Chapter 8: We have our state
Cyprus detention camps
"In the course of that year, the battle against Jewish immigration turned into open warfare not only against the entire yishuv as such, but also against the refugees themselves. It was as though Ernest Bevin had nothing else whatsoever on his mind except how to keep Jewish refugees out of the Jewish homeland. The fact that we refused to solve this problem for him apparently infuriated him so that he eventually lost control altogether, and I honestly believe that some of the decisions he made regarding Palestine could only have been the result of his intense personal rage against the Jews because they could not and would not accept the judgement of the British foreign secretary as to how or where they should live.
I don’t know (nor really does it matter any more) whether Bevin was a little insane, or just anti Semitic, or both. What I do know is that he insisted on pitting the strength of the British Empire against the will of the Jews to live and that by so doing he not only brought great suffering to people who had already suffered enormously, but also forced upon thousands of British soldiers and sailors a role that must have filled them with horror. I remember staring at some of the young Englishmen who guarded the DP detention camps on Cyprus —when I went there myself in 1947 —and wondering how on earth they managed to reconcile themselves to the fact that not so long ago they were liberating from Nazi camps the very same people whom they now kept penned behind barbed wire on Cyprus only because these people found it impossible to go on living anywhere except Palestine. I looked at those nice young English boys and was filled with pity for them. I couldn’t help but think that they were no less victims of Bevin’s obsession than the men, women and children on whom their guns were now trained night and day."
"I often bumped into people who had attended that meeting in Cyprus and remembered it well. About five years ago, for instance, I was visiting a kibbutz in ‘the Negev when a middle-aged woman came up to me very hesitantly. ‘Excuse me for bothering you,’ she said, ‘butt his is the first opportunity I have had in all these years to thank you.’ ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘I was on Cyprus with a baby in 1947,’ she replied,’ ‘and you saved us. Now I’d like you to meet that “baby”. ’The ‘baby’ was a sturdy, pretty girl of twenty who had just finished her military service and obviously thought I had taken leave of my senses when I gave her a great big kiss in front of everybody —without a word of explanation."
Cunningham
"After Cunningham left Palestine on 14 May 1948 I didn’t expect to hear from him ever again. But one day several months after I became prime minister I got a letter from him. It was written by hand from the country place in England to which he had retired, and its essence was that however great the pressures upon us, Israel should not budge from any of the territories we had taken in the Six Day War, unless and until we were guaranteed secure and defensible borders. I was very touched indeed by his letter."
UNSCOP
"Then, for reasons which will never be understood by me - nor, I suspect, by anyone else - just before UNSCOP was scheduled to leave Palestine, the British chose to demonstrate in the most unmistakable way just how brutally and tyrannically they were dealing with us and with the question of Jewish immigration. Before the shocked eyes of the members of UNSCOP, they forcibly caged and returned to Germany the 4,500 refugees who had come to Palestine aboard the Haganah ship Exodus 1947, and by so doing I think that they actually contributed considerably to UNSCOP's final recommendations. If I live to be a hundred, I shall never erase from my mind the gruesome picture of hundreds of British soldiers in full combat dress, bearing and using clubs, pistols and grenades against the wretched refugees on the Exodus, 400 of whom were pregnant women determined to give birth to their babies in Palestine. Nor will I ever be able to forget the revulsion with which I heard that these people were actually going to be shipped back, like animals in their wire cages, to DP camps in the one country that symbolised the graveyard of European Jewry."
"The voting took place at Lake Success in New York on 29 November. Like everyone else in the yishuv, I was glued to the radio, with pencil and paper, writing down the votes as they came through. Finally, at about midnight our time, the results were announced: thirty-three nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, were in favour of the partition plan; thirteen, including all the Arab states, opposed it; ten, including Great Britain, abstained. I went immediately to the compound of the Jewish Agency building, which was already jammed with people. It was an incredible sight: hundreds of people, British soldiers among them, holding hands, singing and dancing, with truckloads of more people arriving at the compound all the time. I remember walking up to my office alone, unable to share in the general festivity. The Arabs had turned the plan down and talked only of war. The crowd, drunk with happiness, wanted a speech, and I thought it would be wicked to dampen the mood by refusing. So from the balcony of my office, I spoke for a few minutes. But it was not really to the mass of people below me that I talked; it was, once again, to the Arabs.
‘You have fought your battle against us in the United Nations,’ I said. ‘The United Nations —the majority of countries in the world —have had their say. The partition plan is a compromise; not what you wanted, not what we wanted. But let us now live in friendship and peace together.’ That speech was hardly the solution for our situation. Arab riots broke out all over Palestine on the very next day (seven Jews were killed in an Arab ambush on a bus) and on 2 December an Arab mob set the Jewish commercial centre in Jerusalem on fire, while British police stood by, interfering only when the Haganah tried to take action."
Fundraising for the Haganah
"They listened and they wept and they pledged money in amounts that no community had ever given before. I stayed in the United States for as long as I could bear to be away from home —for about six weeks —and the Jews all over the country listened, wept and gave money —and when they had to, took loans from banks in order to cover their pledges. By the time I came back to Palestine in March, I had raised fifty million dollars, which was turned over at once for the Haganah’s secret purchase of arms in Europe. But I never deceived myself— not even when upon my return Ben-Gurion said to me ‘someday when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible’. I always knew that these dollars were given not to me, but to Israel."
King Abdullah
"Assassination is an endemic disease in the Arab world, and one of the first lessons that most Arab rulers learn in the connection is between secrecy and longevity. Abdullah's murder made a lasting impression on all subsequent Arab leaders, and I remember that Nasser once said to an intermediary whom we despatched to Cairo: 'If Ben-Gurion came to Egypt to talk to me, he would return home as a conquering hero. But if I went to him, I would be shot when I came back.' And I am afraid that is still the situation."
"The first time I met Abdullah was early in November He had agreed to meet me...He soon made the heart of the matter clear: he would not join in any Arab attack on us. He would always remain our friend, he said, and, like us, he wanted peace more than anything else"
"Throughout January and February, we maintained contact with Abdullah, as a rule through the good offices of a mutual friend, through whom I was able to send direct messages to the king. As the weeks passed, my messages became more worried. The air was thick with conjecture, and there were reports that, despite his promise to me, Abdullah was about to join the Arab League. ‘Wasthis indeed so?’ I asked. The reply from Amman was prompt and negative. King Abdullah was astonished and hurt by my question. He asked me to remember three things: that he was a Bedouin and therefore a man of honour; that he was a king and therefore doubly an honourable man; and finally, that he would never break a promise made to a woman. So there could not possibly be any justification for my concern."
"This time, however, Abdullah refused to come to Naharayim. It was too dangerous, he told us through his emissary. If I wanted to see him, I would have to come to Amman, and the risk would have to be entirely mine. He could not be expected, he informed us, to alert the Legion to the fact that he awaited Jewish guests from Palestine, and he would take no responsibility for anything that might happen to us en route."
"Then Abdullah entered the room. He was very pale and seemed under great strain. Ezra interpreted for us and we talked for about an hour. I started the conversation by coming to the point at once. ‘Have you broken your promise to me, after all?’ I asked him. He didn’t answer my question directly. Instead he said: ‘When I made that promise, I thought I was in control of my own destiny and could do what I thought right. But since then I have learned otherwise.’ Then he went on to say that before he had been alone, but now, ‘I am one of five,’ the other four, we gathered, being Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Still, he thought war could be averted.
‘Why are you in such a hurry to proclaim your state?’ he asked me. ‘What is the rush? You are so impatient!’ I told him that I didn’t think that a people who had waited 2,000 years should be described as being ‘in a hurry’, and he seemed to accept that.
‘Don’t you understand,’ I said, ‘that we are your only allies in this region? The others are all your enemies.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know that. But what can I do? It is not up to me.’ So then I said to him: ‘You must know that if war is forced upon us, we will fight and we will win.’ He sighed and again said ‘Yes. I know that. It is your duty to fight. But why don’t you wait a few years? Drop your demands for free immigration. I will take over the whole country and you will be represented in my parliament. I will treat you very well and there will be no war.’
I tried to explain to him that his plan was impossible. ‘You know all that we have done and how hard we have worked,’ I said. ‘Do you think we did all that just to be represented in a foreign parliament? You know what we want and to what we aspire. If you can offer us nothing more than you have just done, then there will be a war and we will win it. But perhaps we can meet again —after the war and after there is a Jewish state.’
‘You place much too much reliance on your tanks,’ Danin said. ‘You have no real friends in the Arab world, and we will smash your tanks as the Maginot Line was smashed.’ They were very brave words, particularly since Danin knew exactly what the state of our armour was. But Abdullah looked even graver and said again that he knew that we had to do our duty. He also added, unhappily I thought, that events would just have to run their course. All of us would know eventually what fate had in store for us."
"But I never saw Abdullah again, though after the War of Independence there were prolonged negotiations with him. Later I was told that he said about me: ‘If any one person was responsible for the war, it was she, because she was too proud to accept the offer I made her.’ I must say that when I think of what would have befallen us as a ‘protected’ minority in the kingdom of an Arab ruler who was himself murdered by Arabs within just over two years, I can’t bring myself to regret the fact that I disappointed Abdullah so much that night. But I wish that he had been brave enough to stay out of the war. It would have been so much better for him —and for us —if he had been a little prouder."
Declaration of independence
"On the morning of 14 May, I participated in a meeting of the National Council at which we were to decide on the name of the state and on the final formulation of the declaration. The name was less of a problem than the declaration because there was a last-minute argument about the inclusion of a reference to God. Actually the issue had been brought up the day before. The very last sentence, as finally submitted to the small sub-committee charged with producing the final version of the proclamation, began with the words: ‘With trust in the Rock of Israel, we set our hands in witness to this Proclamation.. .‘ Ben-Gurion had hoped that the phrase ‘Rock of Israel’ was sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy those Jews for whom it was inconceivable that the document which established the Jewish state should not contain any reference to God —as well as those who were certain to object strenuously to even the least hint of clericalism in the proclamation.
But the compromise was not so easily accepted. The spokesman of the religious parties, Rabbi Fishman-Maimon, demanded that the reference to God be unequivocal and said that he would only approve of the ‘Rock of Israel’ if the words ‘and its Redeemer’ were added, while Aaron Zisling of the left wing of the Labour Party was just as determined in the opposite direction. ‘I cannot sign a document referring in any way to a God in whom I do not believe,’ he said. It took Ben Gurion most of the morning to persuade Maimon and Zisling that the meaning of the ‘Rock of Israel’ was actually twofold: while it signified ‘God’ for a great many Jews, perhaps for most, it could also be considered as a symbolic and secular reference to the ‘strengthof the Jewish people’. In the end, Maimon agreed that the word ‘Redeemer’ should be left out of the text, though, funnily enough, the first English-language translation of the proclamation, released for publication abroad that day, contained no reference at all to the ‘Rock of Israel’, since the military censor had struck out the entire last paragraph as a security precaution, because it mentioned the time and place of the ceremony."
"Then, as though a signal had been given, we rose to our feet, crying and clapping, while Ben-Gurion, his voice breaking for the only time, read:
‘The State of Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and the in- gathering of exiles.’
This was the very heart of the proclamation, the reason for the state and the point of it all. I remember sobbing out aloud when I heard those words spoken in that hot, packed little hail. But Ben-Gurion just rapped his gavel again for order and went on reading:
‘Even amidst the violent attacks launched against us for months past, we call upon the sons of the Arab people dwelling in Israel to keep the peace and to play their part in building the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent.’
And:
‘We extend the hand of peace and good neighbourliness to all the states around us and to their peoples, and we call upon them to cooperate in mutual helpfulness with the independent Jewish nation in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.’"
Arab states opposition to Israel
"As a matter of fact, it has never ceased to astonish me that the Arab states have been so eager to go to war against us. Almost from the very beginning of Zionist settlement until today, they have been consumed by hatred for us. The only possible explanation - and it is a ridiculous one - is that they simply cannot bear our presence or forgive us for existing, and I find it hard to believe that the leaders of all the Arab states are and always have been so hopelessly primitive in their thinking.
On the other hand, what have we ever done to threaten the Arab states? True, we have not stood in line to return territory we won in wars they started, but territory, after all, has never ever been what Arab aggression is all about - and in 1948 it was certainly not a need for more land that drove the Egyptians northwards in the hope of reaching and destroying Tel Aviv and Jewish Jerusalem. So what was it? An overpowering irrational urge to eliminate us physically? Fear of the progress we might introduce in the Middle East? A distaste for Western civilisation? Who knows? Whatever it was, it has lasted - but then so have we - and the solution will probably not be found for many years, though I have no doubt at all that the time will come when the Arab states will accept us - as we and for what we are.
In a nutshell, peace is - and always has been - dependant entirely upon only one thing: the Arab leaders must acquiesce to our being here."