An Address delivered to American Zionists in Jerusalem,
September 3, 1950

My friends, we are in the vortex of a great revolution, Jewish
history is at the flood of its making. We have fought a war, we
have established a State, and are building it up, but peace still
eludes us; still, with security unsure and the future naked, our
main purpose is unachieved. For long we must defend our free-
dom and frontiers against an enemy forty times as numerous in
an area 220 times as large. For centuries the land had been ne-
glected by foreign lords; the Jewish-Arab war almost led to its
utter ruination, and at the end of it only one dunam in twenty
was tilled. We must absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants
who can find salvation only in Israel, and in the same breath
erect a new culture and society of which no Jew shall be
ashamed. On us depend the prestige, the self-respect and dignity
of all Jewries.

We need time to do all this. We hope that what the United
Nations has done under the aegis of the United States to
stop aggression in Korea may strengthen world peace. My per-
sonal belief is that there will be peace for the next three or four
years at least. But we live in troubled times, and it would be
sinful not to use that tranquil interlude to affirm and fortify the
security of Israel and bring home every Jew in the lands of Islam
and Eastern Europe, for whom the choice is death imminent
where he is or independence in his own free country. It means
the reception and integration of six hundred thousand in the next
three years, and it will cost not less than a billion and a half

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