Israel Independence Day 2007

Israel Independence Day commemorates something as close to a miracle as we are ever likely to see — the re-creation of an ancient state in the Land in which it stood 2,000 years before, the resurrection of an ancient language to bind the ingathering of exiles who had no other place to live, the creation of a democracy that extended citizenship not only to Jews but to every Arab who did not leave or flee during the genocidal war against the state that commenced on the day of independence, and the subsequent growth of the state into a modern economy and a vibrant civil society while under continual military attack over six decades, including the religious crusade currently waged against it.

The day is traditionally a day of celebration that follows a day of mourning for those who fell to secure or protect the state.  But this year Daniel Gordis has noted signs of flagging spirits, as he explains in a sobering but eloquent dispatch.  He attributes it to the difficulties currently facing Israel, which seem to dwarf the problems of an earlier, more optimistic time:

Israeli society is not characterized by a sense of “We the People” the way that American society claimed to be in 1787.  The divisions between secular and religious, hawks and doves, rich and poor, socialists and capitalists, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Jews and Arabs are all wider and deeper than any might have expected they would become. . . . 

[We have] come to realize that these divisions can’t simply be papered over.  The authors of the Declaration [of Independence of Israel] finessed that disagreement as to whether to include God in their text by using the phrase “with trust in the rock of Israel” – a phrase that the religious could interpret as God, and which others could take to mean the military might of the emerging State. . . .  Today, we know that no clever turn of a phrase will bind us together.

But in fact, as Haviv Rettig writes, the “very first draft of the document was a Hebrew translation of the American Declaration of Independence,” and David Ben-Gurion wrote an essay in 1954 — “The Eternity of Israel” — about the difficulties that underlay the Israeli Declaration that makes it clear that much more than a clever turn of phrase was involved.  The essay is particularly worth perusing on this day:

Never in Jewish history has the unity of Israel been revealed in a fuller or more perfect manner than in the Declaration of Independence of our state in our times. . . . [W]hen Moses was merely delayed in descending from the mountain, the people gathered with Aaron at their head and made the golden calf.  And after all the tribes had come to David in Hebron to appoint him as leader over all Israel . . . the rebellion of Absalom broke out.  And after Joab and Abishai, sons of Jeruiah, and Ittai the Gittite, suppressed the family rebellion and restored the kingship to David, a more severe rebellion spread, the rebellion of Sheba, the son of Bichri, a Benjamite – which led, after the death of Solomon, to a split between Judea and Israel.  Only a few [of the Jewish exiles in Babylonia] emigrated with Ezra and Nehemiah to the Land of Israel . . . and those who returned encountered opposition by “the people of the land” who had not been exiled.  In the days of the Second Temple, quarrels proliferated between the Sadducees and the Pharisees and between the Hasmonean brothers themselves, and prior to the destruction, between the moderates and the zealot rebels.  The rebels too fought among themselves no less than they fought the Romans . . . .  Nor did quarrels and conflicts cease in Israel during the exile.

On the eve of the establishment of the state, the Jewish yisuv in the Land was perhaps the most divided and fragmented of all the Jewish settlements in the world.  In no other land could one find such a conglomeration of different ethnic groups, cultures, organizations and parties, beliefs and opinions, shifting ideologies and international orientations, conflicting economic and social interests, as in the yishuv —  as a result of the ingathering of the exiles, the center of all the divisions and splits in Israel.  With the wondrous occurrence of . . . independence, it was as if all the divisions were overcome.  Representatives of all the parties in Israel signed the Declaration – from the Communists, who had forever fought against the Zionist enterprise as reactionary, bourgeois, chauvinistic, and counter-revolutionary, to Agudat Yisrael, which had perceived as apostasy any attempt to bring about the redemption of Israel through natural means . . .

However, it was not only these two extremes that . . . overcame their prolonged and bitter opposition to the state of Israel.  The representatives of Shomer Hatzair, who for over twenty years had maintained that a binational state was the only means to realize the Zionist goal . . . participated in the signing. . . . [And] representatives of the Revisionists, who had vehemently fought against a state based on partition, also signed the Declaration.

The only obstacle . . . was the last paragraph [of the Declaration] referring to “trust in the Rock of Israel.”  Some radical intellectuals considered these words an apostasy against atheism; on the other side was ultra-Orthodox extremists who perceived the failure to add “and its Redeemer” . . . as an apostasy against fundamental dogma.  Nevertheless, everyone signed after negotiations.  And not only the parties in Israel but the Jewish people throughout the world were united on that day in their joy and pride over the establishment of the state.  It is difficult to assess which of the two miracles was greater – the miracle of independence or the miracle of unity . . . .

[Israel] is not a state with a developed country and an established economy. . . .  The people residing within it are only the nucleus of the people for whom it was established.  Most of its area is desolate and waste, requiring development.  Its economy is only in its infancy.  All its neighbors are scheming to destroy it.  Great world powers are unsympathetic to it. . . .

Things are extremely difficult in Israel today, but the problems do not seem different in degree from those that Ben-Gurion described and that Israel encountered from the time of Moses forward.  On this dispirited but inspiring Independence Day, it may be useful to recall the old saying that, at times like these, it is important to remember that there have always been times like these — as Ben-Gurion’s essay reminds us.  And that Israel overcame them all.