My Country

Plot

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 rearmament, embattled , blockaded, besieged- Israel alone among the nations face s a battle for its security anew with every approaching nightfall and every rising dawn".
Eban speaks of Israel's massive aid programme to Africa, during the 1960s and early 70s. We read of the genocidal designs on Israel by Nasser, who endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on 4 October, 1958.
In 1963 Nasser and Iraqi President Aref jointly signed a communiqe proclaiming that 'The aim of the Arabs is the destruction of Israel'.

Eban documents some of the Arab terror faced by Israel during this period, which was denounced by General Burns of Canada , the Chief of Staff of the United Nations armistice machinery in the Middle East who compared the indiscriminate attacks of Arab terrorists on Israeli men, women and children with the crimes for which Nazi leaders had been tried at Nuremberg.
Nobody then associated murder of women and children with 'progressive national sentiment'.
Eban details the Soviet incitement of Arab states to attack Israel in the period leading up to the Six Day War of 1967.
He documents the genocidal Arab threats and acts of agression, forcing Israel to react in June, 1967.
He also writes of the masterful way in which pro-Arab propagandists have replaced the reality of tiny Israel threatened by a massive sea of hostile Arab states, with the false idea of the opressed 'Palestinians' fighting Israeli 'occupation'.
Wherever there there was an Arab community of any size, there had to be an Arab state, as though the existance of so many Arab States were not enough to justify a few hundred thousand Arabs being a minority in a non-Arab country. For the Arabs, as for no other people, ninety nine per cent of self-determination and sovereignty was not adequate. Arabs must be sovereign everywhere. Jews nowhere.
Eban also documents some of the brutal Arab terror, of the early 1970s, by Arafat's PLO and the PFLP of George Habash, such as the Jewish children burned to death in a school bus at Avivim in May 1970, amidst whoops of joy from Habash.
Israelis were left with no illusion as to the fate which would befall them if Israel ever became 'Palestine'.
This book provides a birds eye view of Israel during the period under discussion, and has some penetrating and relevant insights.