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In the 61 years since it became a formally recognized sovereign nation, Israel has spent much of its harrowing existence under pressure from its friends, occasionally effective, to make life-threatening concessions to its enemies. Such difficulties did not begin with the state’s creation. Before the long battle for its life and health as an independent country, the aborning state was required to secure some kind of permission for its existence from a majority of the world’s already sovereign nations, gathered in formal conclave in New York City under the roof of a then-new organization called the United Nations—the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dream of an international agency for keeping the world’s peace, difficult as such a thing might now be even to imagine. Prominent among these early problems was the disposition of territory in the impending, albeit reluctant, decamping of a war-battered Britain from its former great empire—which included the land then known as Palestine. Perhaps even more difficult to imagine was the fact that a not-insignificant part of the world was feeling at least some measure of sympathy for what had recently happened to the Jews, around 250,000 of whom had survived Nazi slaughter but been forced by British policy to remain encamped in Europe under dreadful conditions not so different from those imposed by the Nazis while the Jewish community in Palestine was eager to welcome them and had been undertaking to bring them into the country illegally.

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