“We will not lift a finger, and we will not stand by your side. Do not declare the state,” Harel quoted the US warning as saying.

By World Israel News Staff

A newly released recording of former Israeli intelligence chief Isser Harel offers a firsthand account of the intense political and military uncertainty surrounding David Ben-Gurion’s decision to declare Israeli independence in May 1948, including American pressure on pre-state leaders not to declare independence.

The recording was released this week by Ben-Gurion House in Tel Aviv.

Harel, who became the first head of the Shin Bet and later the second director of the Mossad, was speaking to students during a gathering at Ben-Gurion’s former home sometime after the founding prime minister’s death in 1973.

Harel recalled Ben-Gurion consulting senior Haganah commanders as the British Mandate neared its end and neighboring Arab states prepared to send their armies into the country.

Ben-Gurion questioned the commanders about the Jewish community’s weapons, its military plans, the strength of the opposing forces and the likely course of the coming war, Harel said.

The situation was so precarious that one commander emerged from a meeting with Ben-Gurion and indicated to those waiting outside that the Zionist leader “was having delusions,” according to Harel.

Ben-Gurion nevertheless remained determined to establish a sovereign state before the opportunity disappeared.

Harel said that determination prompted a forceful American warning, which he attributed to then-US Secretary of State George Marshall.

According to Harel’s recollection, Washington warned that the Arab states would attack immediately and that the Jewish forces would be unable to withstand them without outside assistance.

“We will not lift a finger, and we will not stand by your side. Do not declare the state,” Harel quoted the warning as saying.

Contemporary US records confirm that Marshall delivered a grave warning to Moshe Sharett, then known as Moshe Shertok, during meetings in Washington shortly before independence. Sharett returned to the country and relayed the message to Ben-Gurion and other members of the Jewish leadership.

Marshall’s own account, recorded in a May 12 White House memorandum, said he had warned Sharett that the Jewish leadership was taking a dangerous gamble based on recent military successes that might prove temporary.

Should the military situation turn against the Jewish forces, Marshall said, “there was no warrant to expect help from the United States.”

The American document, however, also adds an important qualification to Harel’s later account. Marshall wrote that he had sent no personal message directly to Ben-Gurion and that Sharett had not explicitly told him that a Jewish state would be proclaimed within days.

The warning was nevertheless understood by the Zionist leadership as a clear indication that the United States would not intervene militarily to rescue the emerging state if the anticipated Arab invasion succeeded.

The Truman administration was sharply divided over Palestine at the time. Marshall and much of the State Department feared that establishing and immediately recognizing a Jewish state would deepen regional warfare, damage US relations with Arab countries and potentially require American military involvement.

White House adviser Clark Clifford took the opposing position, urging President Harry Truman to recognize the state as soon as it was established. The dispute culminated in a bitter White House meeting on May 12, two days before Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence.

Israeli leaders were simultaneously receiving warnings from the Arab side.

Harel recalled Golda Meir’s secret meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah, whose Arab Legion was widely regarded as the most effective Arab military force in the region. The Legion was well armed, trained by Britain and commanded in the field by British officers.

According to Harel, Abdullah told Meir that he would have no alternative but to join the war if the Jewish leadership declared a state.

The warnings intensified the debate within the People’s Administration, the provisional body that would become Israel’s first government. Several members favored accepting an American-backed truce or postponing independence rather than risking destruction and a confrontation with Washington.

Ben-Gurion argued that postponement could cause the opportunity for statehood to disappear permanently. The United Nations had approved the partition of Palestine in November 1947, but the United States had subsequently supported placing the territory under a temporary UN trusteeship as violence escalated.

Harel endorsed Ben-Gurion’s assessment in the recording, arguing that a decision not to declare independence in May 1948 might never have been reversed.

Ben-Gurion ultimately proceeded with the declaration on May 14. In an entry written that day, he summarized the enormity of the decision: “Today we founded a state. Its fate is in the hands of the defense forces.”

Despite the State Department’s opposition, Truman recognized Israel’s provisional government just 11 minutes after the state formally came into existence.

The post US tried to block Israel’s establishment in 1948, recording reveals appeared first on World Israel News.

Step inside the newly opened Knesset Museum, where the echoes of Israel’s founding leaders, secret Eichmann files, and vintage schnitzel lunches bring the nation’s political origins vividly back to life.

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During the renovation of David Ben-Gurion’s historic Tel Aviv home, a treasure trove of rare artifacts, personal documents, and even the iconic “red phone” from the Suez Crisis were uncovered, shedding new light on the life and legacy of Israel’s first prime minister.

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In blistering speech, outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid alleges that incoming right-wing government will destroy the founding principles of the state.

By World Israel News Staff

Outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid continued his scathing criticism of the incoming right-wing government on Wednesday, charging that the next coalition would destroy the founding principles on which the State of Israel was built.

During a speech at a memorial ceremony for Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, Lapid said that the “extreme” new government would make Israel unrecognizable to the nation’s founders.

“I did not come today to eulogize Ben-Gurion, I came to apologize to him,” Lapid said, according to a transcript of his speech published by Hebrew-language Channel 14.

“What is happening today in the State of Israel is contrary to everything he believed in…in the Declaration of Independence, the most important moment in the history of the Jewish people in the last 2,000 years, Ben Gurion told us that Israel should be a country [with] complete social and political equality of rights for all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender.

“Now, a new government is being established in Israel, and it does not believe in [the founding principles of the state]. Not in equality for women, not in equality for LGBT people, not in political equality, not in social equality and certainly not in equality for non-Jews.”

Lapid did not provide concrete examples as to how the incoming government discriminates against women, Arabs, or the LGBT community.

Otzma Yehudit MK Itamar Ben Gvir, whose faction ran as part of the Religious Zionism party, has said that he does not take issue with law-abiding Arab Israelis, but believes that the state should clamp down on terrorists.

Similarly, other Religious Zionism MKs have expressed concerns over the IDF lowering physical fitness standards so that women can be recruited to elite combat units. They say that the integration of women into these units could pose issues for religiously observant male soldiers who are already serving in the battalions.

Those concerns have been construed as an opposition to women serving in the IDF by some left-wing commentators.

Lapid repeated his unfounded criticism that MKs from the new government are “inciting IDF soldiers against their commanders,” in a reference to lawmakers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Almog Cohen questioning a 10-day jail sentence for a soldier who was filmed arguing with a left-wing activist.

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Police bulldozed a temporary settlement built by Jewish activists, protesting Bedouin land grabs in the Negev desert.

By World Israel News Staff

Israeli police evacuated a Jewish settlement in the Negev desert on the outskirts of the Bedouin town of Rahat Wednesday morning, just hours after it was built by right-wing activists.

Ma’ale Paula, named after the wife of Israel’s first prime minister, Paula Ben-Gurion, consisted of just a few temporary structures assembled by the Jewish activists.

During the 1948 War of Independence, David Ben-Gurion stated: “If we do not hold on to the Negev, we will eventually lose Tel Aviv. The Negev is the most important stake in the Zionist venture, and our most urgent task is to encourage people to settle in this region.”

In 1953, he resigned from the government and joined the Sde Boker Kibbutz in the Negev.

The short-lived outpost, built Tuesday evening in protest of Bedouin land grabs, carried great symbolic meaning. MKs from the Religious Zionism and Likud parties came to support it.

According to a report from the Jewish Press, the wooden structures at the site bore Israeli flags and a poster featuring Ben-Gurion that read, “In the Negev, the people of Israel and their state will be tested.”

“The State of Israel has abandoned the Negev,” the poster continued. “There’s no governance and no sovereignty. The scattered Bedouin are spreading and the government whitewashes illegal villages and connects them to electricity.”

After the Israeli government passed the so-called Electricity Law in January, which connected unpermitted, illegally built Bedouin homes to Israel’s national power grid, anger over faltering Israeli sovereignty in the Negev has grown.

לאחר שהוקמה הלילה נקודת ההתיישבות ‘מעלה פולה’ בסמוך לרהט בתגובה להתעלמות המדינה מהקמת היישובים הבדואים בדרום, כוחות משטרה רבים פועלים כעת במקום לפינוי המקימים והמעורבים@Now14Israel pic.twitter.com/vqNCc1dSW3

— אריאל עידן (@Arielidan20) February 9, 2022

In a statement, Religious Zionism MK Itamar Ben Gvir, who visited the site, said that “the control Bedouin are taking in the Negev over the country’s lands is a problematic phenomenon that needs to be stopped.

“The solution is to establish more and more Jewish outposts that will prevent this and will create facts on the ground.”

The outpost’s organizers told the Jerusalem Post that the site “is the first in a line of settlements that will be established in the Negev.”

It was created “in response to the lack of governance in the Negev to oppose the spreading of the Bedouin Diaspora,” they said.

Just hours after the structures were assembled, Bedouin from Rahat confronted Jews at the site, including MK Ben Gvir.

Rahat’s mayor, Faiz Abu Sahiban, told Haaretz that he “called the police and asked them to evacuate this outpost and the settlers as soon as possible, otherwise I can’t be sure what the consequences would be. There are calls in the city and on the social networks to get to the place and clash with the settlers.”

By 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, the Israeli police had cleared all Jews from the outpost. Two people were detained for questioning.

The post Symbolic, short-lived: Jewish settlement in southern Israel destroyed appeared first on World Israel News.

The prime minister also compared the divisions in the country in the years before independence to the divisions in Israel today. 

By TPS

Prime Minister Bennett attended the State Memorial Ceremony in memory of the late David Ben-Gurion held on Wednesday, the 48th anniversary of the death of Israel’s first prime minister, according to the Hebrew calendar.

“At the beginning of his public career, David Ben-Gurion saw himself as a Zionist and also as a socialist at the same time,” said Bennett.

“Alongside the Socialist Zionists were religious Zionists, liberal Zionists and spiritual Zionists and more. The multiplicity of identities embarrassed many of them,” he added. “Even Ben-Gurion’s closest friends found it difficult to decide who they were more loyal to, the working class, to which they belonged as socialists, or the Jewish people, for whom they were fighting as Zionists.

“Ben-Gurion made a clear decision – his loyalty is first and foremost to Zionism. His devotion to the Jewish people outweighs his devotion to everything else. The people above the class, the kingdom above the tribe.”

Bennett compared the divisions in the country in the years before independence to the divisions in Israel today. He also said that his government represents many different factions with different ideas of government, but who all share the same goal of preserving the Jewish State, in a coalition similar to the one formed by Ben-Gurion.

“There is a government formed in the name of the same unifying principle, the government is meant to calm the rift,” said Bennett. “We are determined to maintain statehood and a united state.”

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David Ben-Gurion’s grandson Yariv Ben Eliezer cursed Prime Minister Netanyahu during a memorial event-turned anti-government rally.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

David Ben-Gurion’s grandson cursed Prime Minister Netanyahu during a memorial event-turned anti-government rally at Kibbutz Sde Boker on Sunday.

Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, spent his final years at the kibbutz and was buried on the grounds. Sde Boker hosts an annual memorial event for Ben-Gurion, but this year’s event turned into an anti-government rally.

Some 250 demonstrators, who arrived at the event via a 100-strong car caravan, came to protest Netanyahu. They told local media that it was an appropriate setting to protest Netanyahu, because, they say, the current prime minister has failed to live up to Ben-Gurion’s legacy and values.

Yariv Ben Eliezer, Ben-Gurion’s grandson, was present at the rally and gave a short speech.

Addressing the crowd, he said, “You [protesters] came from all over the country to express themselves in protest and say, ‘F**k Netanyahu, and long live Israel.”

His remarks were met with raucous applause and cheers.

נכד בן גוריון נגד נתניהו. עכשיו עם הקובץ. pic.twitter.com/0061Aw0n81

— Almog Ben-zikri (@almogbenzikri) November 22, 2020

The anti-Netanyahu Black Flags protest group said in a statement, “The State of Israel needs to heal from the massive damage caused by Netanyahu.”

“Netanyahu is not Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion was involved in building the country and gathering in the exiles — Netanyahu is busy dismantling society.”

Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin spoke at the ceremony on Sunday. On Saturday, activists wrote the word “Go,” often used by protesters as a demand for Netanyahu’s resignation, on the helipad where Netanyahu landed for the ceremony.

During his speech, Netanyahu called on world powers to refrain from entering the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

“We must uphold an uncompromised policy to guarantee that Iran doesn’t develop nuclear weapons,” he said.

“Thanks to our firm stance to prevent the nuclearization of Iran and our objection to the nuclear accord, many Arab countries have fundamentally changed their approach towards Israel.”

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to break the record for the longest-serving prime minister this week.

The post WATCH: Netanyahu about to become Israel’s longest serving prime minister appeared first on World Israel News.