Spoken on December 12, 1948

In the road we open today there is set the crown of our fight
for the Homeland and freedom. Into its making went the most
tragic heroism and the greatest grandeur of that fight since the
day we were called to face our many enemies and save Jeru-
salem.

This was the heart and soul of the War of Independence that
has ranged over the country now for more than a year. It was, it
still is, a struggle in the eternal city and round about it, and even
more a struggle for the road to it. On mastery of the road hangs
the city's fate.

Our Third Return to Israel took a course opposite to the First
and the Second. We have come now not westering from the east,
but from the Occident moving eastward, not from desert to sea,
but from sea to desert. Of the three regions of the Land--moun-
tains, lowland and valley--we possessed the valley first. We took
only little of the lowland, and late. Of the mountains, we held
almost nothing except for Jerusalem, which in every generation
from every quarter drew Jews to it. Within the last century this
magnetism has turned Jerusalem into a Jewish metropolis, with
a great and growing Jewish majority. But it also meant that
Jewish Jerusalem stood severed from the main centers of rural
and urban settlement, for it was the coastal belt we held for the
most part and the Valleys of Jezreel and Jordan, north of Lake
Tiberias and south of it. In normal times the threat to Jerusalem
did not strike the eye. An hour's journey to Tel Aviv seemed of
little concern, so long as it was safe. How deadly was the danger

-294-