Archive of 1948 open

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By age 20, Elad Peled was a senior commander in the Palmach, one of the branches of Israel’s pre-state army. He was wounded during the fighting and was taken to the hospital. On the way, he passed the Israeli town of Pardes Hanna, and remembered there was a girl he had met and liked who lived there. He wrote a quick note on a piece of paper and threw it out the window, saying that he was trying to contact her. A few days later, her parents came to the hospital with flowers and, just a few weeks later, Peled married Zimra, also a member of the Haganah, who had been accompanying convoys trying to reach besieged Jerusalem.

That was 67 years ago, just a few months before the creation of the state of Israel. Today, Elad and Zimra (who was one of only 100 babies to be born on Ellis Island, the immigration gateway to the United States) are among two of the 700 interviewees compiled by Toldot Yisrael, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to sharing the testimonies of the founders of the state of Israel.

Peled had a long career in the army, reaching the rank of major general, and then became the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture in the 1970s. His generation is fast dying out.

“Later today, I have a funeral for one of our boys,” he told a small group of journalists upon the opening of the archive. “Of all the generals of the 1967 war, I’m the only one still alive.”

Toldot Yisrael, which aims to preserve oral histories from the period surrounding the creation of Israel, is similar to a project of the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation to gather oral histories of Holocaust survivors. Each of the interviews is at least two hours long, for a total of some 3,000 hours of raw footage. Some of the interviews were used for Eyewitness Israel 1948, a series produced jointly by Toldot Yisrael and Israel’s history channel. This series of 10-15 minute films have been downloaded and viewed more than 500,000 times.

In one of these films, Suzy Eban (the wife of former Israeli diplomat Abba Eban) talks about the 1947 United Nations vote on partitioning Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. She said the outcome was not clear. In one case, she said, a member of the Israeli delegation followed a representative of a Latin American country to the men’s room. “He recognized the man’s shoes under the door and he knocked and he said, ‘You promised to vote; they are voting now,’” she recalls. “And he voted.”

Project head Eric Halivni, originally from Cleveland, said Eban even kept the original “scorecard” she used to keep track of the votes. When the partition plan passed, mass celebrations broke out.

“If you ask most people where they were on May 14, 1948, many of them can’t remember,” Halivni said. “But the partition vote on Nov. 29 [1947] is a touchstone. Everyone remembers exactly where they were.” For example, he said, Shlomo Hillel, who later became the speaker of the Knesset, was a spy in Beirut at the time. After the partition vote was announced, a mass protest rally was held in Lebanon. So as not to blow his cover, Hillel attended the protest, while a few miles away in Jerusalem, there was dancing in the streets. The celebrations were short-lived, however. The Arab states rejected the partition plan, and launched an offensive war against what soon became the Jewish state.

The archive is stored at Israel’s National Library. There are plans to digitize it and to make it available to the public and historians. New technology will make it easily searchable.

Today, Peled is almost 87. Every week, he says, his fellow fighters from that time are dying.

“Being part of the generation of ’48 is unique in the history of nations,” Peled said. “You can’t find survivors of the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. We were part of Jewish history that occurs once every thousand years.”

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