'Stubbornly fighting for life': how Arthur Koestler reported the birth of Israel

The Guardian

Seventy years ago, Israel declared independence, and the Manchester Guardian sent the leftwing intellectual to cover the nascent state. But was he an altogether accurate witness?

Young people in Tel Aviv celebrate on 29 November 1947, the day the UN voted to allow the creation of a Jewish state.

" 'In the beginning was chaos and muddle,” reads the first line of the June 1948 dispatch from the coastal city of Tel Aviv. The state of Israel was less than a month old when the Manchester Guardian launched a series of articles by the journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler. The country had declared independence on 14 May.

"In the midst of a conflict with Arab Palestinians, coupled with an invasion by surrounding states, Israel had no clearly accepted borders but was hastily forming a government. So young was the country that the Israeli visas stamped on Koestler’s and his partner’s passports in Paris were numbered five and six. On arrival, he found airport signs freshly painted in English and Hebrew, while immigration and customs officers had not yet received uniforms.

. . . "He arrived to an Israel vastly unrecognisable from the regional powerhouse it is today. Notwithstanding open conflict, Israel’s untested leaders were gathering Jewish militant factions into one army and forming a nation of disparate Jews from across Europe and the Middle East. After close to three decades in which the territory had been under the British Mandate for Palestine, the United Nations proposed, in 1947, to split the area into two, forming independent Arab and Jewish states. Civil war erupted, and Jewish leaders later announced Israel’s creation." . . .Facebook

Israel at 70: jubilant US embassy opening masks fevered times
"Move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is celebrated in land where ‘Netanyahu is king and Trump is a god’ "

. . . "Trump’s decision to recognise the holy city as Israel’s capital was made in stark defiance of long-held international consensus that the status of divided Jerusalem should be negotiated with the Palestinians." . . .