ISRAEL, FLAG OF

national flag consisting of a white field bearing two horizontal blue stripes and a central Shield of David (Hebrew: Magen David), which is also popularly known as the Star of David. The flag's width-to-length ratio is 8 to 11. The early development of the flag of Israel was part of the emergence of Zionism in the late 19th century. Jacob Askowith and his son Charles designed the flag of Judah, which was displayed on July 21, 1891, at B'nai Zion Temple in Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S. Based on the traditional /a>tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, that flag was white with narrow blue stripes near the edges and bore in the centre the ancient six-pointed Shield of David with the word Maccabee in gilt letters. Isaac Harris of Boston presented this flag idea in 1897 to the first international Zionist Congress, and others, including David Wolfsohn, came up with similar designs. Variations were used by the Zionist movement and, during World War II, by the British army's Jewish Brigade Group. The Zionist flag was displayed in Palestine and was raised when Israel proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948. On November 12 of that year a law adopted by the Knesset, the parliament of Israel, went into effect recognizing the Zionist banner as the official national flag. The flags for use on ships contained the same colours and Shield of David, but distinctive backgrounds were designed to make them better recognizable at sea. The exact colour shade for the flag is not specified by Israeli law, nor is it defined by the Standards Institute of Israel. A dark shade of blue is described, however, in a notice (February 18, 1950) of the Israel Office of Information. Lighter shades of blue were used in earlier flags and are still used by some Israeli organizations, but it is said that lighter colours would fade easily in the brilliant sun of Israel. Whitney Smith History The State of Israel The emergence of Israel as a Jewish state on the former territory of Palestine was the central political issue of the Middle East after World War II. The energy, enthusiasm, and skill of the Zionists led to remarkable achievements. Essentially, Israel represented the coming of a modern Western state into the Middle East, and in that fact lay the crux of its achievement and its problems. Relying on private Jewish donations and increasing amounts of economic and military support from Western governments (its relations with the Soviet Union, despite immediate recognition in 1948, were strained), the Israelis also benefited from a highly trained and motivated citizenry to create a unique nation-state. Ironically, they were assisted in this process by the surrounding Arab countries, because the state of siege in which they were forced to live helped to unite them against the common danger and gave them a sense of mission. And, finally, hanging as a tragic backdrop to the state was the memory of the Nazi Holocaust, both a justification and a cause of the final push to success of the Zionist movement. Israel after 1948 In 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, became prime minister of the provisional government. Elections in January 1949 left no party with a majority in the Knesset (Parliament), but the Mapai (Labour Party) of Ben-Gurion, with the largest number of seats, emerged as the dominant party of a coalition government. The new nation did not acquire a written constitution, because of disagreement over what such a document should say about the relationship between religion and the state. In keeping with Zionist principle, the Knesset proclaimed Jerusalem the capital of Israel (even though only a section of the new city was actually held by Israel) and passed the Law of Return, which gave every Jew the right to immigrate. Ben-Gurion formed a succession of coalition governments that kept him in power continuously (except in 195355, when his Mapai associate Moshe Sharett was prime minister) until his resignation in 1963. Levi Eshkol, also of the Mapai, followed as the head of another succession of coalition governments. Upon Eshkol's death in 1969, the Israel Labour Party, which had been formed in 1968 in order to unite the Mapai with the more leftist Ahdut Avodah and with the Rafi (a splinter party of the Mapai founded in 1965 by Ben-Gurion in association with Major General Moshe Dayan), chose Golda Meir, former foreign minister and secretary general of the party, as prime minister. General Yitzhak Rabin, a native-born Israeli, became prime minister in 1974. Rapid inflation, the deep divisions inside the Labour coalition, Israel's relatively poor performance in the 1973 war, and the deep dissatisfaction of Oriental Jews with political domination by eastern Europeans helped bring about the victory of the Likud bloc, a right-wing coalition, and its candidate, Menachem Begin, in May 1977. Begin resigned in 1983, and the Likud bloc remained in power under Yitzhak Shamir. In 1984 neither Labour nor Likud could form a coalition government by itself, so the two created a national unity government. Under the coalition agreement, Labour leader Shimon Peres served as prime minister, and Shamir served as foreign minister until 1986, when the two officials switched portfolios. Because of sharp policy disagreements, the government was often deadlocked, but it did secure a reduction in the rate of inflation. In the parliamentary elections of Nov. 1, 1988, Likud and Labour won about the same number of seats, and in December the two parties renewed their coalition; Shamir remained as prime minister, and Peres served as finance minister. Major issues in the campaign were the Palestinian uprising that had begun in December 1987 and the differing approaches of the two parties toward the peace process. Likud opposed an international peace conference, encouraged building many more Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and wished to retain control over all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since Labour adopted the opposite position on these matters, it withdrew from the governing coalition. On March 15, 1990, for the first time in the history of the country, the Knesset voted no confidence in the government. A narrowly based Likud-led coalition guided Israel through the Persian Gulf Crisis and War of 199091 and into the subsequent Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. In parliamentary elections in 1992, Yitzhak Rabin led the Labour Party to victory by increasing its support from various groupsi.e., new immigrants from the Soviet Union and its successor states, the unemployed, Oriental Jews, and those Israelis who were unhappy with the militant foreign policy of Likud. Although political power in Israel reflected the country's democratic ideology, Israel's political leadership was especially important because of the overwhelming influence the government had on the culture and economy. The mutability of Israeli customs could be seen in the growing presence of American cultural models, which tended to replace European influences after the Six-Day War in 1967, and in the increasing resistance of Oriental Jews to the European Jews' cultural and political dominance. The prosperity and heroic struggle that dominated Israel's founding era from 1948 to 1967 gave way to a period of slower economic growth, political and diplomatic ambiguity, and cultural individualism, associated after 1977 with the policies of the Likud bloc. Massive immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s posed a considerable challenge to the absorptive capacity of the culture, economy, and politics of Israel. History Zionism The Jewish nationalist movement, Zionism, has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews, which is called Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) in Hebrew. Although Zionism originated in eastern and central Europe in the late 19th century, it is in many ways a continuation of the ancient and deep-felt nationalist attachment of the Jews and of the Jewish religion to Palestine, the promised land where one of the hills of ancient Jerusalem was called Zion. This attachment to Zion continued to inspire the Jews throughout the Middle Ages and found its expression in many important parts of their liturgy. The age of the Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century, with its growth of religious toleration and universal and liberal ideals, laid the foundation in western Europe and North America for the emancipation of the Jews and for their participation as citizens in the life of the nations in the midst of which they lived and whose members they became. The consequence was less emphasis among the Jews on traditional religious attitudes and more on assimilation of Western secular culture. This movement emerged also in Germany, where Moses Mendelssohn (172986), a philosopher and a friend of the great German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, emphasized the spiritual and universal aspects of Judaism. The younger Jewish generation gladly seized the opportunity of intellectual enrichment and civic freedom that the new movement, originally called by the Hebrew name Haskala (Enlightenment), offered. Some went the way of complete assimilation, including the abandonment of the faith of their fathers. Others found their place as citizens of the Jewish faith in the new liberal and egalitarian societies emerging in the 19th century in western Europe and North America. Still others applied the new methods of Western scholarship to a study of the Jewish past and produced, especially in Germany, works of lasting value in the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the ancient heritage. Some wealthy Jewsamong them Sir Moses Montefiore and the Rothschild familytried to help their coreligionists in less fortunate lands, especially in eastern Europe and in the Middle East, by establishing schools and introducing them to agriculture and to various trades. For reasons of religious piety, a small number of Jews, supported by donations from outside, settled in Palestine. The interest in a return of the Jews to Palestine was kept alive in the first part of the 19th century in part by Christian millenarians, especially in Great Britain. Among Jews pleading then for a Jewish settlement or state was the American Mordecai Manuel Noah (17851851), who in 1813 became U.S. consul in Tunis and later high sheriff and surveyor of the port of New York. In 1825 he acquired Grand Island in the Niagara River and invited the Jews of the whole world to create a Jewish state, Ararat, there. In 1844 he pleaded with the Christian world in Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews to help the Jews resettle in Palestine. More important but not more successful were the attempts by Lord Shaftesbury, Sir Laurence Oliphant, and others in Great Britain to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Some political writers thought of a Jewish state in the Holy Land as a means of assuring the overland route to India. Others were inspired by religious or mystic ideas, anxious to fulfill the prophecies and bring about the end of the world, as was the eccentric Oliphant. He was accompanied on one of his visits to the Middle East by Naphtali Herz Imber (18561909), a Hebrew poet of Polish origin, famous in the history of Zionism as the author of Ha-Tiqva (The Hope), which became the anthem of Zionism and of Israel, and of Mishmar ha-Yarden (The Watch on the Jordan), a popular nationalist song. These early sympathies with the return to Zion in the English-speaking world found their best literary portrayal in George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda (1876). A German socialist, Moses Hess (181275), influenced by the example set by the unification of Italy, gave the first theoretical expression to Zionism among Jews, Rome and Jerusalem (1862; Eng. trans. 1918). This short book, which contained many thoughts later widely accepted by Jewish nationalists, combined ethical socialism, fervent nationalism, and religious conservatism. Hess believed that the historical ideal of the Jewish people could be realized only in their own historic homeland. He insisted that a moral and spiritual regeneration must precede the settlement there. He hoped that France, which he venerated as the home of the Revolution, would protect the Jewish settlement because it would wish to see the bridge across the Middle East held by a friendly people. Hess's book attracted no attention when it appeared. Only decades later was it rediscovered by the Zionist movement, which had by then developed in eastern and central Europe. The Love of Zion movement Whereas in western Europe the Jews became in the 19th century an integral part of the nations whose citizens they were and fully adopted native language and culture, the Jews in eastern Europe, then identical with the Russian Empire, lived as a separate community with their own language, Yiddish, their own civilization, and their own economic structure. They did not enjoy political or legal equality with the Russians. Further, under the reactionary regime that set in after the reform age of Tsar Alexander II (185581), all hopes for Jewish emancipation were dashed. A wave of bloody pogroms, instigated or tolerated by the government, threatened Jewish lives and property. As a result, large-scale emigration to western Europe and to the United States started. A very small trickle of Jewish youth from Russia also went to Palestine and founded there the first agricultural settlements. In 1882 Leo Pinsker (182191), a physician in Odessa, published Auto-Emancipation (Eng. trans. 1884), an appeal in German to the western European Jews to save the Jewish people from persecution and the misery of dispersion. He applied the ideas of 19th-century European nationalism and secularism to the Jews and propagated the necessity of concentrating them territorially, in Palestine or elsewhere. He found no echo among the western European Jews. However, in Russia a small group, which took the name Hovevei Ziyyon (Lovers of Zion), gathered around him and formed a committee in Odessa to promote the settlement of Jewish farmers and artisans in Palestine. Although these early settlements were able to survive only with the help of Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, they laid the foundations of practical Jewish colonization in Palestine. The most prominent among these early Zionists was Asher Ginzberg (18561927), whose essays written under the pen name Ahad Ha'am (One of the People) became classics of the modern Hebrew language that they helped to create. Ahad Ha'am denied that the majority of the Jewish people could be settled in Palestine; the smallness of the country and the fact that it was inhabited by a large native population seemed to him to be insurmountable obstacles. But, though Palestine according to him could not become a Jewish state, he believed in the creation of a Jewish cultural centre there, a place for the regeneration of Judaism, from which spiritual influences would radiate into all the many lands where Jews continued to live and which would awaken in their hearts a true love of Zion. This early Hebrew Renaissance in Russia also produced several great Zionist poets, among them Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Saul Tchernichowsky (18751943). At the same time, the Yiddish language, an eastern European derivation from medieval German not to be confused with the ancient Semitic Hebrew tongue, was raised from a people's vernacular to a medium of art by a number of writers, the first of whom was S.J. Abramovich (1835?1917), who wrote under the pen name Mendele Mokher Sefarim (Mendele the Itinerant Bookseller).