisis is not
about Israel and its hostile neighbors, but disagreement among Israelis
themselves about the kind of country the Jewish state should be.
When Israelis went to the polls for the
fifth time in three years on November 1, 2022, bringing Benjamin Netanyahu (now
Israel’s longest-serving prime minister) and the right back to power, the new
Justice Minister, Yariv Levin, began to push forward a legislative plan to
dramatically alter Israel’s judicial system. Levin and his partners claim that
it is time to defang Israel’s Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice Aharon
Barak in the 1990s had taken for itself vast power.
Citizens
in Tel Aviv protest against the government’s controversial judicial overhaul
bill on March 25, 2023. (Ahmad Gharabli via Getty Images)
Yet many Israelis on the left and in the
center (and, by now, many on the center-right as well), believe that what was
being proposed was not judicial reform, but regime change. The planned changes,
they argued, would render Israel either a non-democracy, or at best, an
illiberal democracy like Poland or Hungary. Unlike many first world
democracies, Israel has a unicameral parliament, rather than two houses that
might push back on each other. To make matters even more worrisome, the
executive and legislative functions are already blended in the Knesset itself.
Therefore, the proposal that the Knesset (rather than an independent committee,
as is now the case) would select judges and that judicial review by the Supreme
Court would be ended led many Israelis to fear that the “reforms” would
effectively end all checks and balances in Israel’s governmental system.
If the government had expected the
opposition to grumble but then to let the reform pass, they badly miscalculated.
Young Israeli professionals, long assumed
to be nonchalant about the Zionist project of their grandparents and
great-grandparents, took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, waving
tens of thousands of Israeli flags, demanding an end to the proposed reforms.
They blocked highways. Reserve IAF pilots refused to show up for training and
missions, even as matters with Iran are heating up. Hundreds of Israel’s
leading economists warned the government that these reforms would essentially
ruin Israel’s economy, and soon enough, Bloomberg, Moody’s and others had
downgraded Israel’s ratings. Israeli high-tech companies began moving their
assets abroad. All the military, economic, and diplomatic progress Israel had
made through the decades seemed to be slipping through the country’s fingers.
So far, the massive social protests—which
have been held for the past 16 consecutive weeks in more than 100 locations,
bringing more than 200,000 people to the streets on a given Saturday night—have
managed to delay the judicial reforms. But the proposed legislation remains
very much on the table, and the rifts within Israeli society that it has
surfaced have brought Israel to the precipice. A number of Israeli journalists
and intellectuals could not help but note that when the United States was 75
years old, it was gearing up for its Civil War.
But the crisis Israel now faces has also
underscored the power of the dream that fueled the creation of the Jewish
state. To have participated in these protests, as I have with my family, has
meant bearing witness to an extraordinary exhibition of love of country, of
devotion to Zionism, of almost completely violence-free protests by hundreds of
thousands of people for three months. What we have seen is (whatever little bit
remains of) the left, along with the newly reenergized center, joined by many
on the right who were so deeply worried about the split in the nation that
they, too—though they favored the reforms—said it was time to end the
legislative push, not because the idea of reform was wrong, but because the way
the government was ramming it through was tearing the country to shreds. These
protests have had a single symbol: the Israeli flag. “We love this country as
much as you do,” said the left and the center to the right. “And it’s ours no
less than it is yours.”
“All they want is to code, go public, have
exits,” it was said of this younger generation of secular Israelis who live
right where the Declaration was signed in 1948. “Their Zionist-pioneer
grandparents and great-grandparents must be turning in their graves,” people
said.
But no. Not at all. Those Zionist-pioneer
grandparents and great-grandparents must be staring down at their kids’ kids
with proverbial tears of pride and joy, a deep sense of satisfaction that three
quarters of a century in, the young, successful, secular Ashkenazi elites love
this country. They took to the streets to defend it, to protect it, to preserve
it.
What will Israel be like in 25 years, when
it reaches its 100th anniversary? We cannot know, of course. But one great
source of hope is that what is emerging in Israel is a newly energized
political center. A wide swath of Israeli society that wants Israel to be
Jewish and democratic, both universalist and particular, at home in both the
West and in the Middle East.
That desire to be both deeply Western and
profoundly Jewish at the same time was apparently at the core of David
Ben-Gurion’s decision not to include the word “democracy” in Israel’s
Declaration of independence. “As for western democracy, I’m for Jewish
democracy,” he wrote in his diary. “ ‘Western’ doesn’t suffice. Being a Jew is
not simply a biological fact, but. . . also a matter of morals, ethics. . . .
The value of life and human freedom are, for us, more deeply embedded thanks to
the biblical prophets than western democracy.”
That was good as far as it went, but the
absence of a constitution has left many critical questions unanswered. How
Jewish should the Jewish state be, and how should it be Jewish? How much power
should the Supreme Court (still seen as a bastion of secular elitism) have? How
much power should be wrested away from the secular descendants of the Ashkenazi
(European) founders, now that the more traditional and reverential Jews of the
Levant (Mizrahim) constitute a majority of Israel’s Jews?
In 1948, Israel’s Prime Minister Ben
Gurion (center left in jacket) bids farewell to the last contingent of British
troops to leave the Holy Land. (Getty Images)
Our family—my wife, our three kids, and
I—moved to Israel from Los Angeles 25 years ago. Why? We wanted, quite simply,
to be part of the story of a young country that was going to write the future
of the Jewish people. Life here has been wondrous at times, but frightening and
overwhelmingly sad at others. Israel has at times infuriated us, and at times
it has inspired us. Never, though, have we ever second-guessed our decision to
move to Jerusalem, for even a second. After all, no one in the history of
Zionism believed that reviving Jewish life and building a sovereign state where
the “new Jew” could flourish was going to be easy. After 2,000 years of
homelessness, re-creating a home was bound to be a messy affair.
The story of this state, as both the
occasion of the 75th anniversary as well as the current crisis remind us, is
far from finished. We will not live to see it completed. All we can do—and what
we feel compelled to do—is nurture this home against all odds, so that 75 years
from now, our descendants are still proud of what has been wrought, and are
still wrestling with what kind of place this should be.
There has been so much written about the
protests and Israel’s 75th anniversary. Here are just a few pieces we’d
recommend:
For a very different view of the protests,
read an essay we published recently by Moshe Koppel and Eugene Kontorovich: Our
Think Tank Sparked Mass Protests in Israel. We Proudly Stand By Our Ideas.
We also were provoked, as always, by
Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz, this time writing for Newsweek: What Israel’s Protests
Are Really About
And of all the essays capturing the deeper
meaning behind what’s happening in the streets, we were struck by the insights
of David Hazony in the Jewish Journal: The Rebirth of Israel?
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