I join in this salute of Israel today because of my own deep admiration for Israel and her people – an admiration based not on hearsay, not on assumption, but on my own personal experience. For I went to Palestine in 1939; and I saw there an unhappy land...For century after century, Romans, Turks, Christians, Moslems, Pagans, British – all had conquered the Holy Land – but none could make it prosper. In the words of Israel Zangwill: “The land without a people waited for the people without a land.” The realm where once milk and honey flowed, and civilization flourished, was in 1939 a barren realm – barren of hope and cheer and progress as well as crops and industries – a gloomy picture for a young man paying his first visit from the United States.
But 12 years later, in 1951, I traveled again to the land by the River Jordan – this time as a Member of the Congress of the United States – and this time to see first-hand the new State of Israel. The transformation which had taken place could not have been more complete. For between the time of my visit in 1939 and my visit in 1951, a nation had been reborn – a desert had been reclaimed – and a national integrity had been redeemed, after 2,000 years of seemingly endless waiting. Zion had at least been restored – and she had promptly opened her arms to the homeless and the weary and the persecuted. It was the “Ingathering of the Exiles” – they had heard the call of their homeland; and they had come, brands plucked from the burning – they had come from concentration camps and ghettoes, from distant exile and dangerous sanctuary, from broken homes in Poland and lonely huts in Yemen, like the ancient strangers in a strange land they had come. And Israel received them all, fed them, housed them, cared for them, bound up their wounds, and enlisted them in the struggle to build a new nation.
Remarks by Senator John F. Kennedy at Yankee Stadium on April 29, 1956 | Finding Camelot
