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Israel's Fiftieth Anniversary
John D. Rayner
a privilege to take part in this celebration, and I hope it is in order to make my little
contribution to it in the form of a personal testimony.
My relationship with what was to become the State of Israel goes back to 1934, when,
as a ten-year-old boy growing up in Berlin, I was transferred from a State school to a
Jewish one which later changed its name to Theodor Herzl School.
It was, I think, the only explicitly Zionist school in Berlin. Zionism permeated it in
many ways. Most of the teachers and pupils expected to make Aliyah, and there was
much emphasis on speaking Ivrit, singing Hebrew songs, and knowing the geography of
Palestine, so that soon the names of its Kibbutzim were more familiar to me than the
streets of Berlin.
The school, close to the sports stadium in which the 1936 Olympic Games were held,
was destroyed on Kristallnacht but carried on until March 1939. When, shortly after
that, I was offered an opportunity to come to England, I refused because my heart was
set on Aliyah. Luckily, my parents insisted, and in mid-August, with what turned out
to be one of the last of the Kindertransports, I came over.
After leaving school I joined the Army, and in May 1946, while serving in Egypt, I
seized an opportunity to visit Palestine, where three of my uncles had settled already in
the early thirties, one of them in Nahalal, where Jewish and Arab farmers lived side by
side in harmony and friendship. That's how it should be, I thought. But the political
atmosphere was already tense. British officers were under strict orders, which I ignored,
not to walk about singly but only in pairs; and two weeks later the King David Hotel
was blown up.
After my demobilisation in 1947, I went up to Cambridge, and I well remember the
night of 29th November that year, when, with other Jewish undergraduates, I listened
with great excitement to the radio announcing one by one the votes of the Member States
on the Partition Resolution. It was said that two men, by their impassioned oratory,
had contributed more than anybody to a favourable outcome, and both of them were
Progressive rabbis: Stephen S. Wise and Abba Hillel Silver. Two years later, when I met
a very Orthodox refugee rabbi in a Cambridge streethand told him the news that
Stephen Wise had died, he broke down and wept like a child.
Of course I remember also the 14th of May, 1948, which we commemorate especially
today, when David Ben-Gurion read out Israel's Declaration of Independence, and I
need not describe the mood of the Cambridge University Jewish Society, which was then
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predominantly Zionist.
The same cannot be said of the Liberal Jewish movement which Ijoined as a ‘Minister‘
in 1953. Rabbi Israel Mattuck was an anti-Zionist, though not as fiercely so as his
counterpart at the West London Synagogue, Rabbi Harold Reinhart, and though his
associate in the early years of the Movement had been an eminent Zionist, Rabbi Maurice
Perlzweig.
In the ensuing years there was a gradual shift towards a much more positive attitude
towards the State of Israel, in which I played a part, though never in an uncritical way.
So let me testify that I love the land of Israel with an almost sensuous love which
surprises me with its intensity whenever I go there. To me it is a land of extraordinary
beauty, saturated with the history of my people, including the history of my own family.
When an Israeli immigration official at Lod Airport once asked me ifI had any relations
in the country, I answered, with a little exaggeration: 'Yes, 90% of the population.‘
grandmother is buried in the little wooded cemetery above Nahalal, next to Moshe
Dayan and his family. Israel is the only country in the world which zealously
commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, including my parents, whose records in Yad
va-Shem are the nearest thing to a grave I can visit.
I am as enthusiastic as anybody about Israel's achievements, of which perhaps the
greatest is the revival of the Hebrew language, and I thrill when I learn that the word for
heart transplant is derived from an Ezekiel prophecy, or that the term for a summit
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conference evokes the mountain from which Moses, for the first and last time, glimpsed
the Promised land.
But I have three reservations which I must briefly mention before I conclude. First, the
State of Israel is the only country in the world which discriminates against nonOrthodox expressions of Judaism. Until that monstrous injustice is rectified, every one
of the world's two or three million Progressive and Conservative Jews will feel
disenfranchised by it, and the danger will exist that the State of Israel, which was
supposed to unite the Jewish people, will catastrophically divide it
Secondly, successive Israeli governments have failed to take seriously the grievances,
rights and aspirations of the Palestinians, or to encourage on either side a spirit of
moderation and compromise, let alone of magnanimity and reconciliation.
The lowest point in that sad story was the episode of the Lebanon War, which Abba
Eban described as 'a dark age in the moral history of our people' (ferusalem Post,
International Edition, 8-14 August, 1982). I find it deeply depressing that the political
party which perpetrated that calamity has been re-elected ever since - except for a brief
interlude during which Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated - and
that the present Government is doing its utmost to squander the historic opportunity
created by the 0510 Agreement, since its idea of making peace with the Palestinians is to
infuriate and exasperate even the most moderate elements among them in every possible
.
way.
I also find it humiliating that during all these years the prophetic voice has been heard,
not from Israel‘s Rabbinic Establishment but from secular writers such as Amos Oz and
David Grossman, and I sometimes wonder what inferences a Jeremiah would have
drawn from this moral failure
for Israel's future.
Finally, the very concept of a Jewish state is problematic because it raises questions
about the status of its non-Jewish citizens, and because of the preferential treatment it
feels obliged to give to Jews in such matters as immigration and land ownership. But I
believe that, after two thousand years of Jewish statelessness culminating in the
Holocaust, this anomaly needs to be tolerated for a few generations, and that in the
longer term the problem will resolve itself in one way or another.
'Rejoice with trembling', said the Psalmist (2:11). The reservations I have expressed
explain why it is inevitable that we should tremble a little as we celebrate Israel's Fiftieth
Anniversary, But its positive achievements are stupendous and give us more than ample
cause to rejoice.
sponsored by RSGB, ULPS and
Stemberg Centre, 28th June, 1998
Israel Celebration
(1180
words = 10 minutes)
AMS