avnery // on independence
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Uri Avnery
May 14, 2016
A Document with a Mission
WHEN DAVID BEN-GURION read out Israel's declaration of independence
(officially: "Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel") on
May 14, 1948, I was in Kibbutz Hulda.
My company of the (still unnamed) Israeli army was ordered to make a night
attack on the Arab village of al-Kubab, near the town of Ramleh. It was
expected to be a hard fight, and I was busy checking my equipment and
cleaning my
(Czech) rifle, when somebody said that Ben-Gurion was making a speech which
was being broadcast on the Kibbutz dining-room radio.
I was not really interested. We were all convinced that what some
politicians in Tel Aviv might be babbling was quite immaterial to our
future. Whether our state would survive or not would be decided on the
battlefield. The regular armies of the neighboring Arab states were about to
enter the war, there would be bloody battles, and the outcome would decide
our lives. Literally.
However, there was one detail which aroused our curiosity:
What would our new state be called? There were some rumors in the air. We
wanted to know.
So I betook myself to the kibbutz dining room - which we soldiers were not
allowed to enter on ordinary days - and sure enough, I could hear the very
peculiar high-pitched voice of Ben-Gurion reading the document. When he came
to the passage "(we) hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in
Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel", I left.
I remember that outside the hall I met the brother of a girl-friend, who was
scheduled to attack another village that very night. We exchanged a few
words. I never saw him again. He was killed.
ALL THIS crossed my mind when I was called upon three days ago, on the eve
of "Independence Day", to take part in a ceremony in the very hall where the
original text had been read out by Ben-Gurion. I was one of the persons
chosen to read it out again on the 68th anniversary.
For this occasion I read the entire text of the declaration for the first
time. I was not impressed.
The original version was first drafted by some officials, then re-written by
Moshe Sharett (who became Foreign Minister on that day). He was a stickler
for the Hebrew language, so the text is linguistically impeccable.
Ben-Gurion was not satisfied with the text, so he took it and rewrote it
completely. It bears all the hallmarks of his unmistakable style. Also, he
had the Chutzpah to put his signature above all the others, which appear in
alphabetical order.
The writers of the declaration had obviously read the American Declaration
of Independence before drafting their own. They copied the general outline.
It is not written in the edifying style of an historical document, but as a
document with a mission: to convince the nations of the world to recognize
our state.
THE INTRODUCTION is a reiteration of Zionist slogans. It purports to set out
the historical facts, and very dubious facts they are.
For example, it starts with the words "Eretz Israel was the birthplace of
the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity
was shaped."
Well, not quite. I was taught at school that God promised Abraham the land
while still in Mesopotamia. The 10 Commandments were given to us by God
personally on Mount Sinai, which is in Egypt. The more important of the two
Talmuds was written in Babylon. True, the Hebrew Bible was composed in the
country, but most of the religious texts of Judaism were written in "exile".
"Jews strove in every successive generation to reestablish themselves in
their ancient homeland." Nonsense. They most certainly did not. For example,
when the Jews were expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492, the vast majority
of them went to the countries of the Muslim world, with none but a handful
settling in Palestine.
Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish nation in Palestine, was founded
only at the end of the 19th century, when anti-Semitism became a powerful
political force all over Europe, and the founders foresaw the calamities to
come.
THE DECLARATION emphasized, of course, recent history: "On the 29th of
November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution
calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel."
That is a major falsification. The UN resolution called for the
establishment of TWO states: an Arab and a Jewish one (and a separate zone
of Jerusalem). Omitting the call for an Arab state changes the entire
character of the resolution.
This was, of course, intentional. Ben-Gurion was already in secret contact
with King Abdullah of Jordan, who wanted to annex the West Bank to his
Transjordan kingdom. Ben-Gurion approved.
Ben-Gurion saw it as a major aim to eliminate any trace of a separate Arab
Palestinian nation. The annexation of the West Bank by King Abdullah was
tacitly approved - even before the first Jordanian soldier entered the
country, ostensibly to save the Arabs from the Jewish State.
HERE IS the place to tackle these two fateful words:
"Jewish State".
Before the creation of Israel, when speaking about our future state, nearly
all of us here used the words "Hebrew State". This is what we shouted in
innumerable street demonstrations, this is what was written in the
newspapers and demanded in political speeches.
This was not an ideological decision. True, there was a tiny group of young
writers and artists, nicknamed "Canaanites", which was proclaiming the birth
of a new "Hebrew Nation" and wanted nothing to do with the Jews in the
Diaspora. Some other groups, including one founded by me, expressed similar
ideas without reaching such absurd conclusions.
But in colloquial speech, too, people made a clear distinction between
"Hebrew' (things in the country, like Hebrew agriculture, Hebrew defense
forces etc.) and "Jewish" (like Jewish religion, Jewish tradition and such).
So, why "Jewish State"? Quite simple: for the British administration, the
population of Palestine consisted of Jews and Arabs. The UN partition plan
spoke about a Jewish and an Arab state. The "Declaration of Independence"
took great pains to emphasize that we were only fulfilling the UN decision.
Hence: "We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state, to be known
as the State of Israel".
(Note: "A" Jewish state, not "the" Jewish state.)
These innocent words have been quoted a million times to justify the
contention that Israel is a "Jewish" state, in which Jews have special
rights and privileges. This is accepted today without question.
However, it is generally overlooked that in one of the paragraphs, while
"extending our hand to all neighboring states" it asks - in the Hebrew
original - for cooperation with "the sovereign Hebrew people". This is
flagrantly falsified in the official translation into "the sovereign Jewish
people".
In the main sentence in the Hebrew original, the signers identify themselves
as ".representatives of the Hebrew community in Eretz Israel." The official
translation says "the Jewish community in Eretz Israel".
One has to thank Ben-Gurion for the fact that God does not appear in the
document at all. After a strenuous fight with the then small religious
Zionist faction, the only religious allusion is to "the Rock of Israel",
which is one of the appellations of God, but which can also be understood
differently.
ONE GLARING omission is the stark fact that the declaration does not make
one mention of the borders of the new state.
The UN partition plan drew very clear borders. In the course of the 1948
war, our side conquered considerably more territory. In the end the
so-called Green Line was established.
The Declaration mentions no borders, and up to now Israel remains the only
state in the world which has no official borders.
In this, as in almost all other matters, Ben-Gurion laid down the track
along which Israel has been moving to this very day.
