以色列史

• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  The fact that the veteran Jewish Ashkenazi elite of Israel was responsible for channelling the Sephardim into the ma’abarot increased the animosity and resentment of the Sephardim towards the Ashkenazi[73] and caused much tension between these two communities. Yet growing tensions were not only the result of the coming together of the relatively affluent Ashkenazi who could afford to live in the big cities with the poorer – and usually with larger families – Oriental Jews forced to live in the ma’abarah, but it was also the outcome of an almost impossible meeting between two different worlds. On the one hand, the more educated, sophisticated, professional western Jews, and on the other a community of Jews from various Arab lands many of whom could hardly read or write. While religion by bi...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  Israel’s propaganda machine after this war 【the first Arab-Israeli war】 shifted gear to show how little (‘David’) Israel (‘the few’) survived against the mighty (‘Goliath’) Arabs (‘the many’) and how clean a war she fought. This, however, was not quite true. Even though Israel’s population at that time was some 650,000 compared with an Arab population 40 times larger, Israel had more troops on the ground than all the Arab armies put together – 29,677 Israeli compared with 23,500 Arabs at the beginning of the war, whereas towards its end the ratio became two to one in Israel’s favour. So the ‘few’ in this war were the Arabs rather than the Israelis who were effectively the mighty ‘many’, as is also quite clearly demonstrated by the results of this war. Also, contrary to Israeli[69] propagan...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  It was also during this period that Israel took measures to consolidate he hold over the Arabs of Israel. We should recall that not all the Arabs who had resided in Palestine fled during the war and an estimated 156,000 of them remained within Israel’s borders, clinging stubbornly to their property and lands in villages and in the five mixed towns of Acre, Jaffa, Haifa, Ramleh and Jerusalem. On 21 October 1948, Israel established a military government in Arab areas, set up ‘security zones’ and imposed restrictions on the movement of Arabs between towns and villages. New laws also allowed the military administration to remove permanent residents from the declared ‘security zones’ and transfer them elsewhere. This was soon done to several Negev Bedouin tribes and to the inhabitants of the Ar...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  In the mean time in Washington, after an acrimonious argument between Secretary of State George Marshall who opposed recognition of the Jewish state and President Truman, the President decided to recognize Israel. Truman was deeply affected by the plight of European Jewry and he was also well aware that to secure the Jewish vote in the coming elections he had to side with the Jews. Thus, just 11 minutes after Ben-Gurion declared independence Washington recognized Israel and in the UN Ambassador Warren Austin, the American representative, read a brief statement on President Truman’s behalf, the gist of which was that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, that it had asked Washington for recognition and that the government of the United States accepted the request and recognized t...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  The state of Israel, Ben-Gurion assured his audience, would be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries, would promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants, would be based on the principles of liberty, justice and peace, would uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex, would guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education and culture, would safeguard the holy places of all religions and would uphold the principles of the UN Charter. Ben-Gurion then called upon the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the[46] state on the basis of ‘full and equal citizenship’. Israel, said Ben-Gurion, ‘extends its han...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  It was during the civil war in Palestine that what came to be known as ‘the Palestinian refugee problem’ began and gradually intensified. At first the Arab flight from Palestine was only a trickle, consisting mostly the inhabitants of isolated Arab settlements together with some of the more well-to-do Arab Palestinian families who, sensing trouble ahead, decided to move elsewhere until it blew over. But with the Palestinian leadership and the middle class leaving Palestine to take, what they believed to be, a temporary refuge in neighbouring Arab countries,[43] and with the Jews ‘advising’ the poorer Palestinians to follow suit and often using force to expel them, and with rumours of ghastly massacres of Arabs, as occurred at the village of Deir Yassin where 110 civilians were killed by Je...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  On 31 August 1947, UNSCOP published its report. A majority of its members recommended that the Mandate for Palestine should be terminated at the earliest practicable date and that independence should be granted to the country with special safeguards for the holy places and partitioning the land between Jews and Arabs. A minority report, which was also published, advanced a federalist solution with immigration to continue up to the limits of Palestine’s absorptive capacity. On Saturday 29 November 1947, in a dramatic session in New York, the General Assembly of the UN adopted UNSCOP’s majority solution to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs; 33 states voted for, 13 against and 13 abstained. Widespread Christian guilt over the fate of 6 million Jews in Europe, a feeling that at least ...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  When the General Assembly of the UN discussed the Palestine Question, as it was known, at meetings on 28 April and 15 May 1947, it decided to set up an 11-member Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP, with the fullest powers to ascertain and record facts and investigate all questions and issues relevant to the problem of Palestine and decide what recommendations should be made to Britain as the Mandatory Power. The committee – six diplomats, four jurists and a professor – arrived in Jerusalem on 14 June, stayed for five weeks and met Jewish representatives. The Arab Higher Committee, the body representing the Arabs of Palestine, boycotted it on the ground that the UN was refusing to adopt the ‘natural course’, namely declaring independence for Arab Palestine. This was a grave error of jud...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  A man of strong personality and common sense combined with imagination, Lord Peel arrived in Palestine on 11 November 1936. He held 66 meetings, toured Palestine, returned to England and, on 7 July 1937, published his verdict – a massive, cool and balanced, 404-page-long report, which included maps and statistical indices. His Lordship reached the melancholy conclusion that the policy of conciliation, carried to its furthest limits, had failed, and pronounced that both the Jewish claim to Palestine on grounds of historical and religious connections and the Arab claim on grounds of 13 centuries of continuous occupation had validity and thus the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine was not one of right against wrong but that of right against right. Lord Peel concluded that the Mandat...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  Ironically, if by resorting to violence the Arab intention was to halt the development of the Jewish project in Palestine the result was the exact opposite, since the Jews were only pushed into ever growing self-reliance. For with the rebellion there came an acute shortage of Arab labour which was promptly filled by Jewish labour, and Jewish produce replaced Arab fruit and vegetables in markets. Also, with the Arab closure of the Jaffa harbour, the British allowed the Jews, on 15 May 1936, to build a jetty at Tel Aviv, thus enabling the Jews to realize an old dream of having their own independent port.But perhaps more significantly, the Arab Rebellion accelerated the development of a Jewish military force in Palestine. In 1936, some time after the outbreak of the violence, the British rec...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  A wave of 175,000 Jewish immigrants, the so-called fifth Aliyah, arrived in Palestine between 1932 and 1939, mainly as a result of rising anti-Semitism in Europe. The great majority of the immigrants came from Poland, which still had the largest concentration of Jews in the world, with only 21 per cent from Germany. Nevertheless, this wave of immigration was dubbed ‘The German Aliyah’, perhaps because of the novelty of the arrival of German Jews in a country which was, so far, built on eastern European immigration. Thanks to a transfer agreement reached between Zionist leaders and the German Foreign Ministry, the German Jews were able to import part of their savings in the form of goods, and when this fully £63 million in imported capital was invested in Palestine, it led to a significant ...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  In what had by now become a pattern, the British government appointed a commission of inquiry which, headed by Sir Walter Shaw, a retired Chief Justice, was tasked to inquire into the immediate causes of the outbreak of violence and to propose policies to prevent any recurrence. After five weeks of hearings, the commission issued its report on 31 March 1930. It concluded that the Arab violence was a reaction to their sense that Jewish immigrants were taking control of Palestine and that the deep-seated reason for the disorders lay in the Arab’s fear for their economic future. Another commission, this time led by Sir John Hope-Simpson, a retired Indian civil service official and an authority on agricultural economics, was then sent out to Palestine to report on the likely effects of Jewish ...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  Although short, a single 68-word-long sentence, the declaration was a highly significant statement, for it was the first time that a great power – and England was still a world power of the first rank – had openly pledged its full support to the idea of helping the Jews to have their ‘national home’ in the land of Palestine whose population, at the time[18] this declaration was issued, was around 87 per cent Arab. Of course, Weizmann would have preferred to secure Britain’s agreement to his more grandiose demand of support for ‘the establishment of Palestine as the [italics added] national home of the Jewish people’, rather than the hazy definition of British support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. But it was still a great achievement and the...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  In 1910, members of the second Aliyah settled on Um Juni, a tract of land on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and formed the first kibbutz which they called Degania (Cornflower). This new form of agricultural settlement was based on full cooperation among the members in work and on equal profit sharing. By 1914, there were 14 such farms in Palestine. The urban Jewish sector in Palestine was also developing in earnest during this critical period and, with the endorsement of the eighth Zionist Congress, the Director of the Palestine Office, Arthur Ruppin, lent funds to a private development company which established a modest garden quarter on the sand dunes outside Jaffa. By 1914, this encompassed 139 houses and 1419 Jewish inhabitants. It was named Tel Aviv (Mount of Spring, from a...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  He 【David Ben-Gurion】 belonged to a group of young, secular and idealistic men and women, driven by a fierce sense of mission and bent on ‘redeeming the land’ and proving that they were fit not only for commerce, as their detractors often charged, but also for physical work. They adopted Spartan ideals and high standards of personal behaviour and rejected all emblems of comfort such as smart clothes, strong drink, tobacco and the ownership of personal possessions. They survived on a diet of lentils and bean soup and lived in mud huts, which often crumbled in summer heat, and in tents which leaked and were often washed away in winter rains. These young pioneers, who cut themselves adrift from home, family and a whole way of life, had to fight not only against nature – many of them contracte...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  In Palestine, on 31 July 1882, newcomers of this first Aliyah founded, on a stretch of uncultivated and uninhabited sandy land, just eight miles south-east of Jaffa, a new settlement which they called Rishon Lezion (First to Zion), and which became the first settlement to be established by Jewish settlers from outside Palestine. In Rishon, as this town came to be known, these Jewish pioneers established the first Hebrew language kindergarten and elementary school in the country and in honour of the founding of this town, a Romanian Jewish poet, Naphtali Herz Imber, who later lived in America in squalor, misery and alcoholism, wrote a poem, Ha-tikvah (The Hope) which was to become the Zionist hymn, and later with a few alternations, the state of Israel’s national anthem. The poem went:As l...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  Herzl’s dream of living to see the day of a Jewish homeland being established was dashed. It all took longer than he had hoped and he was a very sick man. Worn out by his labours, he died at the age of 44 of a debilitating heart condition and was interred in Vienna next to his father’s grave; 45 years later Herzl’s remains were moved to a hill just west of Jerusalem which became Mount Herzl, later a large military cemetery containing fallen heroes of Israel’s wars. What was Herzl’s legacy? With the benefit of hindsight we can say that his cardinal achievement, apart, of course, from his invention and creation of the Zionist movement as a political force during an effective public life of fewer than nine years, was his success in putting Zionism on the map of world politics. In crude moder...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  But where should one start? Surely at the beginning. But where is the beginning? Historians, mainly of Jewish stock, often range back to biblical times to begin the story of Israel, as if to assert that the development of modern Israel was a fulfilment of a biblical prophecy or, perhaps, the inevitable return of the Jewish people to the land of their fathers and the rebirth of a nation. This is not my approach. I do not regard the birth of Israel in 1948 as the fulfilment of a biblical prophecy nor as the continuation of any previous experience on this land, but rather as the outcome of two unfortunate causes. The first was the failure of nations to accept the Jews living among them as an integral part of society, and the second was the insistence[xviii] of Jews – though by no means all of...
• 之龢

  2019-01-24
  A glance in the entries of a telephone directory and a visit to one of Israel’s military cemeteries give the history of modern Israel in a nutshell. It is the story of Jewish immigration to the land of Israel and constant wars. It is also, particularly, since the late 1970s, the story of attempts, some successful others less so, to forge peace between Israel and her neighbours on the principle of relinquishing land occupied by Israel in return for peace and recognition by Arabs and Palestinians.
• 2koo

  2012-11-20
  1993年9月13日，拉宾和阿拉法特作为主要签字者，坐在了贝京与萨达特于1978年在戴维营签字时用过的同一张桌子边。拉宾在演讲中说道：我们注定要生活在一起，生活在同一个地方的同一块土地中。我们，是从血肉横飞的战场上下来的士兵，我们的亲人和朋友在我们眼前被杀，我们参加过死者的葬礼，我们不敢看那些父母和孤儿的眼睛，我们来自一个父母埋葬孩子的地方，我们曾经与你们战斗，巴勒斯坦人。今天，我们要响亮、清楚地对你们说：鲜血和眼泪已经流得太多了。够了。我们对你们不怀仇恨。我们不想报复。我们和你们一样，是些想建造一座房屋、种植一棵树的人，是些想爱的人，想和你们生活在一起的人——有尊严地，满怀同情地，作为人，作为自由的人。今天，我们给和平一个机会，对你们说：够了。让我们祈祷那一天的到来，那一天我们会说：再见了，武器。