The Jerusalem Post - 54th Independence Day

In the Beginning

By S. Yizhar

(photo: David Rubinger)

(April 30) - S. Yizhar, scribe of the 'Palmah Generation,' recalls that fateful moment when the country stood on the edge of its birth.

Only on very rare occasions does it happen that an entire population comes together at a single spot - a spot that includes everything, from which everything changes for the best, where all that is unresolved is resolved and where all that is unopened suddenly opens, revealing the long-awaited beginning.

It is, perhaps, like a giant triangle: At its base, piled up and pressed together, lurk the darkness, the evils, the worries, the fears, the despair, the cul-de-sacs and the recurring uncertainties; at the apex, a light is turned on from which the change will surely start, from which we will break out into the open, and from which security, solutions and salvation will flow.

This is how the Jewish population in Eretz Yisrael looked on the eve of the foundation of the state. Everything was terribly difficult, but all eyes were turned to that light above, at the apex: Look, a state will be founded here and everything will be resolved for the individual, for the population as a whole and for history - and a life of freedom will begin. Everything will change at once and everything will be different; it will start soon - the darkness will end, the day will dawn, terror will subside, and lost hopes will come to life and come true.

We are not talking about a population of eccentrics and dreamers. There were 600,000 serious, tormented, frightened Jews who were struggling to cope. Children grew rapidly into youths ready for battle, and adults went into training and tightened their belts. It felt like Doomsday was coming, the eve of the end of the world.

On the one hand, the terrible echoes of the immediate past could still be heard - the lengthy period of waiting, the fears, the general anticipation of better times and the sound of the ram's horn. And on the other, the magic word "state"; a "state," and everything would be different from now on. Fears would evaporate, hardships would ease up. A "state," and everything that had failed or had been missed, would come right in a minute. The horrors suffered so recently by the European Jews, as well as everything that was too hard to endure in the tiny Jewish community here - poverty, helplessness, the endless Arab attacks, the never-ending British harassment, the begging, the failures wherever we turned, everything hanging from a thread for too long - now, a state would be founded and everything would become solid, terra firma, and the Jews would have a state.

People breathed it deeply, sensing its arrival like a farmer senses the coming rain. There was no need to prove anything or provide evidence or calculate or plan. It would all be self-evident. An entire nation would meet at one spot, in a single belief that the state would do that great, wished for, messianic and earthly thing for them. The Jews would have a state.

And a little man with a white mane walked before them, his sharp, commanding voice alarming them, driving them on, calling on them and exciting them, confirming that it would indeed be like that, that indeed a state was coming and everything was about to begin and would be different, as if the entire giant sun had shrunk into a single burning spot.

Of course, it is not hard to scoff at that faith now, to question the dream that a state can solve everything. It is not hard to prove how blind, naive, or perhaps just too dejected they were; how gullible and even pathetic they were; and how they forgot about reality and the boundaries of imagination; how they ignored the hard facts, just as they ignored the demands made by the Palestinians living next to them, as well as the reality of the Middle East and the ruthless economic laws that did not go weak at the sound of the word "state." They did not philosophize about a state being merely an instrument, and that it all depends on whose hands it is in and on where he is taking it and so on.

But those were two or three years in which the entire world shrunk into a single demand, a single wish, a single faith dazzled by a big light; when man and nation were compressed into one spot - the State of the Jews. Such moments occur only once in the lifetime of a nation, only once in history.

And regardless of whether this is the right answer or not, that moment, when the world shrunk into a single sizzling spot, with one little man, David Ben-Gurion, running ahead, waving his arms in the air, urging them to follow, and they all ran after him - many of them never to run again - anyone who was there will never forget that one time in his life when everything, absolutely everything, became one thing.

Reprinted with permission from Those Were The Years, edited by Nissim Mishal and published by Yedioth Ahronoth.

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