The rebirth of Israel differed completely from the birth of any other new state in the past decade where the people were not cut off from their lands. Premier David Ben Gurion declared today in a special address on the occasion of Israel’s 10th anniversary of independence whose celebration begins Thursday.
The Premier spoke in a flag-bedecked Parliament summoned into special session to mark the observance of a decade of freedom and development. Chief among the visitors who listened to Mr. Ben Gurion’s words was Israel President Itzhak Ben Zvi, whose presence in the building was signified by the flying of the Presidential flag from the mast over the building. Other notables present included Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, Chief Rabbis Isaac Nissim and Isaac Herzog, and Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, veteran American Zionist leader.
Mr. Ben Gurion noted that while the uprooted and scattered Jewish people–a “hopeless minority” among the nations of the world–had survived, other nations who had similarly been uprooted had vanished. “Neither exile nor unparalleled sufferings crushed the Jewish people,” he said. “Their profound spiritual bonds were unbroken, while all of Israel’s neighbors in the Biblical period have disappeared–their languages forgotten, their cultures vanished, their religions no longer in existence.”
“Israel is the only people in the Middle East that was re-rooted, after a lapse of centuries, in the land of its fathers,” he added. “This is unique in human history and is the outcome of the tremendous spiritual forces latent among our people which were revealed in the eternal creative achievements contained in the Book of Books and in Israel’s unflinching refusal to surrender throughout its long wanderings.”
Today, the Premier continued, the establishment of a Jewish village is an everyday event. Jews who plough, sow, build roads, work in factories and mines, sail the seas, pilot aircraft and do every other type of work in town and country are everyday phenomena. Jewish soldiers armed with light and heavy weapons on land, sea and air have in the course of a decade become part of the landscape.
REPLIES TO KHRUSHCHEV’S VIEWS ON JEWS; CITES WORK OF JEWS IN ISRAEL
Referring to the settlement of Jews in Argentina and the Soviet region of Birobidjan, the two other experiments in settlement of Jews on the soil before the establishment of Israel, the Premier said only a few Jews remained in these developments because they were settled “on alien soil and lacked the devotion to the vision of Messianic redemption and the spiritual bond with their ancient homeland.”
In a reference to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Mr. Ben Gurion said that “a great Soviet expert” had expressed the opinion that Birobidjan was a failure because Jews preferred trade and avoided building and agriculture since they did not like teamwork. But, he pointed out, “those (Jews) who came to Israel had also been divorced from labor on the soil for centuries but when they settled here they worked in every branch of the economy and engaged in occupations in which Jews had not worked before.”
Moreover, he went on, the Jewish people in Israel “live and work as a team, maintain economic undertakings on a cooperative basis–to which there is no parallel in the world–and these enterprises–cooperatives and collectives–have been established not by coercion and governmental injunction but in complete liberty and from free choice.”
Mr. Ben Gurion pointed out that the Jewish population which was in Palestine when the State of Israel was proclaimed numbered 650,000 and had accepted 900,000 refugees from 71 different lands while at the same time building industry and agriculture. He reported that the Arab population of 120,000 in 1948 had risen to 214,000, including 30,000 readmitted from abroad to re-join relatives who had not fled during the War of Liberation.
The Premier pledged that the Government of Israel would devote itself to seeking to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East. He urged memorialization of those who had died in battle to make possible the birth of the state. If ever the blood of Jews was not spilled in vain in 2,000 years of Jewish history, he said, it was the blood of the 5,000 young Israelis who died in the War of Liberation.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
