“As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart; With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion; Then our hope - the two-thousand-year-old hope - will not be lost: To be a holy people in our land, The land of Zion (and) Jerusalem.”
Beautiful and inspiring words they are. These are the words of the national anthem of the State of Israel. Words sung played at the annual dinner of the Yeshiva founded by Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik, Yeshivas Brisk. Rabbi Soloveichik felt so strongly about the religious significance of the establishment of the State, that he said Hallel on Yom HaAtzmaut every year until his passing. But even without any theological significance attributed to it, the creation of the State of Israel by its Zionist founders is worthy of tremendous Hakaras HaTov by all of Jewry.
There has been much written about the creation of the State and its founders, some of it negative by people like Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht. The founders have variously been portrayed as evil and selfish people interested more in the faith of their socialist cause than in saving the lives of their brethren during the holocaust. Chaim Weitzman has been painted as an elitist Jew interested only in saving other elitist Jews and caring little about the uneducated “wretched refuse” of Eastern Europe. David Ben Gurion has been portrayed as a murderer because of his attack on the Altelena and a kidnapper because of the treatment of Yemenite children.
I do not agree with these characterizations. It is really impossibe to judge anyone without being in their shoes. We do not have all the facts. Although there may be some truth to these allegations; the human condition makes no man a total saint or total sinner. People can and do rise above their evil inclinations and become great heroes, even while in some instances, tripping along the way. People will do some bad... but do even more good. Judging anyone based on one aspect of his tenure here on earth is not the right way to look at any individual. It is incumbent upon history to look at the totality of what one has accomplished in life, both good and bad, consider the circumstances and then evaluate. Ultimately, of course it is not ours to judge another human being. It is God’s. It is in this spirit I write of the founding of the state and look at its founders as great people.
The period in history between the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe and the establishment of the State of Israel is an amazing one... one that is full of travail about which many questions can be asked. The immaciated survivors of the death camps who managed to be “resurrected” to life upon being liberated were treated little better by the allies than they were by the Nazis. I don’t necessarily blame the allies... at least not entirely. They just didn’t know how to handle the masses of displaced humanity. With no homes to return to and no where to go survivors were put into displaced persons (DP) camps that very closely resembled the concentration camps of the Nazis. Of course they were not murdered and not tortured. They were fed and kept relatively healthy. But they were prisoners in the sense that they were not permitted to leave and kept under the armed guard of the military and surrounded by barbed wire fences. They lived in far less than humane conditions. And they had little to relieve their despair not knowing what will be with them... what kind of future they would have.
This was because some of the greatest and most influential figures of the time were secretly quite anti-Semitic and were put in charge of the refugee problem. Famed US General George S. Patton harbored such feelings and recorded them in his diary. He hated Jews and called Holocaust survivors "subhumans". It was under his jurisdiction that Jews were kept in these deplorable conditions. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower found out about it and went over there to see for himself he was disgusted and immediately relieved Patton of his duty.
Secretary of State George S.L.A. Marshall was not much better. He argued strongly against President Truman’s support of s Jewish State in Palestine, threatening to resign and vote against him in the next election if he did so.
Many of the Jews in these camps yearned to go to Palestine. They saw their ancestral home as the only viable alternative for the future and were excited about the Zionist ideal of returning and building up their ancient homeland. Ben Gurion visited one of these refugee camps and promised them they would soon be able to come to the holy land. At the end of the assembly he sung Hatikva together with the entire crowd in the squalor of that DP camp. It must have really been a deeply emotional experience unlike any other for both the refugees and Ben Gurion.
Some Jews started finding ways to escape the DP camps on ships, the most famous of which was the Exodus, which would take them to Palestine. Most were intercepted by British soldiers at the time still holding on tenuously to the mandate in Palestine. There were some ships that did make it through but the British government, more interested in Arab oil than in the humanitarian concerns of the Jewish Holocaust refugees kept the gates to Palestine all but closed, allowing only a trickle to enter. It was NOT Britain’s finest hour. British Foreign Secretary Ernst Bevin was quite the anti-Semite himself and was in charge of executing the mandate over Palestine. He ordered these ships to be turned back or in some cases transferred its human cargo to DP camps set up in nearby Cypress. In the case of the Exodus, he ordered it fired upon killing some of the passengers and wounding others.
So here you had a group of people who suffered untold horrors during the holocaust now being kept in limbo in concentration camp like conditions by a world still unsympathetic to their needs. The human tragedy of this scenario is beyond description, in my view.
And it was against this backdrop that God in His infinite wisdom opened up the gates. He caused the world to recognize the need of the Jewish people. Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko went up to the podium of the UN in front of all the member nations and to the shock of almost all, proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in Palestine. This was eventually followed by a vote in which a resolution dividing Palestine into two States, Israel and Palestine, was passed by a 2/3rd majority. Shortly afterward David Ben Gurion declared:
ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE'S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.
The gates were finally open. And the refugees all came. Now under Jewish control for the first time since the destruction of the second Temple, the Jewish people were finally, with the help of God, in control of their own destiny in a world that, during the holocaust that either looked the other, or actively participated in the near genocide of the Jewish people. And now, a world that refused to help them rehabilitate after the war... a world still filled with anti-Semitism.
This is the Israel I celebrate. The in-gathering of the exiles so elusive throughout the millennia was now at hand. Jews are finally free to emigrate at will to a nation, a haven always open to receive them. For this fact alone Yom HaAtzmaut is a day that should be instilled deeply in the hearts of every Jew, regardless of how Frum and regardless of Hashkafa. If they had done nothing else but establish a state and open up the gates to all those survivors, that alone would suffice. Israel, I salute you.
