My Country: The Story of Modern Israel

Abba Eban, in this work of history, documents the history of Israel from it's re-establishment as a Jewish State in 1948, after 2000 years of foreign occupation, to the situation of Israel on the eve of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The book serves as a bird's eye view of Israel during this period, but also makes some salient specific points, which are spot on. Eban points out that in 1948, 'Palestine' was almost the only country in the world, in which the law overtly discriminated against immigrants or residents on the precise grounds of their being Jewish. The book describes the genocidal Arab aggression against the fledgling Jewish micro-state, when the United Nations voted for partition in 1947. The Arab representative in the United Nations thundered that "Any line drawn by the United Nations will be nothing but a line of blood and fire". Within a week of the partition vote, scores of Jews were murdered. The United Nations voted for Israel's re-birth, but did nothing to assure it's survival against the Arab determination to drown the infant state in blood and fire. Eban aptly refers to the UN as an alligator, which according to zoologists, gives birth to it's young with great tenderness and then devours them with calm apathy. Israel was born as a sanctuary for Jews fleeing persecution. The Fourth Aliyah to Palestine, of the 1920s, was made up of Polish Jews fleeing persecution in that country. The Fifth Aliyah of the 1930s consisted of hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Germany from Nazi persecution. After the war over a million holocaust survivors made their homes in the Land of Israel, as did 700 000 Jews from Arab countries fleeing hostility and pogroms in the lands they had lived in for centuries. Many of these were rescued in the heroic Israeli airlifts known as Operation Magic Carpet from Yemen, and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah from Iraq. Included here is part of the speech by Israel's representative at the United Nations, after the Sinai Campaign of 1956. "It is perhaps natural that a country should interpret it's own obligations for the preservation of security more stringently than those who enjoy greater security far away. If we have sometimes found it difficult tp persuade even our closest friends in the international community to understand the motives for our action, this is because nobody in the world community is in Israel's position. How many other nations have had hundreds of their citizens killed over the years by actions of armies across their frontiers? ...In how many countries does every single citizen going about his duties feel the icy wind of his own vulnerability? ...Surrounded by hostile armies on all it's land frontiers, subjected to savage and relentless hostility, exposed to penetration, raids and assaults by day and night, suffering constant toll of life among it's citizenry, bombarded by threats of neighbouring governments to accomplish it's extinction by armed force, overshadowed by menace of irresponsible re