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Israel
Historical Setting
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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