Message to America from Israel's Premier Yitzhak Rabin

As part of our Bicentennial observance, TIME asked leaders of nations around the world to address the American people through the pages of TIME on how they view the U.S. and what they hope--and expect--from the nation in the years ahead. This message from Premier Yitzhak Rabin of Israel is the ninth in the series.

I write from the standpoint of a small democracy addressing itself to the largest and most powerful democracy in the world. I write, too, from the standpoint of a people that sees in the American idea and value system a reflection of its own heritage.

I register these thoughts to emphasize a general point of which the reader should be aware--in the perception of the thinking Israeli there intrudes an emotional dimension when he relates to the United States. He invariably finds it difficult to be absolutely detached. He does not look at the U.S. as though it were a totally strange country thousands of miles away. The reason goes beyond the presence there of a great Jewish community with which there exists a profound bond of religion and history. It reaches deep into the national instinct.

More than any other nation, the image America projects to us of itself conforms in diverse ways with our own, much smaller self-portrait. What we see is a country that graduated through the same school of ideas as we did.

America's Declaration of Independence is separated from our own by 172 years. Though the class of 1776 and the class of 1948 came from different backgrounds and neighborhoods, they had learned the same lessons from the same old textbooks. They had common teachers who had taught them a system of ethics rooted in a single source, the Bible. They were so indoctrinated with the enlightenment of the Prophets--the abhorrence of injustice, the individual worth of every man and woman and the rights of the people to liberty under the law--that it impelled them not merely to self-determination, but to actual revolution. For both, government by democracy was seen as the most natural system to protect the values that had inspired them.

There is a further quality that the Israeli recognizes as familiar about the generations of 1776 and 1948. Both had an immigrant tradition. Persecution and the search for a better life had impelled them or their forebears to go on what Jefferson called a "quest of new habitations." Both conceived of their societies as havens for the homeless and the persecuted. For both, immigration became pioneering, and pioneering, nation building.

This is the instinctive kinship Israel feels toward America. I experienced it on a personal level in the years I lived in the U.S.A. when serving as my country's ambassador between 1968 and 1973. The overwhelming recollection I have of those years is one of spontaneous reciprocal understanding.

There is, I believe, a political axiom that emanates from this spiritual tie. The heritage of history we share and the tradition of government and law to which this heritage gave birth inexorably endow our two nations with the same fundamental aspirations for ourselves and for the world. America and Israel may occasionally disagree, sometimes sharply, but I cannot conceive of a time when we shall ever fall out.

What our world will look like in decades to come and what will be the quality of its life will be decisively shaped by how this and the next generations of Americans perceive their role in their third century of freedom. Such is the measure of U.S. influence on the future of our contracting planet. America's extraordinary size, its natural resources, its wealth, its technology, its national philosophy and the resilience of its system, all combine to command the responsibility of leadership. So much of what America does (or fails to do), be it internal or external, must ultimately set off ripples, and sometimes waves, that interreact with peoples far afield.

I am reminded, in this connection, of what Abraham Lincoln once said of the American Declaration of Independence: "There is something in that declaration giving liberty not only to the people of this country [America], but hope to the world for all future time."

Were the United States ever to depart from what the authors of its independence willed it to be, then the civilization of freedom as we know it will be greatly threatened. Our century has demonstrated how much the fortitude of the Old World rests on that of the New. It is the lesson of international experience that there can be no freedom anywhere, nor will there be peace in this world, without a United States strong and confident in its purpose.

If what was true of America in Lincoln's day has since been magnified tenfold, so, too, has the responsibility of the smaller democracies toward themselves.

The first condition of our individual strength and survival is our own self-will, not U.S. power. There is no outside substitute for the inner resolve demanded of a democratic society in the pursuit of its national security and the liberty of its citizens. A free nation that is not willing to mobilize all its inner resources to protect its right to live through its own self-sacrifice cannot be helped by others. This is the fundamental doctrine we in Israel live by. We alone are responsible for our own defense. This is how it has been. This is how it must be. I emphasize this principle since I believe it to be the condition of our special relationship with the United States. I emphasize it, too, because I see in all this, above all, the moral justification for the generous aid America has rendered to Israel so that we may have the means to defend our freedom ourselves.

Distance offers perspective, and the view of America from Jerusalem in this Bicentennial year is an optimistic one. What I see is a structure of government genuinely reflective of a people that has an incredible capacity for self-invigoration. I see a national conscience that repeatedly renews itself and asserts itself, fed by roots that reach down into the moral soil out of which America grew. I see a nation that still evokes moral principle in the diplomatic affairs of our world. To a small sister democracy like Israel, this is evidence enough to warrant the confidence that the United States will do good things for itself and for the world as its third century unfolds.

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