JStone
Rookie
- Jun 29, 2011
- 13,374
- 253
The native Jews of Palestine were opposed to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
John F. Kennedy...
When the first Zionist conference met in 1897, Palestine was a neglected wasteland... I went to Palestine in 1939 and I saw there an unhappy land...For century after century, Romans, Turks, Christians, Moslems, Pagans, British all had conquered the Holy Land but none could make it prosper. In the words of Israel Zangwill: The land without a people waited for the people without a land. The realm where once milk and honey flowed, and civilization flourished, was in 1939 a barren realm barren of hope and cheer and progress as well as crops and industries a gloomy picture for a young man paying his first visit from the United States. There, the neglect and ruin left by centuries of Ottoman [Muslim] misrule were slowly being transformed by miracles of [Jewish] labor and sacrifice. But Palestine was still a land of promise in 1939, rather than a land of fulfillment.
I returned in 1951...this time as a Member of the Congress of the United States... to see the grandeur of Israel... The transformation which had taken place could not have been more complete. For between the time of my visit in 1939 and my visit in 1951, a nation had been reborn a desert had been reclaimed and a national integrity had been redeemed, after 2,000 years of seemingly endless waiting. Zion had at least been restoredThe barren land I had seen in 1939 had become the vital nation of 1951.
I left with the conviction that the United Nations may have conferred on Israel the credentials of nationhood; but its own idealism and courage, its own sacrifice and generosity, had earned the credentials of immortality.
For Israel was not created in order to disappear - Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom; and no area of the world has ever had an overabundance of democracy and freedom.