“Our own history as a nation and Israel’s have many parallels”, John F. Kennedy

“Before he became president, John F. Kennedy visited Palestine and Israel twice -- once in 1939 and again in 1951. He wrote about the trips in his 1960 collection of speeches entitled The Strategy of Peace.

“In 1939 I first saw Palestine, then an unhappy land under alien rule, and to a large extent then a barren land... In 1951, I travelled again to the land by the River Jordan, to see firsthand the new State of Israel. The transformation that had taken place was hard to believe.

For in those twelve years, a nation had been born, a desert had been reclaimed, and the most tragic victims of World War II... had found a home.”

Kennedy used that recollection to introduce his February 9, 1959 speech to the Golden Jubilee Banquet of B’nai Zion in New York City.

“[O]ur own history as a nation and Israel’s have many parallels - in the diversity of their origins, in their capacity to reach the unattainable, in the receptivity to new ideas and social experimentation...

History records several… breakthroughs - great efforts to which spiritual conviction and human endurance have combined to make realities out of prophecies. The Puritans in Massachusetts, the Mormons in Salt Lake City, the Scotch-Irish in the Western territories were all imbued with the truth of the old Jewish thought that a people can have only as much sky over its head as it has land under its feet...

I would like to... dispel a prevalent myth... the assertion that it is Zionism which has been the unsettling and fevered infection in the Middle East, the belief that without Israel there would somehow be a natural harmony throughout the Middle East and Arab world. Quite apart from the values and hopes which the State of Israel enshrines... it twists reality to suggest that it is the democratic tendency of Israel which has injected discord and dissension into the Near East. Even by the coldest calculations, the removal of Israel would not alter the basic crisis in the area... The basic rivalries within the Arab world, the quarrels over boundaries, the tensions involved in lifting their economies from stagnation, the cross pressures of nationalism - all of these factors would still be there, even if there were no Israel...

Israel, on the other hand, embodying all the characteristics of a Western democracy and having long passed the threshold of economic development, shares with the West a tradition of civil liberties, of cultural freedom, of parliamentary democracy, of social mobility...

The choice today is not between either the Arab states or Israel. Ways must be found of supporting the legitimate aspirations of each. The United States, whose President was first to recognize the new State of Israel, need have no apologies – indeed should pride itself – for the action it took...

The Jewish state found its fulfilment during a time when it bore witness, to use the words of Markham, to humanity betrayed, “plundered, profaned, and disinherited.”But it is yet possible that history will record this event as only the prelude to the betterment and therapy, not merely of a strip of land, but of a broad expanse of almost continental dimensions... [A]s we observe the inspiring experience of Israel, we know that we must make the effort...””
Rick Richman in Jewish Current Affairs
http://jpundit.typepad.com/jci/2006/04/response_to_ton.html