Israel Turns 60

[This is a pre-recorded message. Judah is gone on vacation this week.]

Remember that little jingle to help you remember Columbus?

In Fourteen Hundred Ninety-Two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Well here's another one for you

On May Fourteenth of Fourty-Eight
Israel became a state

After nearly 2000 years of dispersion, after the Crusades, after the Inquisition, after the Holocaust, after all the persecution of the Jewish people, often at the hands of Christians and Muslims, the United Nations declared the creation of the state of Israel.

After millenia of longsuffering, Jews around the world wept with unspeakable joy and rejoicing as the ancient Jewish homeland -- the only homeland for the Jewish people -- was re-established at long last.

The Israeli Scroll of Independence puts it in words better than I can,

ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses.

Pioneers… and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In 1897, at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in what it claimed to be its own country. This right was supported by the British government in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Palestine and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

An audio recording of the UN vote to re-establish the Nation of Israel:



Immediately upon its creation by UN mandate, Israel -- a tiny nation the size of New Jersey -- was simultaneously invaded by Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the new nation.

On the day after the UN vote to create Israel, a spate of Arab attacks left seven Jews dead and scores more wounded. Shooting, stoning, and rioting continued apace in the following days. The consulates of Poland and Sweden, both of whose governments had voted for the creation of Israel, were attacked. Bombs were thrown into cafes, Molotov cocktails were hurled at shops, a synagogue was set on fire.

The Arab League also planned punitive measures against Jews living in Arab countries, many of which were subsequently implemented by individual states.

On December 3, at the instigation of the Arab leadership, a large mob ransacked the new Jewish commercial center in Jerusalem, looting and burning shops and stabbing and stoning whomever they happened upon. The next day, some 120–150 armed Arabs attacked Kibbutz Efal, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, in the first large-scale attempt to storm a Jewish village.

All this in an attempt to wipe out the Jews from Israel.

But God had other plans for his people; He's so faithful! The time to favor Zion had come, as the ancient prophets had foretold in Scripture. The time had come to restore His people to the land He gave them.

The result of this war waged on the newborn Israel is something Muslims refer to this day as Yawm al-nakba: Catastrophe Day.

Why is it called Catastrophe Day by Muslims? By the time the fighting finally ended on July 24th, 1949 with the signing of the armistice agreement with Syria, not only had Israel retained its independence and statehood, it actually increased its land area by almost 50%! Also, many of the Arabs living in the area -- the same ones that were attacking the newborn Jewish state, setting synagogues on fire, stoning Jews -- were driven out of the land.

(To this day, Arab nations, still bitter over their failed invasion, demand Israel give back this land won in Israel's War for Independence and the '67 War in return for peace. This is what the faulty "land for peace" deals are all about, folks.)

Here's to another 60 years of Israel. This time, may there be lasting peace in Jerusalem, the kind of peace only God himself can bring. God will prosper those that love her, so we bless her and say shalom aleichem Yerushalayim!