TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0241> <link 93XP0391> <link 93HT0337> <title> 1940s: State Of Israel </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> State of Israel </hdr> <body> [Still another British possession evolved into an independent state in a paroxysm of violence: Palestine, a mandate Britain took on after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in World War I; British foreign Minister Balfour had promised that Jews would be allowed a "National Home" there. The British had also promised the territory to the Arabs, however, so they restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939, just in time to trap millions of desperate Jews in Europe. In 1946, displaced Jews who had survived the war and the concentration camps began heading, illegally, toward the Middle East.] (May 6, 1946) Only Jehovah knew last week how many Jews were moving out of their modern bondage toward the ancient promised land. By thousands they fled from eastern Europe, where three-fourths of the Continent's 1,300,000 surviving Jews (not including those of Russia) have found no victory in Hitler's defeat. Their exodus was illegal, clandestine, and humanitarian. A Polish Jewess explained why: "You know what Europe is to me? It's a cemetery. When I walk into a store and see soap on sale, I remember that this may be the body of my sister." The underground was shifting its human freight out of the villages of eastern Europe. Operated by Haganah (Hebrew for "self-defense"), the movement is largely financed by funds collected in the U.S. Bari in Italy is the chief jumping-off place; it has large reception camps where the travelers are housed and fed until the night they crowd aboard a little tramp ship for the voyage to Palestine. Landing in Palestine is a touch-&-go operation. The vigilant British patrol is composed of coast guard stations on 24-hour watch, motor launches and cutters, radar posts. If a ship eludes all these, the authorities may throw a smoke screen around a suspected landing place, then intensively search nearby homes and fields. "Illegals" who are caught are herded into a concentration camp. The Jewish Agency for Palestine, recognized as spokesman for world Jewry, negotiates for their release. Usually the British deduct the "illegals" from the regular quota for immigrants (1,500 a month), before freeing them. Haganah men say that in the last four months they brought 7,000 out of 10,000 "illegals" safely through the British cordon. Once ashore, the travelers find the channels of absorption into the Jewish community efficient and heartwarming. [The conflicting nationalisms of Jews and Arabs had been causing bloodshed in Palestine at least since 1936. After the war's end, Jewish extremist groups like the Irgun Zvai Leumi, headed by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang, frustrated by Britain's refusal to admit more than 1,500 of the desperate Jewish DPs per month, initiated terrorist actions aimed at driving the British out of Palestine. In August 1946, the Irgun blew up Jerusalem's King David Hotel, killing 80 people.] (August 26, 1946) Electric tension gripped Jerusalem. Outside the Jaffa Gate the tension was even greater. A Government "fortress" went up last week in the heart of the New City. The British evicted shopkeepers and business firms along Jaffa Road, stretched tangles of barbed wire from rooftops to the ground and along the road. Sand-bagged guard posts manned by grim-faced infantrymen and paratroopers in maroon berets hemmed in the precincts of the British rulers. Tommy gunners covered everyone entering Barclay's Bank to cash a check. The Post Office, Government Lands Office, Overseas Airways office jittered as Jewish extremists carried on a "telephone terror," threatening bombings (the blasted walls of the King David Hotel were still vivid in everyone's mind). On Zion Circus the marquee of a cinema twinkled: "They Were Expendable." When London announced last fortnight that illegal immigration of Jewish refugees into Palestine must end, the 1st Infantry Division threw barbed wire round the port area, patrolled its perimeter with tanks and armored cars. Early one morning Tommies and Royal Marines began transferring 1,286 refugees from two small sailing craft (popularly called "floating sewers") where they had sweltered in filth for two weeks. Like Moses, these Jews might glimpse the Promised Land, but they could not enter it. Some hurled sticks, cans, jars of preserves as the British moved them to barbed-wire pens aboard British troopships. At the Henrietta Szold, the soldiers threw smoke bombs to quiet the Jews. The Jews tossed them back. At last the screaming cargoes were embarked. Sympathizers ashore tried to aid them. About a thousand Jews from Haifa defied the British curfew, tried to crash through the barbed wire to the docks. Tommies fired; three Jews were killed, seven more wounded. [Once again, Britain gave up; this time it dumped the responsibility on the U.N.] (December 8, 1947) Last week the United Nations General Assembly after much anxious hesitation, "settled" the 30-year-old Palestine dispute. They voted, 33 to 13, to partition Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish. "This is the day that the Lord hath made!" cried a rabbi in the U.N. delegates' lounge after the vote. "Let us be glad and rejoice therein!" But Arab representatives stalked out of the Assembly chamber, saying they would fight the plan. U.S. Delegate Herschel Johnson, who had steered the partition plan to parliamentary victory, was wary of premature rejoicing. "This thing is just beginning," he said wearily. Until the very moment of public decision at Flushing meadow, no one knew whether U.N. would approve partition. A two-thirds vote among nations voting in the full Assembly was needed to win final approval. But the very fact of U.S.-Russian agreement seemed to free many smaller nations from the necessity of taking a stand. After the vote was announced, the six Arab delegations (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) arose and strode out of the Assembly chamber. Pakistan's delegation soon followed. The U.N. Charter, said an Arab delegate, is dead. "Not of a natural death--it was murdered." added Syria's Faris el Khoury. The U.N. decision, he said, "will establish a Jewish patrol at the door of Asia. The Arabs and the Asiatics will not accept it." All Arab delegations announced that they would boycott the partition plan, have nothing more to do with U.N. discussions of Palestine. In the early morning hours, when news of the U.N. vote reached Tel Aviv, cheering crowds danced the traditional hora. In Jerusalem and Haifa, jubilant thousands paraded the streets waving blue & white Zionist flag. Even British Tommies joined in the fun. The Arabs planned uprisings, an economic blockade, concentrated attacks on outlying Jewish settlements and pinpoint attacks against the long exposed borders of the crazy-quilt Jewish state. The Arabs seemed resigned to the prospect of an armed struggle. They regarded partition in its present form as so outrageous that there was no alternative. (December 15, 1947) Mobs of Jews and Arabs surged and countersurged through Old and New Jerusalem, killing, stoning, stabbing, burning, looting. Arab and Jewish slum-dwellers along the dividing line of Jewish Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa made armed forays into each other's quarters. Gunmen from rooftops covered arsonists while they put dwellings to the torch. Arab gangs waylaid Jewish buses on Palestine's roads. Jerusalem's water supply gave out as firemen fought blazes. Dr. Huessein F. Khalidi, secretary of the Mufti's Arab Higher Executive, then called off the strike, which he said was just a "token of protest" against the U.N. decision. But he could not call a stop to violence. By the end of a bloody week, 62 Jews and 32 Arabs had died of violence in Palestine. More than 200 were wounded. On the Jewish side, part of the underground army Haganah came out into the open to protect Jews from Arab attacks. Jews set up twelve recruiting center in Palestine. Increased immigration (present limit fixed by the British: 1,500 a month) would increase Jewish strength. The British government considered transferring 16,000 Jews to Palestine from Cyprus before Feb. 1, admitting 10,000 Jews a month to Palestine thereafter. U.S. officials in Germany, Austria and Italy began planning the movement of 6,250 Jewish D.P.s a month, beginning in February. The Jewish Agency for Palestine gave priority to young people, able to build or fight. (April 19, 1948) It was war in Palestine last week. The hit-&-run raids, the bombings and the skirmishes were giving way to something bigger. Now there were pitched battles, between thousands of men in organized bands, for definite objectives. A prime objective for both Arabs and Jews: control of Jerusalem. Ever since U.N. voted partition, Arabs have been tightening their grip on the lifeline of Jerusalem's 100,000 Jews--the road to Tel Aviv, which twists from the city through the rocky Judean hills to the coastal plain. The city's Jewish population, which used to buy 80 to 90% of its food from neighboring Arabs, now depends on food convoys from the Jewish settlements along the coast. Cabled TIME Correspondent Eric Gibbs, who watched the battle of the Jerusalem roads last week: "I stood on a high escarpment amid a crowd of Arab soldiers, watching their 105-millimeter Schnieder howitzer lob big shells into Jewish convoys trying to round a perilous bend in the road, two miles away. A Haganah truck or armored car looked like a tiny beetle as it climbed slowly and unsuspectingly towards danger. As the howitzer fired, Arabs waited tensely for the shell to land, bony brown hands clutching at rifles, eyes narrowed to slits. Another instant and a black mushroom of smoke grew silently out of the road. By the time the sound had echoed back, the vehicle was rolling helplessly down the precipice. From the escarpment rose an Arab cheer. Elsewhere, savage raids turned into brutal massacres. Four miles from Kastel, about 100 Jews (two-third Irgun, one-third Stern Gang) swept into the village of Deir Yesin at dawn, blew up its huts with demolition charges. More than 200 Arabs, half of them women & children, died in the slaughter. The rest of the village's 700 dwellers surrendered or fled to caves in the nearby hills. (May 3, 1948) While U.N. talked, the Jews were carving Palestine with a sword, In a whirlwind week they seized Haifa, attacked Jaffa, won Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee and tried to cut the Arab supply road into Jerusalem. For the first time since the Romans leveled Jerusalem 1,800 years ago, a Jewish army ate Passover matzoth and bitter herbs around campfires in the field. Said Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion: "We stand on the eve of the Jewish State...heartened by the victories of our army...We have just begun to buckle on the sword." The Jews' most dazzling military prize of the week was Haifa, the only port where seagoing ships can dock. As British troops prepared last week to withdraw from all the city except the dock area, Jewish soldiers began to filter into the town. Others gathered on the slopes of Mount Carmel. One morning at 1 a.m. they struck. Behind a creeping mortar barrage, the Jews moved into the Arab quarters of the city. Bewildered Arabs gathered for one brief counterattack, then collapsed in leaderless confusion. Within a day, the Jews had taken Haifa. (May 24, 1948) Between one pink dawn and another over the Moabite hills last week came The Day. It brought forth events sufficient to crowd aside the worries of tomorrow. To the Jews of Palestine this day brought a state of their own, first in 1,878 years. To the British it brought the loss of a 10,460-square-mile base in the Mediterranean--and relief from burden they had snatched up with imperial optimism 31 years ago. To the Arabs, it brought a tautening of determination as well as more sober assessing of their chances for victory. That day, 400 Jews gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum under the watchful eyes of Haganah Bren-gunners. The 13 men who would rule the new Jewish state sat down at a long table on a raised dais. Over their heads were white Zionist flags bearing two pale blue stripes and a blue Star of David. The assemblage rose to sing the Zionist anthem Hatikvah--"The ancient longing will be fulfilled, to return to the land...of our fathers..." A stocky man with a halo of electric white hair, dressed in alight blue suit and tie and white shirt, fiddled nervously with his glasses and papers, looked frequently at his watch. On the dot of 4 p.m., David Ben-Gurion, first Prime Minister of the Jewish state, banged the table with his fist and began to read. As he reached the words proclaiming "the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Israel," the audience cheered and wept. In the two hours that remained before sundown, when the Jewish Sabbath would begin, Tel Aviv's jubilant people danced in the streets, paraded with blue-&-white streamers and Star of David flags, prayed in their synagogues, with tears and cheers waved off truckloads of Haganah youths headed for the frontiers. At 21 minutes past midnight, Palestine time, President Truman announced: "The U.S. Government recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new state of Israel." [The Israelis and Arabs agreed to and broke several truces. Between two of them, Stern Gang terrorists murdered the U.N. mediator, Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte. The final set of armistices was hammered out by a new U.N. mediator from the U.S. Ralph Bunche. Israel was by no means secure, but was spared a full-scale war with her Arab neighbors for another 18 years.] </body> </article> </text>