Tag: Israel

1948: Why the name Israel?

On By Martin Kramer

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared statehood in the old Tel Aviv Museum, now Independence Hall, on Rothschild Boulevard. The climax was this sentence: “We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” This was the applause line, the culmination, and the naming of the state.

Until that moment, very few people knew what the state would be called. In the various drafts of the declaration, the space for the name was left blank. When the diplomats of the Jewish Agency in Washington went to secure an advance promise of recognition for the state, they couldn’t tell the Americans what the name would be.

As Clark Clifford, Truman’s legal advisor, later recalled: “The name ‘Israel’ was as yet unknown, and most of us assumed the new nation would be called ‘Judaea.’” The letter prepared for Harry Truman on May 14, extending recognition, was typed as follows: “The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new Jewish state.” Some hand crossed out “Jewish state” and wrote in its place “State of Israel.”

How was the name decided? By a vote in the People’s Administration, the cabinet-in-waiting, on May 12. The protocol doesn’t give the details of the debate. It simply records Ben-Gurion as saying:

We have decided that the name of the state will be Israel. And if we say state, then the State of Israel…. To this can be added every word in the grammatical construct state: army of Israel, community of Israel, people of Israel.

Ben-Gurion then put this to a vote. According to the protocol, seven voted in favor. Opposing and abstaining votes weren’t recorded. In his 1962 book Three Days, cabinet secretary Zeev Sharef wrote that this decision was taken “in the absence of any other suggestion.”

An unenthusiastic choice

But we actually know rather more about the debate that preceded this meeting from two sources: the first, what Sharef told a journalist on the first anniversary of independence; and the second, a recollection of the chief opponent of the name Israel.

This is what Sharef told that journalist in 1949. (He was Moshe Brilliant, and he published his piece on Israel’s first anniversary in what was still called, even in 1949, the Palestine Post.)

Most people had thought that the state would be called Judea (Yehuda in Hebrew). But Judea is the historical name of the area around Jerusalem, which at that time seemed the area least likely to become part of the state. Also, it applied only to a very small territory. So Judea was ruled out.

From its outset, Zionism had talked about creating a Jewish state, and so did the partition plan. As “Jewish” was a derivative of Judea, this name might have seemed a logical choice. But according to the UN partition plan, virtually all of the traditional geographic area of Judea was supposed to be either internationalized—Jerusalem and its environs—or part the Arab state. Calling a state Judea that didn’t include the geographic Judea would have been an anomaly.

But even if the state did wind up possessing a chunk of Judea, it would include much more than it—for example, the Negev. And how could the state be called Judea, when most of it was something else? It was problematic in another way. What would its citizens be called? Yehudim? How would that comport with the Arab citizens of the state, projected in the partition plan to number half a million? So Judea was ruled out.

I return to the account of Sharef via Brilliant.

“Zion” was also suggested, but Zion is the name of a hill overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

Here, again, we see the problem posed by the actual geography. How could a state be called Zion, when the geographic Zion wasn’t going to be a part of it?

Even the Bible refers to Jerusalem and sometimes to the entire land of Israel as Zion. It was in that sense that it was adopted by “Lovers of Zion” in the 19th century, and then by the Zionist movement.

But the creation of a sovereign Jewish state had the effect of reducing Zion once again to its specific territorial meaning. And in any case, what would the citizen of such a state be called? If he would be called a Zionist, that would create a confusion between a Zionist living in America and an actual citizen of the Jewish state. And of course, to expect Arab citizens to call themselves Zionists would have been asking rather a lot.

Back to Sharef via Brilliant.

One man proposed “Ever”—the root of “Ivri,” which means Hebrew. No one liked it.

There’s no explanation for why, and it certainly connected to the idea of the “new Jew” as a Hebrew. Presumably, the citizen of such a state would have been called an Ivri, a Hebrew. But Ever also had a geographic association, “crossing over,” and one interpretation is that it refers to that which is west of the Jordan. Possibly too limiting, and so no one liked it.

“Eretz Israel,” the Hebrew Biblical name for Palestine, was ruled out because of the dangers involved in its irredenta flavor.

Aside from the association of Eretz Israel with the Biblical past, under the British mandate it had been in the official Hebrew name of the entire country. That name was Palestina-Aleph-Yud, for Eretz Yisrael. Jews under the mandate did sometimes call themselves Eretz Yisraelim. But the UN had called for a partition of the country. While the declaration of statehood was careful not to refer to that plan as a partition plan, no one wanted openly to defy the UN either. Calling the state Eretz Israel would have sounded like an overt claim to all of mandatory Palestine. So it was ruled out also.

Back to Sharef via Brilliant:

It was Mr. Ben-Gurion who first suggested “Israel.” It seemed strange at the beginning, and the proposal was received coolly. But members tried pronouncing “Israel Government,” “Israel Army,” “Israel citizen,” “Israel consul” to see how it sounded. Most were unenthusiastic, but there were only 48 hours left and much urgent work to be done, and the matter was put to a vote. Seven of the ten members present voted for “Israel.”

There you have it. The name “Israel” came to the state by a process of elimination, because there wasn’t time to come up with anything better. A majority voted for it—unenthusiastically.

The lost case for Judea

The most cogent argument against this choice came from Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the foremost secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry, subsequent chairman of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee during the Holocaust, and the first minister of interior of Israel.

Gruenbaum made the argument for the name Judea and against Israel, and years later explained his rationale in these words:

I opposed the name Israel. It reminded me of the name israélite [in French] used by non-Jewish sympathizers and assimilationists, instead of juif, which was considered derogatory. We Zionists embraced the derogatory “Jew,” which was the name of our people from the return from [Babylonian] exile and building of the Second Temple. The independent Hasmonean state, also after the Roman conquest, had this name. I favored the revival of this name, which the masses of the [Jewish] people accepted in their spoken languages. Another name was liable divide the state from the Diaspora.

For Gruenbaum, the name Judea had the advantage of creating continuity, from the last expression of Jewish sovereignty, Judea under the Hasmoneans, and through the 2,000 years of the dispersion of the Jews. This had been embraced by the Zionists when they campaigned for a Jewish national home and a Jewish state. A state called Judea would emphasize not only that continuity in time, but would link the new state to Jews everywhere in the present.

It’s an argument Gruenbaum lost because of the geographic counterpoint I mentioned earlier: the geographic Judea was too small, and not slated to be in the state. Gruenbaum admitted that “the majority accepted Ben-Gurion’s proposal… because the borders of our state are wider than those of the Hasmoneans.”

But then we come to Gruenbaum’s insinuation as to the real reason Ben-Gurion had come to prefer Israel over Judea. It wasn’t the geography.

I had a feeling that Ben-Gurion didn’t reveal the real reason behind his proposal, which was adopted. Unfortunately, it was realized after a few years that the name “Israel” created a misunderstanding among native-born Sabras. The Sabra began to see himself as an Israeli and not as a Jew.

Gruenbaum suspected that the real reason Ben-Gurion preferred the state of Israel over the state of Judea was that he wanted a rupture of continuity, a rupture with the Jewish, exilic past.

In that respect, Ben-Gurion wasn’t entirely different from those in France who had substituted israélite for juif, with the purpose of signaling that the Jews in France had been emancipated. Emancipation, after all, was also a rupture with the Jewish past. And Ben-Gurion didn’t want a bridge to the Diaspora, but its subordination to the new state. By the choice of the name of Israel, then, Ben-Gurion was out to create a new identity, building upon yet superseding Jewish identity.

Gruenbaum wasn’t religious. To the contrary, he was a declared secularist, and ended up in the socialist Mapam party. He didn’t want the name Judea to shackle the state to religion (or stake a claim to territory). But he wanted a name that bound the state to Jewish history, and not just Israelite antiquity.

When Gruenbaum complained that the sabra had ceased to see himself as a Jew, he was speaking in 1961, the very height of the secular wave of smug self-regard of the native-born Israelis, who thought they had transcended Jewish history.

But at that very moment, Ben-Gurion had taken a major step to remind young Israelis that they were indeed Jews. The previous year, Israel had seized Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in planning the Holocaust, and in 1961 put him on trial for crimes committed against Jews who were murdered in Europe, before the birth of Israel. The Washington Post ran an editorial claiming that Israel had no claim to represent the Jewish people. Ben-Gurion’s reply:

The Washington Post writer is perhaps unaware that on May 14, 1948, we proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state, in accordance with the decisions of the United Nations (which were backed by the United States as well as other countries), and Israel is only the name of the Jewish state.

The essence of the state was Jewish; its name was a convenience. In Ben-Gurion’s view, the Eichmann trial should have banished any ambiguity caused by the name.

But the choice of Israel created a confusion that lingers to this day.

This post is derived from lecture three, “Identity,” of my new seven-lecture series, “Declaring Israel’s Independence.” The series, sponsored by the Tikvah Fund, is free. Enroll here.

Cross-posted at the Times of Israel.

Free online course! Declaring Israel’s Independence

On By Martin Kramer

“We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” That declaration by David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon, May 14, 1948, the Fifth of Iyar, 5708, is the most significant and consequential sentence uttered by a Jew since antiquity.

It put an end to 2,000 years of dispersion and exile, and announced the restoration of sovereign self-determination to the Jews in their own land. “We hereby declare” is the modern equivalent of the Biblical “Hineini,” an affirmation of presence, and an assumption of responsibility. And it is the key passage in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That declaration is the topic of my free online course “Declaring Israel’s Independence,” an educational program of the Tikvah Fund.

You’ll discover the rich history of the declaration, the heated debates surrounding its drafting, and the drama-filled back stories behind May 14. Watch these seven lectures, take your Israel-literacy to a new level, and become an expert in your own right in advance of Israel’s Independence Day next month. Enroll here.

And view the trailer:

The Trump plan: history doesn’t run in reverse

On By Martin Kramer

On February 5, Gregg Roman of the Middle East Forum interviewed me on the Trump plan for Israel and the Palestinians. I’ve written about it elsewhere; in the interview, I offer some further reflections. (If you prefer, click here to listen.)

MEF: What’s your take on the Trump peace plan?

Kramer: Well, the first thing you have to do is separate analysis of the plan from the partisan political atmosphere that prevails the United States today, and just look at the plan on its merits and limitations. I understand that’s hard to do, but it’s really important because otherwise, you’re letting your political prejudice influence your analysis, and we want to neutralize that.

The plan has three key levels of analysis that you could do. There are the assumptions of the plan; there are the principles of the plan; and there are the details of the plan. It’s important not to reverse the order of discussion and get lost in the details before you look at the assumptions and the principles.

The core assumption is that the end of the conflict is important. [Otherwise,] why have a proposal? There have been administrations that didn’t make a proposal. The Obama administration basically dropped the whole issue at one point, and focused elsewhere. The idea that resolving the conflict could have a positive effect on the US position in the Middle East and on Israel’s position in the Middle East, is the basic underlying assumption of this initiative.

There’s a bit of linkage here—in other words, it’s important because it connects with the way the US is perceived in the region and the way Israel is perceived in the region.

So that’s one core assumption. The second core assumption is that you can’t reverse history, history only goes in one direction.

And that’s reflected in the principles. Now there are two key principles here. One is that there’s no way that you’re going to see the massive movement of peoples or parts of peoples as a consequence of, or as an element in, any solution. What does that mean? Anyone who thinks that 80,000, or 50,000, or 20,000 settlers can be removed from settlements under any political constellation which is imaginable in Israel today, is simply dreaming. It’s not going to happen.

And the second, that anyone who imagines that the West Bank or Gaza could absorb other huge numbers of Palestinian refugees—really, descendants of refugees—from other countries, is also dreaming.

So everyone stays in place in this plan. And I think that’s a core principle.

Another core principle—and you can’t get around it—is that the United States remains committed to a two-state solution. It has been since 1947. Even a man now described as Israel’s best friend ever still cannot put a plan on the table that doesn’t highlight two states.

The rest are details. We can discuss the details; [but] I think that they’re the most flexible part of the plan. In fact, Jared Kushner indicated they’re all open to negotiation. I’d say that even includes Jerusalem; it certainly includes the borders that are proposed on the conceptual map.

So, in a way, it’s pointless to get lost in the details at this point. It’s much more important to focus on the assumptions and the principles.

MEF: So let’s talk about the conditioning of the Palestinian people before we even have any principles associated with the peace deal. Because as far as they’re concerned, anything that this president or Benny Gantz or Benjamin Netanyahu offers to them, they’ll say no. A hundred years of Palestinian rejectionism.

And I’m sure you’re familiar with the campaign that the Middle East Forum ran in Israel last summer, associated with our Israel Victory Project: the idea that you can only make peace with defeated enemies, those who recognize a sense of defeat. What’s your take on that idea? Do you think that there’s a way for the Palestinians to give up on sumud, their “steadfastness,” the rejectionism, sarbanut as it’s called in Hebrew, or are we in for this for another hundred years?

Kramer: Look, let me first begin by making a minor correction to the way you described the plan. You called it a “peace plan.” It’s not a peace plan, it’s a partition plan. And a partition plan doesn’t have to be accepted—no partition was ever accepted by the Palestinians—in order to have historic effects. The 1947 plan by the United Nations, which was accepted by the Zionist movement, and was rejected by the Palestinians, still had transformative historic effects: creation of the State of Israel.

What characterizes a partition plan, is that basically it’s a proposal of a third party, looking from the outside, that has some authority, whether it be the British in 1937 when they proposed a partition plan, or the United Nations in 1947, or the United States today. So in a way, the importance of the plan transcends whether either of the parties accepts it.

And I don’t think that the Palestinians can accept it, or will accept it, given the state of their myth-making in their political vision. There are plenty of elements in the plan which Israel really can’t accept either, although Israel will accept the assumptions and the principles without accepting necessarily the details.

But that doesn’t mean that the plan won’t have an effect. The question is, even if the plan is never implemented (and it will never be implemented in all its details), what will be its historic effect?

What will be transformative here for the Palestinians is that they will begin to understand that history only runs in one direction, and the world is moving gradually to an accommodation with the facts of history. The Palestinians haven’t done that. And the reason they haven’t—part of the reason—isn’t just because they’re hidebound. It’s because the world has told them again and again that history can be reversed. Even the United States at various times has told them that history can be reversed. When people stop telling Palestinians that history can be reversed, that is the beginning of wisdom for the Palestinians. That’s the effect of the plan.

And that’s why the plan is so important. It begins with the United States, it will percolate to other states in the West and Arab states, and the Palestinians will begin to understand that their demand for the reversal of history has no support from anyone else.

MEF: You write, in an article that you wrote on the 102nd anniversary of the Balfour plan on October 31 of last year, regarding this issue, that the declaration “did clearly mark the beginning of the end of the Jewish problem as Weizmann and the Zionists understood it: a total absence of power that left the Jews as wanderers, vulnerable and weak.” What will it take to realize, on the Palestinian side, that there is a vacuum of power there, they have no legitimacy in the eyes of many Arab states (in the eyes of the Arab populations, maybe)? They have no ability to tell their leaders what to do unless they openly revolt and even if that happened, the IDF might come in and save those leaders who are providing sort of a Faustian bargain for security as it relates right now to, at least, the West Bank. And they’re suffering; their brand is crisis. How do we get the Palestinians to realize, like the Jews realized—I guess it was 1948, seventy-two years ago now—that the gig is up, you’ve lost, it’s time to develop your own polity not based on rejecting another. How do we get there?

Kramer: Well, you just did it yourself. You have to begin to tell them the truth. Now coming from Martin Kramer, or from you, it will have no effect on them whatsoever. But when they start to hear it from the very same quarters which historically and traditionally have been supportive of their demands, then that will begin to have an effect.

And that’s why, as I’ve argued elsewhere, what’s really important, [in order] for the Trump plan to have that historic effect, [is that it] be marketed to the Europeans, to the Russians, to the Arabs, so that while they may not endorse it—in fact, very few of them will openly endorse it and many will reject it—they will begin to echo some of the assumptions and principles that are in the plan, and go to the Palestinians and say: “Look, we understand why you reject the plan, it’s full of flaws, and so on and so on. But the basic assumptions and principles have some validity.” And when the Palestinians begin to hear that from friends—not from you and me but from their friends—then that will have an effect.

Much of the responsibility for the predicament of the Palestinians today lies not just on them but on their friends, or would-be friends, or supposed friends, who lied to them, misled them and promised they would deliver to them on fantasies, which were completely detached from reality.

I think Jared Kushner wouldn’t see the Trump plan as some unilateral American act. Even the Balfour Declaration was cleared with all Britain’s allies in advance, as I showed that in an earlier study. It was like a Security Council resolution in practice. The US has put this plan on the table. Now what it has to do is, not to get the endorsement of the full plan from anyone, but get other parties to echo elements of its assumptions and principles, and play those back to the Palestinians.