Word: zionists
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...have mixed feelings about Israel's celebration of its 50 years of statehood [WORLD, May 11]. The founding of the nation signified a birth to Jews but a burial to the Palestinians. Over time, Zionist terrorism was replaced by Palestinian terrorism, and war and grief were never far away. The perpetual threat of conflict forced increases in Israeli defense budgets and made enormous economic support by the U.S. necessary. Against all odds, foreign and internal, the Israelis have managed to build and uphold the most democratic country in the Middle East. However, Israeli society is more torn than ever before...
...conflict is rooted in an old and unresolved question of national identity: Is Israel a Jewish state, with the emphasis on Jewish, or is it a state for the Jews, a regular, modern, democratic place where Jews are in the majority? Israel's Zionist founders were almost exclusively secular--in many respects, antireligious--and they saw Judaism principally as a nationality. But in deference to tradition, and as a way of securing the support of the Orthodox minority, they made certain concessions to religion: restricting commerce on the Jewish Sabbath, for instance, and leaving such matters as marriage and burial...
After World War I he returned to Palestine, now governed by Britain and--after 1920--designated by the League of Nations as a "National Home" for the Jewish people. He rose to prominence in the growing Zionist-socialist movement. The increasing anti-Semitism in Europe during the 1920s and '30s sent waves of Jewish immigrants into the country. Furious Arab leaders launched a rebellion against the British and a holy war on the Jews. Much earlier than others, Ben-Gurion recognized the depth and rationale of Arab objection to Zionism: he was aware of the tragic nature of a clash...
...fighting the Nazis, but at the same time authorized an underground agency to ship Jewish refugees into the country. As the British were intercepting, deporting and locking away these survivors of the Nazi inferno in barbed-wired detention camps, world opinion grew more and more sympathetic to the Zionist prescription for the plight of the Jews. This strategy helped bring about the favorable atmosphere that led to the 1947 U.N. resolution, partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state...
...Gurion's iron-will leadership during the fateful 1 1/2 years of that touch-and-go war turned him from "first among equals" in the Zionist leadership into a modern-day King David. The crux of his leadership was a lifelong, partly successful struggle to transplant a tradition of binding majority rule in a painfully divided Jewish society that for thousands of years had not experienced any form of self-rule, not even a central spiritual authority. In the early years of the state, many Israelis saw him as a combination of Moses, George Washington, Garibaldi and God Almighty...