The Jewish Story: 1949 Boundary Issues - part I

daring to set boundaries says brené Brown is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others well I'm not afraid to this point I've got a fair bit of self-love and I like to push boundaries because I'm Roth Mike Feuer and this is the Jewish story episode 5 1949 boundary issues the ongoing struggle for statehood so when I was growing up my dad used to say to me all the time be careful what you wish for Mike because you might just get it and I know it may be a little bit scary to contemplate or at least sound somewhat cynical but seeing as so many people today Jew and non-jew alike are starting to cast doubtful glances our way here in the state of Israel we have to consider the question is this what we wished for and before I get started cuz frankly it's a conversation that will follow us through much of season 3 I want to put my cards on the table we've come a long way in the Jewish story 2500 years in fact and there's no period we've discussed so far that I would want to live in more than the present and it's actually because I feel that way and because I actually believe the best is yet to come for I'm Israel and the world that I need to tell a challenging story because redemption looks very neat in the abstract and I'm sure that in the depths of exile the return to being a sovereign people in our land look like the answer to all our problems but I'm confident you've begun to sense at this point of season 3 that the Jewish story is not exempt from the fact that every solution comes with its own host of challenges now Zionism in my eyes is the movement for Jewish National embodiment and the State of Israel its most concrete product and as such its subject to the problem of embodiment in both its primary manifestations we've spoken about it before the first issue with all embodied phenomena is the edge it may sound obvious but anything embodied in the real world has edges and that means on some level it's absurd you know this is an example I've given you before that when my 11 year old daughter first began to push back against the rules of modesty in my house which I try to hold at the elbow in the knee and she held her shirt there and she pulled it down over the elbows and she said really Ava that's okay and pulled it back and said but this isn't that's okay this isn't I looked at her and I laughed and I said you've just uncovered one of the fundamental problems that we all have because a value is nothing but worthless abstraction until you embody it in the world but once you do someone's always going to be able to challenge it about the absurdity of where is the edge I mean if that doesn't make sense you just think of a municipal boundary the city of Jerusalem ends here why I can stand on one side the other what's fundamentally different and the answer is if it's going to be a city it has to have edge or a country and that very edge is what forces us to fight to make our value real in the world because I'm not willing to point and say crossing this line is a violation of whatever of a value or a border and I question whether the issue at hand is really a value for me and whether the country is actually real and as you're probably beginning to sense we as a people and a nation state have major boundary issues the second manifestation of the problem of embodiment is course life is messy because only philosophical abstractions are perfect anything organic and growing is bound to make a mess and in fact it's our imperfections that allow us to grow and evolve but we can only do so if we're able to hold the tension between accepting ourselves for what we are while simultaneously committing to be what we can be there are lots of people out there who want perfect or nothing and so when they look at the state be it now or back in 1949 they chose nothing because it wasn't perfect others are willing to settle for what they have now and they'll never see Redemption this is good enough never got us anywhere but an organic embodied people that wants to not only survive but thrive has to plow through the messiness of life toward that vision that were meant to birth in the world in this episode I want to begin a discussion of the boundary issues that mom Israel has now really there are three ways that we can hold that boundary one is international legitimacy and we'll touch today a little bit on the United Nations in the cold war and international context of the new state another one is national cohesion the formation of a character that is truly Israeli but you see this person they're Israeli that one is not that's one of the defining characteristics of a nation and the third one will just be the raw fact that if you're a nation-state you gotta have borders you might remember that in the discussions leading up to the Declaration of Independence back there at the end of season two Ben Gurion refused actually to define the borders of the state that he was about to declare and he did it by pointing out that the UN which did nothing to implement the partition plan of resolution 181 and the Arabs who declared war on Israel had basically torn up any map to which Israel had committed he said we don't know what will happen if the UN stands its ground we won't fight the UN but if the UN doesn't act in the Arabs waged war against us and we fought them and we then take the Western Galilee in both sides of the corridor to Jerusalem all this will become part of the state if we have sufficient force why commit ourselves and so ben-gurion set his new state on a path to establishing borders through the fortunes of war and not through a sense of international legitimacy math going to have a lot of consequences in the episodes ahead one wonders how he'd feel to know 71 years later that the pattern still holds true because as we're going to begin to discuss the State of Israel has boundary issues you know I remember when at the height of the Second Intifada also known as the Asda War the US government sent yet another special envoy to the Middle East in hopes of bringing about peace it might have been George Mitchell I can't exactly remember who and I was sitting reading about it in a Jerusalem Post newspaper and I saw that there was a cartoon along with it it showed Mitchell a stack of papers in his hands trooping with undue optimism toward the Middle East and about this step in a big pile of a dog poo and that's because there's a long history to the hopes that a foreign negotiator could somehow broker peace here in the Middle East it was always a healthy dose of the colonial attitude that we in the region could never hope to get it right without some American or European to hold our hands or spank us when we wouldn't obey and really that history began before the state was fully board already on the 20th of May in 1948 less than a week after the outbreak of Israel's war independence and the declaration of independence there was a UN resolution which appointed count folke Bernadotte United Nations mediator in Palestine now you have to remember in 1948 the UN itself is a relatively new body and it's looking to establish itself as an alternative to war and international power politics and frankly has already succeeded in giving the sample of legitimacy because the United Nations means that anyone who is a nation is legitimate in the world and anyone who's not part of the club is not so there's a feeling that it was UN resolution 181 that had actually created the State of Israel now that was a feeling that the Arabs might have shared in the sense that well one resolution can create another one could destroy but it was a feeling that Israel rejected it's not just the whole history of the relationship between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel don't forget that the partition plan and the war of independence were preceded by more than a decade of Jewish struggle against foreign rule in the land and whether it was the British or the United Nations Security Council we weren't interested in repeating that folly so Bernadotte was actually a Swedish diplomat originally he'd made his name negotiating the release of Allied prisoners from German concentration camps including by the way several hundred Jews from Tracy and Scott and he'd been chosen right after World War two before the outbreak of the war by the newly formed United Nations Security Council to be a mediator in the Arab Jewish conflict that everyone saw on the horizon and he was asked to dedicate himself to a new model of pose colonial international politics and with net dedication he couldn't possibly know that he'd pay with his life and already during the first truce in June of 1948 Bernadotte identified the barriers to peace and they haven't really changed since number one he said that the Arab world's rejection of the existence of a Jewish state was a major barrier to solving the conflicts whatever its borders would be number two he said that what he called Israel's new philosophy based on its increasing military strength of ignoring the UN sanction bounders in conquering whatever additional territory it could I would point out to him that it's consistent with the entire Zionist pattern of you know redeeming the land of Israel number three was the Arab refugee problem which already in June of 1948 he saw as a critical issue in the time ahead now that first truce as we know proved to be nothing more than a chance for both sides to catch their breath and fighting resumed and a few months later another truce came about and this time count Bernadotte brought a comprehensive proposal to both sides of the battle he ditched basically resolution 181 that partition plan we spoken about and rather recommended that the final boundaries should reflect the military a letís on the ground the Galilee should go to the newborn State of Israel and the Negev would be awarded to Arab Palestine but contrary to the partition plan this Palestine was no longer to be an independent state it would be annexed to Transjordan along with the mountains of Judea and Samaria that's the West Bank that the Jordanians had seized right at the outset of the war and bernadotte's plan calls the repatriation of all refugees in the internationalization of Jerusalem finally in recognition of the bad blood that existed between the warring parties he recommended that a Palestine conciliation commission be established to oversee and carry out any UN plan it sounds like a lot I know but documents that were unearthed much later show that the Israeli government the provisional government at that point never intended to accept the plan they were unwilling to sacrifice at the peace table what they've won on the battlefield nevertheless they may show of considering it it's not so easy just shrug off the institutions of international diplomacy meanwhile the radical elements of the former underground had labeled the UN mediator as an agent of Britain's ongoing colonial aspirations and as overly sympathetic to the Arab cause and finally as a deadly threat to the survival of the new nation and we know that wouldn't end well and that's why on Friday September 17th bernadotte's motorcade was ambushed by a four-man team of latvia assassins as it drove through jerusalem and burn enough murder is actually a complex story in its own right maybe someday I'll get a chance to tell it but for now I just want you to know that his death didn't stop the war or halt the peace because he was replaced by his assistant American Ralph Bunche who in his wisdom shifted away from the idea of a comprehensive peace plan to negotiating separate armistice agreements between Israel and the so-called confrontation States that's Egypt Lebanon Jordan and Syria all the borders around the new state remember an armistice is not a peace it's basically a glorified ceasefire and that's why the lines the so-called 1948 borders of Israel on borders at all their ceasefire lines they're basically where we managed to fight to and they managed to fight to and where we all ground to a halt the so-called green line that separates the West Bank Judea and Samaria from the rest of the State of Israel is green because that's the marker they used to draw it on the Armistice map even though bernadotte's vision for a peace plan didn't succeed nevertheless it didn't disappear because remember one of the ways in which any state then and now gains its boundaries it's through international legitimacy and so only a few months after his assassination the United Nations voted on UN resolution 194 they haven't come so far from 181 I guess it consists of 15 articles and we're not going to go through it all because most of them focus on the sort of substance and process of that Palestine conciliation commission that he recommended in which indeed created the Commission actually eventually convened the luzon conference from April through September 1949 in Lausanne Switzerland right it was a the first in many attempts failed attempts to pursue peace through international diplomacy there's no need to go into all the details of luzon but a couple of critical issues did come out of resolution 194 and the process that it birthed first was the codification of an international claim to Jerusalem one of the Articles resolves that in view of its association with three world religions the Jerusalem area should be accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control now I have to say at this point in the Jewish story the idea that the nations of the world had any claim to Jerusalem much less that I was going to trust them I in the figurative of course to be impartial protectors of the so-called three religions just kind of sticks in my throat and apparently Prime Minister David ben-gurion felt exactly the same way because his response to this once again international claim to Jerusalem was simple and direct soon after lose an peace conference broke up in failure he just moved all the Israeli government offices from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and when voices some from within his own party protesters the new state couldn't afford to alienate the whole world by rejecting a decision that had been taken by a majority of the General Assembly of the UN this is what he replied in his Knesset speech as you know the General Assembly of the United Nations has by a large majority decided to place Jerusalem under an international regime as a separate entity it is to be hoped that the General Assembly will in the course of time amend the error which is majority has made and will make no attempt to impose a regime on the holy city against the will of its people in the stress of war when Jerusalem was under siege we were compelled to establish the seat of government in hoc area at Tel Aviv but for the State of Israel there has always been and always will be one capital only Jerusalem the eternal thus it was 3000 years ago and thus it will be we believe until the end of time so the other fundamental concept that it's worth mentioning from resolution 191 is the refugee issue it resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return now the Arab states showed no interest in absorbing the hundreds of thousands of their brothers who'd fled and were driven out during the war unlike as we detailed in the last couple episodes what Israel did with the refugees from Europe and the Arab lands but let's be clear they also had no interest in creating a state of Palestine for them either and that obvious from the nature of the negotiations that took place at the loosen conference I mean Egypt was demanding that Israel cede the Negev to them to them not to create a separate state in fact the only real attempt at a compromise was around the Gaza Strip which even in 1949 was filled with refugees and political hot potato that no one wanted Egypt was unwilling to annex the strip and its inhabitants explicitly stating that they were uninterested in creating a separate political entity between them in the new State of Israel it was actually ben-gurion who proposed absorbing the strip and it's refugees into Israel an idea which eventually collapsed and sounds quite interesting in the light of everything that's happening today but add to that Jordan's eventual annexation of the West Bank and the extension of citizenship to the populace and you can see a very important point that from luzon on all the way through the aftermath of 1967 war the goal of the Arab states was to expand their own territory not to create a state called Palestine that was a tactic that they would come up with much later but nevertheless politics aside there are still hundreds of thousands of refugees that Israel wouldn't accept back and the Arabs refused to absorb and so Unruh was born the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the near another mouthful just call it unruhe it was established in December of 1949 right after the breakup of Luzon conference and Unruh actually the only UN agency which is dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict it exists separate from what's called the UN High Commission on refugees because the UN High Commission has a specific mandate to aid refugees by integration into their country of residence resettlement in a third country or array paid through Asian when possible under on the other hand provides relief and social services in place not only that but it allows refugee status to be inherited by some descendants as opposed to being lost in the case of UN High Commission of refugees I don't want to get into the controversy over Unruh right now if you've been following the news during the Trump administration it's taken some serious blows but it's symptomatic of the take away we need to have from Luzon conference and that is the setting of a pattern of zero consequence warfare it's an idea that dominated thinking about the region ever since basically the Arab world could wage a war of aggression lose and then insists that Israel returned to status quo ante without any consequences and the major victims of that of course were the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were frozen in place you know in a speech before the Knesset actually during the Luzon conference Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett warned against the consequences to the international community of accepting this kind of thinking he said why indeed to the Arab states be considered entitled to territorial compensation whoever wittingly or unwittingly encourages the Arab states to believe that they may succeed in squeezing concessions from Israel and getting by political pressure what they failed the game by a war of aggression will not be serving the cause of peace in the Middle East that's a headline that could have been printed yesterday that being said it's also important to recognize how Israel hardened its stance in the process of luzon there gonna be a number of other efforts at peace public private domestic international that we made all through the 1950s and every single one of them will fail and each historian blames who they will for that failure but all of them recognize that Israel was unwilling at this point to compromise on any territorial or demographic game it had made in the 1948 war as I said why lose the peace if you feel you won the war so you add that the inflexible position that the Arab states were largely unwilling to accept the Jewish state in their midst no matter what it's boarded and throw in the instability generated by the refugee issue will see that Israel may have won the battle for independence but the war is far from over so we touched in the last segment about the failure of un-led diplomacy in the Middle East and I'm sure it bruised some egos but the breakup of luzon conference and the ongoing instability in the Middle East didn't threaten the existence of the UN the Western powers however saw things otherwise because the UN wasn't the only new global reality that was born out of wolf work - on March 12 1947 u.s. President Harry Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress and in an 18 minute speech laid out what became known as the Truman Doctrine I believe it must be the policy of the United States he said to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability in orderly political processes it sounds great in fact only a year later the US Congress approved what's called the Marshall Plan that was the American initiative that devoted 12 billion dollars to the reconstruction of Western Europe but the fact that I said Western Europe should tip off to you what this was really about the Soviet Union was offered but they refused any of this assistance they even blocked many of the newly so-called Eastern Bloc countries from leaving the American aide that's because the Truman Doctrine was the opening shot in the Cold War and the world was quickly beginning to choose sides or to be placed on one and the Middle East was no exception if the content between is only Arab States couldn't be resolved through an international peace treaty then the Western powers felt it needed to be managed through Cold War politics and so in 1950 the United States the United Kingdom and France issued what's known as the tripartite declaration which was their commitment to guarantee the territorial status quo that had been determined by the 1949 arab-israeli armistice agreements and this is how the ceasefire lines of 1948 became sacred the failure of the international diplomacy of the United Nations didn't stop the reality of Cold War power politics from solidifying the situation in the Middle East because the Western powers were looking to maintain stability above all and of course the free flow of oil out of Middle East and perhaps if possible to convince Arabs and Israelis to make common cause with the West against the Soviet Union and if not at least prevent any part of the Middle East from being taken by force and that last piece the fear of force was what led to setting up what was known as the Near East Arms Coordinating Committee in 1942 here there's a whole story of arms in the Middle East we could tell Albert Einstein once said one has to realize that the powerful industrial groups concerned in the manufacture of arms are doing their best in all countries to prevent the peaceful settlement of international disputes it may sound a bit cynical but you have to take his words seriously I mean can you really believe that the major powers of the world are a wholeheartedly dedicated to peace in the Middle East when they're making so much money off of selling arms to both sides and that's without even going into the domestic arms industry nevertheless the control of arms is one way to control a conflict or at least manage it if not solve it the u.s. at the time was selling almost no arms in Middle East it was Britain in France that owned the market and they had considerable competition between them both an economic and political fronts in many ways this was just a new form of colonialism the client state replaced the colony and each would periodically withhold arms from their rivals within the Arab in Israeli conflict mostly when someone took action that threatened either British or French regional interests and this branch of that tripartite agreement even had a clause that stressed that the three powers would sell arms only with an assurance that the purchasing nations could not use them for acts of aggression against other nations although what exactly they were gonna use them for I'm not sure meanwhile at least in the first few years of the 1950s this chokehold on the arms flow helped to keep the conflict from erupting into full-scale war that'll hold until the confluence of Israeli security needs and European colonial interests come together in the Sinai War of 56 but the struggle between is only Arab States is one of the most malleable conflicts in history racial religious territorial colonial post-colonial Cold War you name it it's basically a doppelganger it just takes on whatever form is readily available and I think I'm gonna push off the conversation about full conversation at least about infiltration till next episode because it's gonna have the most impact going forward in the 1950s but for now let's just end with a word about economic war the Arab League was formed in 1944 and one of its foundational purposes was to frustrate further Jewish economic development in Palestine by means of a boycott against Zionist produce in resolution 16 only prohibited the purchase of Zionist goods less this lead to the realization of Zionist political aims resolution 68 actually said that propaganda should be carried out to make the boycott of Zionist goods a Creed of the Arab nations so that each Arab might preach it enthusiastically to all with the end of the 1948 war and the signing of those armistice agreements and there's solidification x' through the Cold War politics of the tripartite agreements the chosen battlefield of the Arab states became economic and a central boycott office was established in Damascus with branch offices in the other Arab states economic warfare officially replaced military confrontation though like I said we'll talk about border infiltration in an episode to come now this wasn't simply economic cold war where countries were either on the Arab side or on the Israeli side a blacklist was created for individual companies that did business in Israel and considering the size of the Arab purchasing block versus the Israeli one it meant that many voluntarily complied with this blackmail I remember growing up and we would come to Israel you couldn't get Pepsi only coke it wasn't until the Madrid peace conference of 1992 that Pepsi entered the market here because of the boycott and beyond black listening the Arab states surrounding Israel cut off all land routes connecting the countries including severing the pipeline between Iraqi oil fields and the hyper refinery import they'd been built by the British furthermore during the interwar period and world war ii Israel's economy had begun to thrive driven largely by its historic role as a hub transportation and trade and travel between East and West but in 1948 Israel became the only non island nation in the entire world that could be reached only by air sea the Arab states closed their ports in air field to Israeli carriers and third party carriers transporting critical goods like oil for Israel were kept out as well the Straits of Tiran which gave the new Israeli city of a lot at its southern extremity access to the Red Sea and therefore the whole world was completely blockaded to Israeli shivering until 1956 choking the new port city and serving as a primary trigger to the Wars of 56 and 67 the surrounding Arab states even banned holders of Israeli passport or visa stamps from entering their nations Israel seemed to be cut off now I know from the perspective of today's start-up nation whose economy rivals any ones in the world certainly in the region we might be attempted to see the boycott as no big deal or even as a case of the Arab nations coming up their nose to spite their face I mean who really lost out it's clearly been a failure either way but nobody knew this in 1948 and when you add the boycott to the picture that I painted in the last two episodes about the austerity measures and the mass emigration you can imagine that the economic outlook in Israel was downright grim it really seemed to be as author Barbara Tuchman called it the land of unlimited impossibilities and we haven't even touched on the most painful challenge which at pace Israel in 1949 was a strategic nightmare as ben-gurion said our border is the worst conceivable extremely long and meandering a land border lacking any natural defenses if you look at the map or I should say the armistice lines it was surrounded by hostile states all of the major cities were with an artillery range and not not only that the country had a 10-mile waistline between the Tonja and the West Bank which meant that one successful armored thrust could cut it in half but that's not all there's a major issue that we have to discuss and I want to start the discussion now but I'll leave it's deeper analysis for another episode because the sudden increase in land area which was emptied of its Arab inhabitants in 1948 was followed by a massive demobilization of the IDF forces at the end of the war they had to do it in order to try to save the staggering economy and what that produce was large parts of this new frontier completely undefended not just undefended unpopulated and that meant the infiltration or he sustained a newt as it's called in hebrew by the Arab refugees began even before the war had ended Israel was fighting to maintain sovereignty over the lancet conquered from day zero in essence in the eyes of many generals and politicians the war of independence never ended it just shifted tactics from classic confrontation to infiltration now the Lebanese and Syrian borders up in the North were relatively straightforward and therefore easily sealed and the border between the Negev and the Sinai desert all the way down itself was wide open but that was the realm of the Bedouin they were crossing back and forth for their own grazing and raiding purposes but they were transient and even sometimes to be relied upon it was the borders with the Gaza Strip in the West Bank then as now that were completely porous and therefore the source the problem between ten and fifteen thousand infiltration incidents occurred per year between 1949 in 1954 now some were simply refugees farmers crossing over to work the land that they'd abandoned to maintain their family connections or just simply to return to home after the trauma of war others were thieves looking to steal crops irrigation equipment farm animals or anything else that wasn't nailed down in the bordel settlements and in the wake of a brutal war one might try to stop them but you could hardly blame them and of course smuggling is always a major industry and then there were the small but deadly percentage who came to spy sabotage and kill and in the period between 1948 and 1956 infiltration slowly but surely became the defining issue in arab-israeli relations even more than the economic boycott that we discussed previously more than 200 Israeli civilians and scores more soldiers were killed by these infiltrators these are painful losses but not ones that threaten the stability of the state I mean six thousand had to hide in the independence war but beyond the loss of life and the economic damage it was the fear that infiltration generated that almost undermined the young state's efforts to resettle the waves of Jewish refugees pouring in that we discuss in previous episodes now security officials and policy makers agreed that the military presence along the border was not enough even if the state could have afforded to maintain the forces only a settled population could actually seal Israel's borders it's what's known as no hoot widespread presence and so a policy of population dispersion began we touched on this idea from a different angle in the last episodes but not only did this dispersion ease the crowding from Israel's art a settled coastal strip he aimed to establish new settlements populated by these new immigrants in order to prevent era refugees from coming and returning to their own homes and lands if in the early days of the conquest of labor back in the second a liao the model had been where the plow stops the border begins now the modern the sovereign state became were infiltration stops the border begins and settlement was seen to be a far more effective tool than military presence in putting an end to it from 48 to 54 only six years 350 new settlements were founded almost all of them collective agricultural you know Moshe Feiglin kibbutzim located on or close to the borders the Zionist leadership called it Jewish mama the conquest of the wastelands the classic Zionist phrase and they called it that despite the fact that everyone knew much of it was cultivated land whose Arab inhabitants at I have been driven out or simply fled during the war some spoke in biblical terms of settling the refugees of Europe and the Arab lands in houses which they didn't build on fields which they didn't plant but it was Ben Gurion who has always expressed the pragmatic goal the best he said in his introduction to a book which was praising the settlement of each region that area now called the la Hache region lies at the gate to the Negev the immigration waves of the last century could not penetrate this region and after its conquest in the war of independence he remained for several years empty and abandoned because of the severe security danger it split the country for years and enabled bands of smuggles and infiltrators to pass through even in peacetime no one could imagine ten years ago what is today visible places that were scenes of combat in the war of independence have now become strongholds and outposts in the south and if you have a sharp ear you can surely hear how these factors set the stage for the narrative conflict to come Zionists land theft first build in the country for the sake of a secure life and we're still in argument now but constant infiltration actually threatened to put an end to all of these efforts the issue was more than tactical it was cultural because many of the new immigrants had no experience in agriculture and certainly none in settling a hostile frontier in fact from 48 to 50 fully 46% of the population that had been dispersed in these new settlements left some were completely emptied of their inhabitants there were efforts even put up guards to keep people in as opposed to keep the infiltrators out lady ash Cole who was then head of the Jewish agencies settlement department wrote to ben-gurion in April 1950 sounding the alarm about the security of these new settlements he said we're putting up dozens of new immigrant settlements throughout the Jerusalem corridor on the galleys borders and in other areas just hundreds of meters from any lines these immigrants as a natural salt of their wanderings rootlessness and infirmities are like autumn leaves that tremble even in an imaginary wind time will have to pass before they acclimatize and are educated to be confident of themselves and defenders of their settlements now veterans of the second alia like ben-gurion and ash Cole knew that life on the frontier had the power to transform that it could take these frightened immigrants from being leaves that tremble in the wind too strong trunks rooted in their soil I mean they themselves had experienced the healing power of coming to land leave note Willie Heba no to build and be built the problem was they needed a chance to strike rude the army who stretched too thin to maintain the whole border in force and we'll have to discuss I think at this point in another episode how they dealt with the problem so the immediate solution seemed to be to go back to that classic Zionist model of having a plow in one hand and the rifle in the other and for some just receiving a weapon was enough of a life changing experience this is this letter one new immigrant wrote back to his family and I've now received a rifle on my land to protect my home I cleaned it and hung it by my bed i lying gaze at my rifle and I feel my confidence rise in expanding inside me like yeast dough filling my heart my blood and all my bones from now on I will not be afraid there is a way to defend ourselves it's a powerful expression of what for many may seem strange those of us who come from peaceful countries but to someone who is a product of 2,000 years of wandering and oppression it seemed to be an instant solution but for others there was a lot more required to undergo the transformation into Israelis but as opposed to the new settled immigrant motion beam there were plenty of kibbutz and moshav being that were populated by old-timers or youth movement members which were not abandoned during these difficult years and because of this they had the survival skills the experience of hardship and an ideological clarity that allowed them to overcome all obstacles now encouraged by the state many of the veterans left their homes and moved into the immigrant border settlements as youth leaders community organizers are simply new members and their impact in stiffening the result in holding the border can't be underestimated and beyond the specific question of infiltration or even a specific question of immigrant settlement in many ways these portal settlements became a crucible this is where a new Israeli character was formed one that could fight and win against all odds because of the sense that we had come home it's just like ben-gurion said during a debate over a civil defense law in the Knesset in 1951 it's not the army that is decisive what's decisive is the entire nation the material and spiritual capacity that beats within it it's not the rifle the artillery and the airplane that battle and win but the living person who uses them and the capability of a man to face gun fire in death his ability to fight to win depends not only on his technical abilities but rather on the spirit that beats within him and so this is the second source of national legitimacy we talked a little bit about the international context and will pursue it down through season three I mean after all the international community is still trying Forge peace in the Middle East but here we see another element which is national cohesion the way in which the adversity economic military cultural that the young state face actually caused a new Jew in the sense of that Zionist dream to emerge and one who was capable and ready to fight the battles which lay in the decades ahead and we're not gonna do it now but I'll give you a teaser for the next episode because if there was one man who in the eyes of the nation embodied that Israeli spirit that beats within who shaped not only the national policy toward infiltration but also was able to fill the nation with courage in the face of its threat it's going to be Moshe Dayan but his story lies ahead I just want to thank a few people now that I'm done I want to thank all the folks that give their hard earned money help make this show happy to keep it free and widely available and I want to invite you to join them go right now to my website Jewish story dot Co in the upper right hand corner you'll see a button that says be a patron you can click on through there for a little bit of per podcast support I also wanna remind folks that I'm happy to dedicate a show to anyone living or dead just send me an email and I'll shoot you back the details that's Rob Mike foyer at gmail.com or you can contact me at Jewish story podcast and Facebook or Bob Mike for on Facebook so I'm thanking folks I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network that's the Land of Israel comm for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many amazing people and I want to put a little shout out coming up on Shavuot are doing an amazing four-day program at design hotel in Jerusalem be there I'm gonna be speaking I think I'm a last day it looks like I also want to thank the partes Institute dar DES org dot al for creating an educational institute that allows me to teach so many wonderful Jews and I want to thank you for listening