In Those Days, At This Season
Commanders of the Maccabean People's Army:
1922-1931:
Berl Katznelson (political leader), Israel Shochat (military leader)
1931-1938:
Berl Katznelson (political leader), Mordechai Anielewicz (military leader)
1938-1947?:
Yitzhak Tabenkin (political leader), Mordechai Anielewicz (military leader)
1947?-1953: Yitzhak Tabenkin (political leader), Mordechai Anielewicz (military leader)
1953-1965: Yitzhak Tabenkin (political leader), Josef Glasman (military leader)
1965-1974: Zivia Lubetkin (political leader), Yitzhak Zuckerman & Mansur al-Nashashibi (military leaders)
Presidents of the Governing Council of the Union of Levantine Kibbutzim:
1974-1978:
Transitional Council of All Factions
1978-xxxx: Murray Bookchin (HaKibbutz Hameuhad)
def 1978: (Minority with Arab People's and Young Zion support) Yigael Gluckstein (Adhut HaAvoda), Rostam Bastuni (Arab People's), Eliezer Livneh (HaOved HaTzioni), Jakub Berman (Makei), Moshe Unna (Emunah), Saadia Marciano (Young Zion), Yigael Yadin (HaIkarim), Bashir Barghouti (Arabic Workers Front)
They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat.
[laughter from the audience]
...is that not enough? Fine, then. The full story. Oh you want it from the start? Well, in the beginning G_d created the heaven and the earth...
[more laughter]
Alright, alright, fine then! I think it's an important point, though. With history, it's hard--very hard indeed--to pick a "beginning" that properly, well, begins. Every point in history is dependent on the points before it, and so on and so forth...really, if I wanted to waste any more of your time I could start with the exodus from Egypt into the promised land, the first time we returned here, or the destruction of the Temple by Babylon, the first time we were forced to leave. While our national story does
start there, or in another sense it starts with Maimonides' Thirteen Principles, or in a synagogue in Semlin, the best place to start for our purposes is the 1920s, with one of the more trouble Mutasarrifates of the Ottoman Empire...
A lot of accounts act like the New Maccabees came out of nowhere, that their history begins with Katznelson getting off the boat from White Russia--well, that's really not true. There had been Jewish communities in Palestine for, well, quite some time, and their number was increasing as aliyah began to look a more attractive option thanks to the barbarisms going on in Russia at the time under Denikin, and of course this began to cause friction. After 1908, the new government had started out by being friendly to us if we toed the line--accepting Ottoman citizenship, swearing loyalty, all that sort of thing--but they'd changed their tone not five years later, were trying to bar those making aliyah from landfall, accusing us of being foreign agents, the same old story from all over.
By the early Twenties, Djemal Pasha [hissing and booing] not now! Oh, alright, fine...a
certain gentleman had managed to outmaneuver the other two members of the triumvirate, and the policies of discrimination became policies of destruction. Katznelson, at the time, was growing his influence in the Jewish community's left-wing through his labour organising efforts on behalf of Jewish workers, and so faced his work constantly being opposed by Ottoman authorities. The sudden shift to more direct cultural suppression, the burning of libraries, the breaking-up of prayer meetings, this was something new to him, that he knew had to be fought. So he reached out to the group that had been preparing for such a day--the HaShomer, the watchmen, who'd been acting as an internal police and protecting the Yishuv.
They both needed each other--Katznelson and the Histadrut had the foundations for a Hebrew civil society, and Shochat and the HaShomer had the means to defend that society. A sword in one hand, a plow in the other--that was the way. They took their name from the Maccabees not just because they fought in this land, once, and won, against an empire that hated them, but because in the midst of that bloodshed they found time to restore the Temple. Those were the ideals of Labour Zionism--that in building a new nation, we have a duty to make a just one, not just another state, but a light unto the nations.
The Ottoman armies laughed at us, said we didn't have the men or the resources to last, but once we got the port of Hadera secure, the whole diaspora could join the fight as well. Just like how what some though would last only one night was enough to last eight, what some thought would last only seven years lasted eight times that. It was thanks to His hand protecting us that we weathered the splits--between religious and secular, between kibbutznik and state-builder, and yes, between ourselves and the other inhabitants--and stayed united in our common struggle, to live in our land and keep our customs, whatever those customs were, with no Pasha to breathe down our neck!
On this day, so many years ago, the 7th of Tevet, we came out the other side. Decades of struggle were over--we could hold elections, be part of the community of nations, accomplish the dream of two thousand years. They tried to kill us, and we won.
So let's eat!
[applause from the audience]