Image of the Week: The War of Independence
© D. Yael Bernhard
Meet David, my featured character for the year 1948 in The Life of an Olive. Last week's post showed a girl from 1106 CE pickling olives from this gnarly old tree. Nine centuries later, David is climbing its branches in order to get a better view of the action in the distance: a convoy of British vehicles in retreat. He's not the only one watching, for this is the War of Independence that made Israel a nation. With little training or equipment, the Jews of Palestine fought with everything they could muster and more – a spirit of determination born of the Holocaust, and of centuries of persecution before that. In the Ukraine alone, over 70,000 Jews had been slaughtered in over a thousand pogroms. Refugees by the tens of thousands poured into British-ruled Palestine from Europe and the Soviet Union. By the hundreds of thousands, Jews who had lived for nearly two millennia in neighboring Arab countries were expelled from their homes and fled to Israel, constituting half the population of the fledgling Jewish state (where is their "right of return"?). Thousands died to bring an end to the long exile that had begun nineteen centuries earlier when Roman legions crushed the last Jewish resistance – when this tree was but a youngster. Now the olive tree is nearly two thousand years old – and for the second time in its long life, it is rooted in a nation called Israel.
Also known as the Arab-Israeli War, the fighting broke out on May 15, 1948 – the day after Israel announced its Declaration of Independence. The United Nations Partition Plan, which granted two states for two peoples – with a much larger land mass for the Arabs of Palestine – was utterly rejected by the Arabs, who refused to live peacefully within or beside the Jewish state (and still refuse). A combined invasion by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, with additional help from Iraq, attacked Jewish settlements and took control of Arab areas after ordering local Arab residents to flee to nearby Transjordan. The war lasted for nine terrible months, with a victorious Israel finally re-established as the national homeland of the Jewish people.
In his childish excitement, David finds refuge in the olive tree – symbolic of the ancient tenure of his ancestors in the land. David looks forward into the future even as he is rooted in the past. Though they are barely visible, tiny green olives are already forming all around him. Like the olive tree that was burned to ground in Roman times, his people have regenerated, and offer new fruits to all who come peacefully to harvest.
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