Too much of the population is either deployed in the field or may soon be, displaced from their homes near the Gaza border or aware that at any moment rocket alerts could sound for incoming missiles from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen or Iran. This year, Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day annually observed for the fallen, will overshadow Yom Ha’atzmaut or Independence Day.
Much like America’s Greatest Generation, the men and women who scrappily fought for Israel’s independence using crude weapons and WWII surplus gear are passing out of history. Few now remember a time when Israel did not exist and some have come to take it for granted. While Israeli Air Force jets won’t be doing flyovers for the 76th, the leftist protesters, some backed by foreign interests, will still continue their rallies and riots that only serve to aid Hamas.
And yet Israel did declare a new kind of independence before its latest Yom Ha’atzmaut.
After nearly half a year of pressure campaigns to end the war, the Biden administration followed through by announcing an embargo on offensive weapons to Israel. It’s not the first time. In 1947, the Truman administration had imposed an arms embargo on Israel. Truman, like the current Democrat in the White House, had played a familiar double game, offering diplomatic recognition to Israel and enthusiastic speeches to Jewish voters, even while privately promising Muslims the opposite and making sure that Israel would not have the weapons to defend itself.
When the Republican Party platform declared that it took “pride in the fact that the Republican Party was the first to call for the establishment of a free and independent Jewish Commonwealth” and condemned the “vacillation of the Democrat Administration”, Truman shot back angrily claiming that he supported the Democratic platform and its call for “the revision of the arms embargo to accord to the State of Israel the right of self-defense.” This was a lie.
Truman had supported the arms embargo from the beginning. Three months before the Democrat platform had been adopted, the administration had backed a UN resolution that included an arms embargo. Truman was saying one thing and doing another. Like Biden, Truman had been following political considerations. That was why diplomats had been warned to stay away from making any anti-Israel moves at the United Nations before Election Day.
Even under the arms embargo, Israel survived an invasion by five Muslim nations.
“You just don’t understand. Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea. And that’s all there is to it,” Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had predicted.
Three generations later, Israel is still here.
Israel’s 76th Independence Day has come around again. Once again the Jewish State is fighting for its survival against Islamic genocidal violence and a corrupt political class in Washington D.C. It’s relearning the old lesson that presidents say one thing for public consumption and do another. And that independence is not just aspirational, it’s a simple matter of survival.
Biden’s betrayal of Israel was inevitable. The blindness of Israeli leaders to that eventuality, their conviction that if they followed every single guideline from the White House, they would have the support they needed to finish off Hamas in Gaza was a delusional fantasy. Israel’s best bet lay in quickly doing what it needed to do. Everything the Biden administration wanted only slowed down the war effort and doomed the very support that Israel had been counting on.
A day after delivering a speech at the Holocaust Museum about his support for Israel, Biden told CNN that the support was gone. But Truman had pulled a similar trick with a rally at Madison Square Garden when he told New York’s Jewish voters that he was responsible for setting up Israel “as a free and independent political state” even while it was fighting for its survival.
The Truman administration continued backing worthless UN truces (the predecessors of today’s equally duplicitous ceasefires) which allowed the Islamic terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of Hamas) to continue attacking Jewish towns and massacring Jews.
While Truman was telling one thing to Jewish voters in New York City ahead of Election Day, Israel was evacuating children as part of ‘Operation Baby’ from front line communities under siege by terrorists during the latest ‘truce’. In Kibbutz Manara, the children had to be evacuated from the mountaintop in vegetable crates in a scene later recreated in the movie ‘Exodus’.
Manara had to be evacuated again after the Hamas attacks of Oct 7 and it’s estimated that half the homes in the community have been destroyed after Hezbollah Islamic terrorists have shot a rocket every day at the village. The people living there can’t go home. But unlike the Hamas supporters crying in Gaza, you won’t see their faces on the evening news.
After the 1948 election, not only weren’t there any arms sales, but the White House was upset that Israel had begun winning. The Egyptians had not only failed to push the Jews into the sea, but the Jews were now pushing them back into the Sinai.
A month after the election, in which 75% of Jews had voted for him, Truman demanded that Israel immediately withdraw or his administration would “re-examine” its mostly non-existent relations. Truman, who would later claim credit for creating Israel, had done little more than provide de facto (not de jure) recognition to Israel, while still maintaining the arms embargo.
Truman’s move allowed Egypt to control Gaza and turn it over to the Muslim Brotherhood for regular terror raids on Israel. And that led directly to the rise of Hamas and the current war.
It’s also why Truman ought to get more credit for creating Hamas than for creating Israel.
Truman did not actually begin selling weapons to Israel until 1950, well after it had survived the war, and only in order to also be able to sell weapons to its Arab Muslim enemies as part of an agreement with the UK to “maintain a rough balance of power between Israel and the Arab states.“
American Jews have long lived with the comforting “Eddie Jacobson” myth that Truman had intervened on behalf of Israel because of a plea from his longtime friend and business partner. The truth is that the Truman administration had opposed statehood, until Israel had gone ahead and declared it, had opposed any Israeli presence in Jerusalem, and blocked the pathway to victory, until Israel had gone ahead and won not because of Truman, but despite him.
Since then history has repeated itself again and again. And too many Israelis, who used to know better, bought into the silly myth that their country existed because Truman “liked” them. Millions of Jews were murdered in Europe despite all the politicians who claimed to like them, but then did nothing for them. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in Israel held off armies and built a state, not because politicians liked them, but because they fought for their independence.
The Oslo Accords, made so that Israel would be liked, brought it to the brink of destruction. If Israel is going to undo that and the entire ‘palestinian’ colonial project, it has a limited time in which to act. Even after Oct 7, it was too consumed with being liked to do what had to be done.
Like America, Israel wants to be liked after Islamic terror attacks, when what it needs is to win.
On the 76th anniversary of its independence, Israel has once again been forced to declare its independence from a White House Democrat who publicly promised support while privately stabbing it in the back. Going into Rafah and finishing off Hamas will be a more meaningful celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut or Independence Day than any flag-waving parades.
Independence is not in the fireworks you shoot off, it’s in taking independent action.
Contrary to popular myth, foreign aid to Israel isn’t proof that Jerusalem controls D.C. but that D.C. controls Jerusalem. What’s often misleadingly described as aid isn’t a big check, it’s an entanglement with the U.S. defense industry that prevents Israel from fighting an extended war without permission. Since the War of Independence and the 1956 Suez Canal War, the priority has been to make sure that Israel won’t be able to unilaterally pursue a military campaign. Once denied weapons, Israel has been given them in exchange for being put on a leash out of D.C.
Oct 7 has become the ultimate test of Israel’s independence. And this Memorial Day and Independence Day will determine whether a nation of nearly 10 million is truly free to do more than mourn its dead, but once again take independent action to protect its living future.
