One of my favorite national anthems is Hatikvah, which means “The Dove” in Hebrew and serves as the Israeli anthem. It eschews the tendency of some national anthems to obscurity, and others to pomposity, by adopting a grave and serious tone, well-fitting to the nation of the longsuffering Jewish people. I should note that the Israelis themelves (who only comprise a very small section, albeit the most self-aware one, of the entire biblical nation of Israel, and should rather be called Judah) celebrate their independence on 5 Iyar [1], in the lunar-solar calendar. But seeing as most of the readers of this blog would follow the solar calendar, let us note that the celebration would be different in Israel and other nations depending on what calendar was used.

Israel’s independence was a very contentious problem in the Middle East. Though there had been a strong Zionist movement in Europe from the late 1800’s, it was really the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that gave Zionism real legs in the Middle East. When the British government promised the Jews their own homeland, as later on the Jews faced terrible persecution throughout the world (and not just in Nazi Germany), the hope of a homeland inspired many Jews to seek to return to their homeland in the aliyah, returning to a land they had never seen like Ruth “returning” to Bethlehem as a convert.

Of course, that was only one side of the story, as a significant portion of the British Colonial and Miliary Establishment favored the Arabs, and TE Lawrence and others had promied the Arabs their own state, and the colonial establishment sought to appease the Arabs by limiting Jewish emigration, which was changing the ethnic balance of the Holy Land during the interwar period when Britain had a League of Nations Mandate for the lands. Worse, when the Peel Comission sought to divide the land between Jew and Arab, the Arabs revolted, unwilling to “share” land they thought theirs.

After World War II and the horrors of the Shoah (or Holocost), the pressure for the Jews to be given their own homeland grew. Terrorism from both Arabs and Jews against the British, humanitarian disasters like the Exodus, and a postwar malaise on a part of the British Government eager to get rid of its burdensome foreign obligations led the British to punt and give the issue to the UN. The UN made stipulations and drew some lines in the sand, the Jews accepted them and declared their independence. And immediately there was war—the Jews won—and instead of having half of the Holy Land, the Arabs were left with almost none, and that is how it has remained ever since, a contentious land of fighting and feuding, as it has been for a long time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Declaration_of_Independence