ADDRESS TO THE 1947 CONVENTION

About ten years have passed since I last spoke to a v'ida (convention) of Habonim. I don't see many faces here who were present then. Some have fallen in the war. Some I met in units in Austria, in rescue work at Bergen-Belsen while I was with the Brigade. When we sat down to organize the World Union of Jewish Combatants to include Jews fighting in the armed forces of all nations and as partisans, if not for the fact that the hair of one was white, the other was getting bald, and all of them were already wrinkled, it was a former merkaz of Habonim. I have seen many of them among the crews that brought over the ships, and I have seen many of them in Kfar Blum and in Maayan Baruch. All these reunions have demonstrated that our movement, though small, knew how to rise to historic occasions and to fill posts in our most important battle lines.

Ten years ago, at the v'ida, I told the story of how Bialik wrote the Scroll of Fire, that great masterpiece of his, in which he describes the struggle between redemption and damnation in the first generation of the Dispersal, that generation which witnessed the destruction of the Temple. The inspirational vision according to which he built his poetic masterpiece of the burning of the Temple was a picture of a small hut which was burning before his eyes when he was young.

I said then that it seems to me to be the fate of each generation to experience in its youth a fire which emphasizes for it the volcanic nature of Jewish life in the Diaspora. It seems to be the fate of each generation to experience a fire that is more intense, more tragic, more catastrophic than the preceding one. Unfortunately, it is not always we who determine our course of history. 

Now we have been forced by history to state what we claim, because the world was ready to define our rights for us in Eretz Israel. Once the Mandate became unworkable, because the country which was supposed to implement it declared it as such, once all other mandates were abolished and Arab states organized all around us, including TransJordan carved up from the very body of Palestine, we had to come out and state definitely what we wanted, against the bleak background of the tremendous devastation wrought upon the Jews in the past and upon the present precarious situation of the remnant.

We could only say what we had always felt, what we had always aspired to, that we want to be the masters of our own destiny, free to control our own course of immigration; that the Jewish people should have the Mandate over the development of Palestine; that they should have an equal status among the nations of the world; that we wanted a Jewish state. When this program was first declared, it meant a Jewish state in all of Palestine; and it would be foolhardy to deny that, at the present moment, this program means a Jewish state in part of Palestine.

I firmly believe that it would have been much easier for the world to have given us a Jewish state in all of Palestine at the end of the war than perhaps to give us a Jewish state in part of Palestine now. The deterioration of our position has been the result of Bevin's maneuvering, of his having created such a political constellation, that the obstacles to a Jewish state in all of Palestine seem to have become insurmountable. The stock of the Arab forces which had sunk to a new low at the end of the war has risen tremendously, swollen by the false importance artificially blown into them by the British. Our generation will have to make that tragic decision of consenting to cut off from itself sections of Palestine which are for us more than mere historic sentimentalities.

There is not a spot in Palestine, even though it is completely desolate or inhabited only by Arabs, which is not dear to us. Yet we have to acquiesce to that tragic operation in order to preserve and to sustain that life force which has been so tremendously undermined during these past years.

Our economy is straining at its leash in a critical phase of its development. It cannot be held much longer in its present position where it is exploited by a colonial power for its own aggrandizement and whose one aim is restriction. We are told that, at the birth of every child, there is a guardian angel which continuously strikes and tells it to grow. Our position is such that every time we try to build new things in Palestine, the Colonial Power hits us and tells us not to grow and attempts to restrict any possibility of further expansion. We are not in a position to maintain our defense in exactly the same manner as before, within the same underground limitations. We are not in 1936-1939 now. We are in 1947; and we have seven Arab independent states about us, who can arm openly, who can send military missions all over the world, who have military missions from the great powers coming to them.

We can no longer tolerate a position in which the United Nations is being speckled by independent Arab and Moslem states and we have to stand hat in hand in the corridors while our fate is being decided. It is the tragic irony of our situation that we have to regard our own vivisection as a political victory. It will depend upon our drive, our initiative, and our capacity whether we turn a partitioned Palestine into a Procrustean bed or into a bridgehead.

It may be that we have not yet drunk the cup of bitterness to the full and that within the next few months we may find our security vitally threatened. We are, however, fully confident that we shall emerge, though battle-scarred, with all our positions intact. It may be that we are going to face more critical years than the ones we have been passing through up till now. There are no fat years in Jewish life and in Jewish Zionism. We live in continuous crisis. Sometimes there is a lull, usually there is not. It may be that the next years are going to be even more difficult, because, while our political issue may still be obscured and unsettled and may be tossed about from one committee to another, it may also be that we will be unable to produce any dramatic examples of constructive efforts on a very large scale, on the same scale that we have been evincing until the present moment. It is quite possible that the British blockade, which is being made more severe every moment, will have temporary success. It may be that the crescendo of immigration will temporarily decline.
It may be that for a while we will see another lull, another break, until new tactics are adopted. It may be that strangling legislation and encouragement of Arab internal terror will prevent constructive action on a large scale. There are British officials who are even now saying: "There is no need now for the land laws in Palestine. The Arabs won't sell because their economic position has been so much bettered. They won't sell because of the strong, internal Arab Reign of Terror, which has already sent eight Arabs known for land selling to their deaths."

It may be that we will become isolated from the rest of the world, that everyone will turn his back on us, that everyone will tell us that we are wrong and that we have no right to live. We may hear such reactions from every pulpit and read it in the press. We will have to be immune to that. We will have to know how to continue our struggle. We will have to know how to stand alone against the world. There was a time when a Jew could do that very easily, when the conviction of his own righteousness was strong within the Jew. Perhaps his religion gave him that power. He could see the poritz's dog tear him to pieces, but he knew that the poritz was a dog and that he was right. He could see his brother and his mother herself going on kiddush hashem, but he knew that he was right. But in our generation the most debasing aberration has been the questioning of our own righteousness. Can it be that the entire world is wrong and only we are right? That everyone is out of step except we ourselves? Yes, that is possible; and we must be filled with the conviction that the entire world can be wrong and that we are right.

We have to go down to the very roots of our movement, drink deeply from its primary sources, strengthen our ties with our traditions. We have to develop within ourselves both the feeling for tzaar haumah, for sorrow of our nation, the full awareness of our tragedy, and of ahavat yisrael, the love of every Jew, for the few who are left. Not only the love of the Jew who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, but of that same Beri and Shmeri who were so weak, who embodied all that we call galut characteristics, yet who possessed a tremendous amount of richness and power of endurance within them which we must try to recapture and which help us in our struggle. The Jewish partisan, the Jewish ghetto fighter did not want to leave the ghetto. They wanted their struggle to take place within that background, within that context. They may have revolted against many Jewish attitudes, but they loved the Jews and therefore wanted to fight amongst them. 

Without that inner strength, without the awareness of our catastrophic position, without the highly developed feeling of brotherhood, without the conviction of our righteousness, without this consciousness, it is going to be very difficult for us to live through the years ahead of us.

I wish that I could say that, as isolated as we are from the rest of the world, at least we are unified among ourselves. There was a time when unity went forth from Zion and we could point to the labor movement of Palestine as being one of the few examples of a united movement. Unfortunately, things have changed and we can see no sign of betterment. We cannot say at the present moment that there are signs of a closer unity within our ranks. I think that everyone is aware of the tragic mistake that has been made. The issues over which the movement split have long been forgotten; and the new issues which have arisen have done so, not so much because there are basic differences of opinion, but because we have lived separately, and living separately always compels one to think in different lines in order to justify one's separate existence.

There was a time when we believed that unity, ichud, would have to be imported into Palestine and that it would be brought in by those who were on the front lines of Jewish resistance—those who were fighting in the Brigade, those who were with the Partisans, those with the Hechalutz, those who were among the remnants.

We saw aspirations toward unity in each of these groups. There are enough common sources among us in aliya, in avoda, in klitat aliya (absorption of immigration), in hagana, in Hebrew culture, in the conquest of labor—so many common tasks, so many common values which form the foundation for all our acts at the present time. There can be a mutual tolerance and not competition among the various colonization forms.
Habonim has a very great role to play, because the weight of the American movement transcends its numbers and its influence is felt all over. Everyone, everyone in Palestine, everyone in Europe feels that with America rests the future. The role Habonim has to take upon itself at the present moment is the historic role of complete identification with the yishuv (Jewish community) in Palestine. Common arithmetic points out brutally that we have to lay the foundations of a mass chalutz movement in America itself. Within the next few years, all eyes will be turned toward America.

We have to realize that this identification can take form in only one way, in the revival of the traditional values of chalutziut. The American has to realize that he need not make a special contribution to the yishuv. He must not necessarily be the scientist, the technologist, the professional man. The time has come when America will have to provide the very body and soul of our undertaking in Palestine.

It is this regarding of chalutziut as a career that must be inspired. This is the value which must be included in all our hearts and become once more the slogan for our movement, and from our movement radiate to the rest of American Jewry.

BEN ZION ILAN, Moshava Convention, September, 1947