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The Promised Land. To the Jews of the world, Israel is both a state and a state of mind. Named for Jacob, whose battle with the Angel of God (Genesis 32:24-28) led him to be called Israel ("He who struggles with God"), it is the fulfillment of a struggle that has pitted the Jew against the world for 2,000 years. It is the Land of Canaan to which Abraham was given a divine deed after he left Ur in the 18th century B.C., the promised land toward which Moses led his people in the 13th century B.C. For seven centuries, it was the Land of Zion, Judea, the homeland of the Jews. And, when its Roman rulers expelled the Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 135, the latter continued to look upon the land as rightly theirs.
Their claim to title has never, of course, been completely unmuddied. In succeeding centuries, the land that the Romans named Syria Palestina (after the Jews' most hated enemies, the Philistines) was overrun by the Arabs (A.D. 636), Crusaders (1099), Mamelukes (1250) and Turks (1517). A few lonely Jews hung on to decry their fate at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, but the land was mostly settled by Moslems.
Toward the end of the last century, when the pogroms of Russia and Poland drove the Jews out of their ghettos, some of them headed back to the land of their ancestors. Supported by money from the newly created World Zionist Organization and the French Rothschild family, the first pioneers bought land from the Turks, organized themselves into kibbutzim and began planning the revival of a Jewish state. By 1914, there were some 85,000 Jews in Palestine. Among them were David Ben-Gurion, the tough dreamer who became Israel's first Premier, and Levi Eshkol, a burly Ukrainian youth who left school at the age of 19 to follow the dream.
Arab Vengeance. It was an elusive dream. The British, given a League of Nations mandate over Palestine, could not make up their minds to whom the land belonged. They promised it to the Arabs in 1915, to the Jews in 1917, and finally, after almost 20 years of Arab rioting, to the Arabs again in a White Paper issued on the eve of World War II. But the war swung the balance to the Jews. Horrified by the ovens of Buchenwald, the Western world took up the Jewish cause as its own. It winked when the displaced Jews of Europe began flooding into Palestine in defiance of a British immigration ban. It all but rejoiced when Jewish terrorists made it impossible for the British to continue governing.
In 1947, when the British finally threw up their hands and turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations, it took the General Assembly only ten weeks to partition the land between the Arabs and the Jews. At four o'clock on the afternoon of May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion read a 979-word pronouncement declaring Israel an independent Jewish state. Began the declaration: "In the Land of Israel, the Jewish people came into being."