ican sion th a t its the oks hed
Walter Jacob
War marked the birth of Israel and fighting has been continuous through the decades. After two thousand years of selfimposed pacifism a vigorous militancy was born. It was necessity, not a fighting ideology which brought this about. Israel became an independent state on May 14, 1948 and established its military forces on the same day. David Ben-Gurion , the Defense minister formed this conscript army out of the paramilitary Hagganah, Palmach , and units of Irgun and Lehi . He had quietly developed a structure through 1947 as he knew that Arab attacks would come immediately, as they did. These defense forces actually began in 1907 as Bar Giora which, along with its successor organizations was intended to provide protection for the settlements against marauders. During World War I a Jewish Legion and a Zion Mule Corps assisted the British . A defense force was created in April 1920 during the first Arab riots; it was expanded in the 1936-1939 riots and eventually formed the basis of the Hagganah. The Israeli armed forces have fought a major war along with numerous small engagements in every decade since the creation of the State.
How was this new military entity to fit into the Jewish thought and the halakhah. No Jewish armed forces had existed for thousands of years and Jews fighting for other lands also represented a new experience as demonstrated in an earlier essay in this volume. The traditional halakhah provided virtually no guidance for the troops or the leadership of newly independent Israel .
If placed into a halalkhic setting, the entire struggle could be seen as milhemet mitzvah(mandatory commanded war), a struggle to defend the new state and its people— the land as provided by United Nations Resolution and expanded through the defeat of aggressive, attacking neighbors. When viewed through the lens of ancient biblical Israel the pattern, unfortunately has been very much the same. Although many of the modern settlers came from the sea, not from the desert, possession of the land was similarly contested and a cessation of hostilities never endured long.