Israel: From a dream to a present shaken to the core

Israel's commemoration of the founding of its state traditionally begins with the lighting of 12 torches on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. They stand for the biblical 12 Tribes of Israel. This year, the celebrations are overshadowed by the protest of hundreds of thousands of Israelis against their government's judicial reform plans. It is one of the biggest crises in the country's crisis-ridden history.

The state was founded on May 14, 1948, following the Gregorian calendar. But because the holiday follows the Jewish calendar, this year it falls on the evening of April 25.

In essence, Israel emerged from crisis and was born into crisis. When David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel, the Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land had already been at war with their Arab-Palestinian neighbors for months.

For many Jews, the proclamation of their own state just three years after the Holocaust felt like a release. "The year 1948 is very closely connected with 1945 — on the one hand, we have the end of European Jewry, very clearly marked by the year 1945, and three years later, the founding of the state of Israel, which is, so to speak, the redemption of this annihilation," the Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider told DW. "It was like a resurrection. I think that's a narrative that's not only official, but also shared by most Israelis: the founding of the state as an almost theological act of liberation," he added.

Between 1941 and 1945, 6 million European Jews were brutally murdered in the Holocaust, crammed into ghettos, starved, murdered, worked to death, exterminated in German death camps. It was an unprecedented genocide, and an unimaginable crime.  If was followed by a possibly unique historical decision: In 1947, the UN General Assembly — with 13 votes against — adopted a partition plan for Palestine, which at the time was still a British mandate territory, providing for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state. Jerusalem was to be governed by a special international regime. The Arab side rejected the plan, but Jewish representatives agreed. A civil war ensued, with violence on both sides.

A state of one's own

Although the horrors of the Holocaust contributed considerable momentum to the founding of the state of Israel, the idea of a Jewish homeland goes much further back. The most famous representative of the Zionist idea is Theodor Herzl. In 1896, under the impression of rising antisemitism, especially in France, Herzl wrote "The Jewish State," a pamphlet with very practical ideas for the establishment of a state.

Herzl first explored alternative possibilities to Palestine, but other representatives of the Zionist movement were opposed from the start. They invoked the millennia-old spiritual connection of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel.  "From a Zionist point of view, the Jews are first and foremost a people, a nation, not a religion, and just like other nations, they deserve their homeland and state sovereignty," says Michael Brenner, a historian and current director of the Center for Israel Studies at American University in Washington DC.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration was a diplomatic breakthrough — the British promised to support a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The declaration was deliberately vague, however, and the British also gave Arabs in Palestine hopes for their own state. As a mandate power, Britain thereby ultimately contributed to the tensions in the region. Several large waves of immigration to Mandatory Palestine followed, often in response to antisemitic persecutions in Europe. In 1909, the city of Tel Aviv was founded on the Mediterranean Sea. The British repeatedly tried to halt immigration, even as Jewish suffering increased after the Nazis had seized power in Germany.

One country, two peoples

Violent exchanges between Jews and Arabs began in Mandatory Palestine as early as the 1920s, for example in Jaffa and Jerusalem. "The basic problem, of course, is that two peoples have a claim to the same land, and both justify that claim historically," says Brenner. After the proclamation of the state of Israel, five Arab armies declared war on the fledgling country. Israel won the war and occupied about 40% of the territory designated for Palestine. As a result, or in some cases even beforehand, some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled and fled the country. In Palestinian discourse, this came to be known as the Nakba, or disaster.

In 1967, another war shifted the balance of power once again: Since then, Israel has occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and largely blockaded the Gaza Strip. Israel faces international criticism for its occupation policy; many governments, including the German government, regard the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as a breach of international law.

In the 1980s, a generation of New Historians, as they called themselves, established itself in Israel. They "challenged the sacred cows that existed, these basic 'truths' of what shaped official Israel," Brenner says. That included addressing the consequences the establishment of Israel had for Palestinians — to this day, a sensitive and frequently disregarded topic in Israel.

Back to the original idea

"It will probably be the most political Independence Day Israel has ever seen," said Sznaider. For weeks, people have been taking to the streets to demonstrate against a planned judiciary reform. The plans are currently on hold, but the protests continue.

Protesters are currently considering holding a ceremony with torches in Tel Aviv as an alternative to the one in Jerusalem, as a sign that they do not feel represented by the current right-wing religious government, and want a different future for their state. 

"There will be two Independence Days at the same time," Sznaider concluded. 

Both sides consider themselves positioned in the tradition of Israel's founding fathers and mothers. Among Zionists, there have always also been religious Zionists. Today's settler movement in the occupied territories also sees itself as a successor movement to the settlement of the land in the 1920s. "They try to present themselves as a kind of super-Zionists, attempting to complete the plans of the originally secular Zionist movement, which was also left-wing and Social Democratic," said Brenner.

The protesters take a different point of view. Each week, demonstrators deliberately refer to the founding ideas of the Jewish state as they wave Israel's flag and invoke its Declaration of Independence.

They insist on Israel's democratic origins, on a free country under the rule of law for all its citizens. As Israeli historian Tom Segev once said in an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel news magazine: "David Ben Gurion would probably be beside himself" if he knew what point Israeli society has reached.

Tensions that have always existed within the Zionist movement are coming to bear in Israel at the moment, Brenner said.  "Many of the divisions in Israeli society go back to the early days, and perhaps it's a small miracle that it took 75 years for them to erupt so strongly," the historian explained.

At every protest, tens of thousands of protesters sing Hatikva, the Israeli anthem. "One of the verses of the national anthem is about being a free people in their own land," Sznaider said. "At the moment, however, there are two definitions of what exactly it means to be a free people in one's own land." 

This article was originally written in German.