Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel

Context

At the middle of the nineteenth century, the Hebrew-speaking population of Palestine was almost nonexistent. Hebrew was used during religious sermons, in communicating the teachings of scripture, and for correspondence with Jewish communities around the world. Meanwhile, on the political front, it took decades until modern nationalism, as developed in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, reached the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, where Palestine was located.

But two parallel processes that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century soon changed this situation. The spread of nationalism throughout central and eastern Europe and the formation of independent nation-states there led many Jewish scholars and intellectuals to contemplate the possibility of making a new nation out of the Jewish religious community. The best known among them was Eliezer Ben-Jehuda, who, in an article published in 1879, called for the revival of Hebrew nationhood in Palestine. The second process was the technological innovations that improved transportation and communication between Europe and Palestine.

Three years after Ben-Jehuda published his article, in 1882, a wave of Jewish immigration from Yemen and eastern Europe (Poland, Russia, and Ukraine) to Palestine laid the foundations for a Hebrew-speaking community. Subsequent waves of immigration followed, encouraged by the emergence of European Zionism and the founding of the World Zionist Organization as an organized political movement in August 1897. The significance of this event was summarized by its leader and first president, Theodor Herzl, who wrote afterward that no one would believe him, but in Basel (Switzerland) he had created the state of the Jews. Encouraged by the success of the Hebrew renaissance in Palestine, the aim of the Zionist Organization was to build, as the Israeli independence proclamation would state, a “National Home” for Jewish people there.

The increasing immigration and the spread of the Hebrew language among natives in Palestine contributed to the steady growth of the Jewish population—some eighty thousand people on the eve of World War I. The importance of this community, however, went far beyond its numbers. Living in a region governed by conservative Islamic rulers, having strong connections with modern European culture, and with no other modern cultural community emerging in its vicinity (as attempts to modernize the Arabic world had had limited success), the Jewish community was the locomotive that drove not only the country's technological and economic modernization but also its cultural and social progress. It gained support from Britain, expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In a letter to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, Britain's foreign secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour, stated that the British government would support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. This statement would be the basis for Zionist organizations' claims for their right to establish a Jewish state there.

The hardships of World War I were a passing episode. The conquering of the land by British forces in September 1918 was followed by the enactment of British civil occupation rule in 1920. On September 11, 1922, the League of Nations made Palestine an official British Mandate. According to Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (accepted on June 28, 1919), the territories conquered by the victorious Allies and inhabited by peoples unable to rule themselves (effectively meaning non-Europeans) would be entrusted to advanced nations (meaning the victorious European powers) until the local people could conduct their own affairs.

The mandate regime was not limited in time. Soon, many local political activists came to believe that they were able and ready to rule themselves. Nationalist sentiments were not limited to the Jewish community; the tightening ties with Europe and the increasing diffusion of ideas from Europe to the Middle East affected the Arab-speaking populations as well. Consequently, the 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of two competing national movements in Palestine: a Zionist, or Jewish, movement and an Arab, or Palestinian, movement. The mandate period was marked by alternating cooperation and clashes with the British regime. Zionists were particularly disappointed with a British memorandum detailing how Britain proposed to organize the British Mandate of Palestine, a plan that was approved by the League of Nations on September 23, 1922. The memorandum separated the eastern and western parts of the British Mandate unequally into Transjordan (77 percent) and Palestine (23 percent), respectively. Transjordan was granted to Prince Abdullah from the House of Hashem, and transfer of administration over that territory took place over a period of five years (though Britain's mandate did not end there until 1946 when the territory became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). Many Zionist activists had hoped that Britain would make all of Palestine a national Jewish home. This disappointment prompted armed struggle against the British occupier.

After a period of relative calm during World War II, the demand for Jewish statehood reemerged with greater force. Britain was victorious but exhausted after the war and could not maintain its global empire. In 1945 armed Hebrew factions united to combat the British government, forming the Hebrew Rebellion Movement, often called the Jewish Resistance Movement. This movement was halted in 1946 after the various factions failed to agree on whether to increase attacks against the British government or to come to terms with it. The gradual British withdrawal from Palestine was only a part of the global process of decolonization and reshaping of the world's map, as the old superpowers (mainly Britain and France) gave up their territorial assets and cleared the stage for other forces, mainly the United States and the Soviet Union.

A secondary but not unimportant factor that contributed to the demand for an independent Jewish state in Palestine was the almost total annihilation of Zionism in Europe during the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. The loss of Jewish lives in Europe left Palestine the center of Zionism. Therefore, Zionists saw great importance in fortifying this center and gaining total control of it. The Holocaust, combined with the global process of decolonization, led to the UN decision to end mandate rule in Palestine and create separate Arab and Jewish states in Palestine west of the Jordan River. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved Resolution 181 about “the future Government of Palestine,” making August 1, 1948, the target date for British withdrawal and the inauguration of the two states. The next morning, a civil war broke out between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, as neither side was entirely happy with the partition of the country. Understanding the futility of continuing its presence in Palestine, the British government decided not to wait until August and to withdraw its forces earlier, on May 15, 1948. That became the new target date for founding an independent Jewish state in Palestine.

The writing of the declaration began on April 23, 1948, three weeks before the due date for the end of British Mandate. Pinchas Rosen, Israel's first minister of justice, together with his assistant, Mordechaj Bühm, wrote a draft that was highly inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and with a clear religious inclination, mentioning God several times. This draft was then edited by Zvi Berenson, the legal councilor of the World Zionist Organization (later a member of Israel's Supreme Court), who added a paragraph defining the state as Jewish, free, independent, and democratic and explicitly mentioning the rights of minorities. Because of pressure from religious circles, this “democratic” paragraph was deleted from the declaration's final version, which included only the word “Jewish.”

In turn, nonreligious and atheist members of the People's Council opposed the mentioning of God in the declaration. Another draft was written by Moshe Sharett (later foreign minister and prime minister). When this version was also rejected, Ben-Gurion wrote a fourth draft, where he added a sentence stating that the “members of the National Council, representing the Jewish people in Palestine and the World Zionist Movement,” were assembled by “natural and historic right” to declare independence. The controversy regarding the mentioning of God, however, was still unsolved. While secular members of the council insisted on deleting the phrase “Rock of Israel,” their religious counterparts wanted to write “the Rock of Israel and its Saviour.” Finally, the phrase “Rock of Israel,” first suggested by Rosen and Bühm, remained as it was. The final version was authorized by the People's Council in a long session, which began on Wednesday, May 12, and continued almost until dawn of the following day.