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This item is a speech that Uziel gave to members of the American King-Crane Commission to Palestine in 1918. The investigation commission visited Palestine in May and June of that year as part of the deliberations concerning the future of the country after World War I. Already known as a leader in the Yishuv, Uziel was asked to address the members of the commission. My esteemed peers: For many years we have awaited your arrival on our soil. We waited, as we believed that your arrival fulfills our eminent, longing of millennia. To our great pleasure, the joyous day has arrived wherein your feet walk on the holy soil. Your eyes shall see the flourishing community of the People of Israel in our Land, and your ears shall hear the soul’s longing of the People of Israel dwelling in the Land, the dream of the entire People of Israel that has dwelled in the Diaspora, in all its avenues and tributaries. It is with boundless pleasure that I am so honored to present to you on behalf of the People of Israel its welcome of peace, and I say, “Welcome, thou angels of peace.” My esteemed peers, I see in you not only emissaries of the peace conference, but emissaries of all humanity. The inspiration for peace in one land and for one people is the inspiration for peace the world over. I look on you as the emissaries of the supreme stewardship that by supreme grace has bestowed absolute triumph, and [that] admonishes our benevolent and beloved government—that of Great Britain over the Holy Land—the land about which our Torah says: “It is a land the lord your God cares for; the eyes of the lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end” [Deuteronomy 11:12], and which shall emerge from our lips first and foremost, and from the mouths of the covenantal kingdoms who shall come after, heralding to the People of Israel, the oppressed and tortured, exiled and wandering, dispersed and scattered over the earth for these millennia, a heralding, I say, according to which 14 | Angels of Peace Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, “Mal’akhe Ha-Shalom,” in Sefer Mikhmane ‘Uzi’el: ma’marim kelaliyim, mikhtavim tsiburiyim u-le’umiyim, ne’umim yesodiyim li‑tehiyat Yisra’el u-vinyan artso (1939, Jerusalem: ha-Va’ad le-hotsaa‘t kitve Maran, 2003), 435–38. 74 | b e n -z i o n m e i r ha i u z i e l the ­ establishment of a national home and safe haven for the People of Israel in the land of our ancestors is a necessary provision for the continued national existence of the People of Israel, as well as the Jewish soul’s uplifting since we became a nation and unto this day. Our longing—the longing of all Israel to establish for ourselves our national home in this, our ancestral Land—is not a longing that stems from love of the [British] rule and the government, but rather a longing hidden in the depths of our hearts since God took us from our Land with a strong arm until today. This necessary longing that our history of Diaspora persecution and the murders committed in our day and before our eyes in various lands, is the clearest and most reliable testimony that the People of Israel cannot continue its existence without a safe haven and national home wherein it will continue its political, civil, and spiritual life in full freedom and autonomy. We want to return and to live our political and spiritual lives in our Land, to return and to build the Land, to return and to fulfill Torah law, which abounds with mercy and compassion for all who are created in God’s image, and which treats one and all with the same law, as it is written: “The community is to have thesamerulesforyouandfortheforeignerresidingamongyou”[Numbers15:15]. God forbid we constrain any individual; God forbid we offend the religious and national sensitivities of any of the nations, or negate the rights of all citizens. We want to join hands in productive work with all communities and nations, to make the land flourish and to live therein in freedom, love, and peace; and we want to plow the desolate land by means of large-scale, commercial, and faith-based agriculture, and to revive the land from its desolation; to employ therein thousands and tens...

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