Exploring the Israeli Declaration of Independence

The Israeli Declaration of Independence "on one foot":

When Israel was declared a state in 1948, David Ben-Gurion read The Israeli Declaration of Independence. This source sheet examines that text.

David Ben-Gurion (First Prime Minister of Israel) publicly pronouncing the Declaration of the State of Israel, May 14 1948, Tel Aviv, Israel, beneath a large portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, in the old Tel Aviv Museum of Art building on Rothshild St.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to adopt the Partition Plan dividing the land of Palestine then controlled by the British into a Jewish and Arab state. Shortly after this vote, the British government decided that British rule would end on midnight May 14th, 1948. The Jews would have the right to declare a state at 12am, May 15th, 1948 which falls out on the 6th of Iyyar on the Jewish calendar.

Fast forward a few months to the 5th of Iyyar, Friday May 14th, 1948. Debate raged in the Jewish council convened by David Ben Gurion about the new Jewish state’s Declaration of Independence. Religious members of this Jewish assembly insisted that this declaration mention the God of Israel while many secular Zionists felt any mention of God would be blasphemy. One political party even insisted the declaration be signed at midnight when the British mandate officially expired. The religious parties asserted that such a situation would mean that the state would be “born in sin” and threatened to leave the convention as the Sabbath approached. A compromise satisfying both the secular majority and the religious delegates seemed impossible.

David Ben Gurion realized that to succeed any declaration of Jewish statehood required all the stakeholders to agree. He proposed that rather than refer to God, Israel’s declaration would end with a mention of placing trust in Tzur Yisrael, The Rock of Israel, a biblical term used as a synonym for God but one that could be interpreted differently by members of the assembly possessing a more secular outlook

If you were to write a Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, what would you put in it?

Translation of the Israeli Declaration of Independence (via the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland.

This section focuses on the connection of the People of Israel with the Land of Israel.

How do the first 2 paragraphs in this section differ in their arguments?

In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma'pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

This section focuses on ingathering, settling, and cultivating the Land.

What did you learn that was new? What surprised you?

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE'S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE BASIS OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

This section focuses on the right of a people to have their own country.

Should all people have their own state?

Which one(s) of the following reasons for founding the State of Israel is/are most compelling to you: The Bible, Jewish history, anti-Semitism, Zionism, the Hebrew language (and its revival), the Holocaust, the UN Resolution (11/29/47 - the Partition Plan), military victory, or the Declaration of Independence?

What do you want to learn more about?

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called "Israel".

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

This section focuses on justice, social justice, and democracy.

What are things that you value? Are they found in this section?

Are the values in this section Jewish values? Are they important in the modern world?

Is anything missing from this section?

What does it say about Israel that this section is included in its Declaration of Independence?

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

This section focuses on the rights of Arab inhabitants of Israel.

Are you surprised to learn that Israel extends citizenship to all Arab inhabitants of the sovereign state of Israel?

What responsibility does this give Israel? What responsibility does this give to the Arab residents?

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

This section focuses on peace with Israel's Arab neighbors.

What does it mean that Israel offered peace to its Arab neighbors in its first public statement?

For this passage to be fulfilled, what is your hope or dream?

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream - the redemption of Israel.

PLACING OUR TRUST IN THE "ROCK OF ISRAEL", WE AFFIX OUR SIGNATURES TO THIS PROCLAMATION AT THIS SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COUNCIL OF STATE, ON THE SOIL OF THE HOMELAND, IN THE CITY OF TEL-AVIV, ON THIS SABBATH EVE, THE 5TH DAY OF IYAR, 5708 (14TH MAY,1948).

This section focuses on uniting Israel and Jews around the world.

Israel asked the Jews of the world to rally by its side. What do you think this meant in 1948? And what do you think it means today?

The section suggests that the "redemption of Israel" is ongoing and not complete. What do you think this means? Do you feel a part of this?

The term "Rock of Israel" was a compromise between those who did and didn't want G-d in the Declaration of Independence. Does the inclusion of this term make it easier or harder for you to connect to the document?

Signed by: David Ben-Gurion, Daniel Auster, Mordekhai Bentov, Yitzchak Ben Zvi, Eliyahu Berligne, Fritz Bernstein, Rabbi Wolf Gold, Meir Grabovsky, Yitzchak Gruenbaum, Dr. Abraham Granovsky, Eliyahu Dobkin, Meir Wilner-Kovner, Zerach Wahrhaftig, Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen, Rabbi Kalman Kahana, Saadia Kobashi, Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin, Meir David Loewenstein, Zvi Luria, Golda Myerson, Nachum Nir, Zvi Segal, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman, David Zvi Pinkas, Aharon Zisling, Moshe Kolodny, Eliezer Kaplan, Abraham Katznelson, Felix Rosenblueth, David Remez, Berl Repetur, Mordekhai Shattner, Ben Zion Sternberg, Bekhor Shitreet, Moshe Shapira, Moshe Shertok

https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/declaration%20of%20establishment%20of%20state%20of%20israel.aspx

Musical Version

Context: This is a video from the a cappella group The Maccabeats. They composed this song in 2018.

How does this musical setting change your experience of the words?

How do the pictures in the background change your experience of the words?

Comparison of the Israeli and American Declarations of Independence

Noteworthy similarities and differences exist between the American and Israeli Declarations of Independence. Both declarations assert independence and the right of their populations to control their own destinies, free from legislative impositions and despotic abuses. In the Israeli case, however, immediate past history was included, and it reflected earlier Jewish catastrophes and the prospects of potential physical annihilation. Both declarations sought self-determination, liberty, and freedom, derived their claims based on human and natural rights, promised safeguards for the individual, and proclaimed an interest in commerce or economic growth.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence contained a list of historical claims to the land of Israel. The Declaration cited benchmark historical events when the international community sanctioned the Jewish state’s legitimacy, particularly the acknowledgement to build a national home given by the League of Nations (1922) and by the United Nations (1947) to establish a Jewish state. While there were skirmishes going on between Americans and the British when the American Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, when Israel declared its independence it was in the midst of a full-fledged war for survival with the local Arab population and surrounding Arab states. The on-going war notwithstanding, the Israeli Declaration of Independence includes a declaratory statement offering “peace and amity” to its neighbors and the request “to return to the ways of peace.” Both declarations made reference to a higher authority: the Israeli Declaration of Independence does not mention religion, but it closes with the phrase “with trust in the Rock of Israel [Tzur Yisrael].” The choice of this phrase was Ben-Gurion’s verbal compromise, made to balance strong secular and religious pressures. Any precise mention of religion might have required mention of religious practice, which could have created enormous social fragmentation in the early fragile years of the state. By contrast, the American Declaration of Independence appealed to the “Supreme Judge, protection of the Divine.”

https://israeled.org/resources/documents/israel-declaration-independence/

With appreciation to Rabbi Dina Rosenberg, Yair Walton, Rabbi Yoni Regev, Tzvi Pittinsky, Reconstructing Judaism's Haggadat Ha'atzmaut, the iCenter, JCRC, Center for Israel Education, Lookstein, and Rich Moline.

Appendix A: Megillat HaAtzmaut, annotated by Rich Moline

Eretz Yisrael (why? What Yisrael means)was the birthplace of the Jewish people (really?) Here their spiritual, religious (difference between spiritual and religious?) and national identity (what does this mean?) was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood (1000BCE King Saul – monarchy established), created cultural values of national and universal significance (nod to secular after mention of religious) and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.(why not Tanakh?)

After being forcibly exiled from their land (586BCE/70CE – why not BC and AD?), the people remained faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope (religious/secular – never forgot or gave up – HaTikvah bat shnot alpayim) for their return to it and for the restoration in the land of their national freedom.

Connected to this historic and traditional attachment (again), Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in masses. Pioneers (chalutzim), ma’apilim [immigrants coming to Eretz Yisrael in defiance of restrictive legislation] (British imposed strict immigration laws, ran British blockade. Name: Moses because of SPIES generation won’t enter Holy Land – some say they’ll go anyway – means audacious) and defenders (sovereignty/nationhood – link to ma’apilim), they made deserts bloom (link to chalutzim), revived the Hebrew language (Eliezer Ben Yehuda), built villages and cities, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants (not citizens – l’khol toshavei ha’aretz – not ezrachim), and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the call of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national revival in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration (letter from UK foreign sec’y Balfour to Baron Rothschild – His majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for the Jewish people…) of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which gave explicit international recognition to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz Yisrael and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its national home (why not religious or cultural? Who is this written for?).

The Shoah which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz Yisrael the Jewish State, which would open wide the gates of the homeland to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the family of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe (she’ereet haplaitah) (1st Chronicles), as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz Yisrael, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community (yishuv- pre-state settlers) of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be recognized among the founders of the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947 (streets in modern Israel), the United Nations General Assembly (no more League of Nations – continual intersection between Jewish history and world history. Recognition that we don’t exist in a vacuum) passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution (resolution called for establishment of provisional government). This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable. (Israel as a Jewish state)

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE'S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY (YISHUV) OF ERETZ YISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ YISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL (Eretz Yisrael, Am Yisrael, Medinat Yisrael).

WE DECLARE that effective from the moment of the termination of the Mandate tonight, the eve of Sabbath (Erev Shabbat), the 6th of Iyar, 5708 (14/15 May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with a constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called Israel.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration (aliyah) and for the ingathering of the exiles (kibbutz galuyot); it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its citizens; it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel (underscores the message of Israel as a Jewish state); it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, beliefs, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the entirety of Eretz Yisrael.

We call upon the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the family of nations.

We also call upon - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the building of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand in good faith to all neighboring states and their people in an offer of peace and neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

We call upon the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally around the Jews of the community (yishuv) in the tasks of immigration (aliyah) and development, and to stand by their side in the great struggle for the realization of the dream of generations - the redemption of Israel.

PLACING OUR TRUST IN THE ROCK OF ISRAEL (TZUR YISRAEL), WE AFFIX OUR SIGNATURES TO THIS PROCLAMATION AT THIS SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COUNCIL OF STATE, ON THE SOIL OF THE HOMELAND, IN THE CITY OF TEL-AVIV, ON THIS DAY, SABBATH EVE (EREV SHABBAT), THE 5TH DAY OF IYAR, 5708, 14TH MAY,1948.

David Ben-Gurion

Appendix B: The Hidden Author of the Declaration of Independence

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-739705

Appendix C: Verses Referencing G-d as “The Rock of Israel”

Appendix D: Other Thoughts

It is important, at the outset, to read the declaration from start to finish, to experience it as it was meant to be experienced: as a single, integrated statement. But first let’s go back and reconstruct the scene of its proclamation.

The physical setting, on Rothschild Boulevard, is the former home of Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv’s first mayor. Built in 1909, it was renovated in the 1930s in the so-called “International Style.” Today it is known as Independence Hall; in 1948, it was the Tel Aviv Museum, an art gallery.

The date is May 14, a Friday afternoon, and the time is 4:00 p.m., only a few hours before sundown and the onset of the Sabbath. For several days now, Zionist leaders and statesmen have been in a frenzy of activity. The British were supposed to assist a UN commission in implementing the 1947 partition plan, but they made no effort to do so and now their mandate will end on the Sabbath. They even unilaterally moved up the date, and General Sir Alan Cunningham, the last British high commissioner, has already boarded an outward-bound ship in Haifa harbor. The Union Jack is being lowered everywhere.

In the resulting void, the Jewish state, as recommended by the UN General Assembly, is about to be born. Who will recognize it? Will the world applaud? Most importantly, who will provide it with needed arms?

For months, the country has been in turmoil. Since the UN resolution in November, a civil war has raged between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The Jews have held their own, and then some—but at great cost. They have secured a chunk but not all of the territory allotted to the Jewish state (in particular, not the Negev), and they also hold some of the territory allotted to the Arab state, including the seacoast town of Jaffa. But the 100,00 Jews of Jerusalem are under siege, and the road is too perilous to send relief convoys from Tel Aviv. Among the isolated Jerusalemites are eleven members of the People’s Council, the proto-parliament, who should be at the museum in Tel Aviv for the afternoon ceremony.

In the meantime, the Jewish settlers in the Etzion Bloc, southwest of Jerusalem, have been overrun by the Arab Legion. Reports suggest that the defenders have been massacred by local Arabs. At the same moment, the armies of the neighboring Arab countries are gearing up to invade once the British decamp. There are already warnings that the Egyptian air force may bomb Tel Aviv. The Jews, at this point, have no air force of their own.

Under other circumstances, a declaration of national independence would be made at the national theater, Habimah, in the large square that it overlooks. But that would be tempting fate: nearly the entire Zionist leadership will attend the ceremony, thereby presenting a tempting target for an enemy. So the smallish museum has been chosen, invitations have been issued at the very last minute, everything is hush-hush, and the press has carried no notice of place or time. Yet, despite the supposed secrecy, Tel Aviv knows all of the details and the streets around the museum soon fill up.

The members of the People’s Council who are in Tel Aviv and who will be signers of the declaration have met earlier in the afternoon, at the nearby building of the Jewish National Fund, for the purpose of debating and approving the declaration. Ben-Gurion is in the chair. He has had only two hours of sleep, and has already spent the morning with his military chiefs. He presents the declaration, and a debate ensues. Cutting it short, he calls for a vote. On the first ballot, sixteen members vote for the declaration, eight abstain. Ben-Gurion then asks for a unanimous second ballot, and he gets it. The members now know what will be in the declaration, and all have agreed to sign it despite any reservations.

They arrive at the museum and settle into the hall. When Ben-Gurion’s car pulls up, he emerges with his wife Paula to the salute of a policeman. His crisp return salute, captured on film, will become one of the iconic images of the day. The hall is now packed, standing room only.

Ben-Gurion rises, strikes a gavel, and announces that he will now read “the founding scroll” of the new state.

There are different ways to designate the constituent parts of the declaration, which has been divided into as many as seven or eight sections. The convention in Israel is to split it into four sections: historical preamble; proclamation; principles of the state; appeals to the world. At the conclusion of these four sections comes the affixing of signatures.

When Ben-Gurion finished reading the declaration, Rabbi Fishman-Maimon, a member of the People’s Council, recited the Sheheḥeyanu, the blessing of thanksgiving. Many would remember it as the most moving aspect of the proceedings.

The members of the People’s Council then came up, one by one, to sign the parchment in alphabetical order. Moshe Shertok, the foreign-minister-in-waiting, held it as each signed his name. Blank space was left for the members who could not be present.

Some in the audience now expected a speech. But then the strains of Hatikvah descended from the building’s second floor where the Philharmonic Orchestra had been crammed. After the anthem, Ben-Gurion banged his gavel and made this announcement: “The state of Israel has arisen. This session is adjourned.”

The ceremony had lasted a little more than a half-hour. The parchment was taken off for safekeeping in the vault of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. The next morning, Tel Aviv had a taste of what was to come when Egyptian Spitfire aircraft bombed the city.

The declaration was written in haste, under the dual pressures of a deadline and a war. From the very outset, it was a controversial document. Even some of its signers thought it flawed, perhaps even deeply flawed. The structure, the content, and the style met with criticism from different and sometimes opposing corners. Had the authors had another few hours or days or weeks, they might have produced a different statement. What is remarkable is that in such difficult conditions they did produce a lasting declaration, one that still resonates more than 70 years later.

Unlike America’s Declaration of Independence, the Israeli document doesn’t breathe fire—against anyone. Indeed, one might question whether it even qualifies as a declaration of independence; for if so, independence from whom? To answer that question, we must reconstruct the peculiar political circumstances that gave the declaration its peculiar character, and to do that we’ll proceed to examine the declaration for what it reveals about five themes.

For each of the five themes we can analyze what the declaration says and doesn’t say; whether or not an issue of principle or politics arose in the drafting stage; and how the text has been interpreted at various points over the past 70-plus years. Here follow the five themes, in order.

1. Identity. Who declared the state? By what authority, in whose name? The entity being declared was “a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel,” but what did “Jewish state” mean to those who wrote the declaration? What does its name, Israel, reveal about the identity of the new state? If there were other alternatives—and there were—why was this name ultimately preferred?
2. Religion. If readers are familiar with any aspect of the declaration’s composition, it is the dispute over whether or not to mention God. The debate spilled out into the public arena at the time, and was famously resolved by mention of Tsur Yisrael, “the Rock of Israel,” in the concluding passage quoted above: “Placing our trust in Tsur Yisrael, we affix our signatures to this proclamation.”

We know the story of the basic tension in this passage: Ben-Gurion wanted a formula that could be signed by both an Orthodox Jew and an atheistic or Communist Jew. Tsur Yisrael was an ambiguous compromise. We’ll reexamine this episode, but other passages in the declaration also required that choices be made about the role of divine promise in the rights of the Jewish people to the land. In general, the earliest drafts made the most references to God; with each successive draft, the number shrank, eventually reaching none. And yet Tsur Yisrael made the cut. So is it right or wrong to regard the declaration of independence as a secular document?

1. Legitimacy. How did Israel’s founders express in words the legitimate claim of the Jews to statehood? What was the mix of historical, religious, and legal claims put forward in the text? Which ones were directed internally, to the Jewish community, and which externally, to the world at large? And why were some kinds of claims preferred over others?

In particular, how much significance should be attached to the issue of international legitimacy? The declaration refers six times to the United Nations, mostly in connection with UN General Assembly resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Earlier drafts not only cited the UN resolution but affirmed that the state would be established in the borders specified on the map of the November 1947 partition plan.

In the end, as we have seen, all mention of the borders was dropped after a very close vote in the People’s Administration. What does the absence of any territorial references suggest? Did the declaration commit Israel to any territorial limits or configuration?

Nor is that all. In the final draft, a reference to the 1947 UN plan as a partition plan was also cut at Ben-Gurion’s insistence. Did the declaration reject an Arab state in Eretz-Israel?

1. Rights. It is often assumed that the declaration proclaimed Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state. In fact, the word “democratic” doesn’t appear in the text. The omission wasn’t just a matter of carelessness. The word appeared in earlier drafts but was then deleted. Why? Are there nevertheless passages that could be read as effectively insisting on the state’s democratic character—so much so as to license subsequent legislation asserting that the declaration constitutes Israel as not only Jewish but also democratic?

And what of individual rights? Israel’s declaration, like America’s, justifies the establishment of the state in terms of its pledge to uphold the rights of its prospective citizens. But which rights? “We hold these Truths to be self-evident,” states the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Israel’s declaration also makes numerous references to rights, and these references, too, underwent an evolution in prior drafts.

Yet all but one such reference is to the collective rights of the Jewish people. What does that say about how the founders understood rights in the first half of the 20th century? When, in the second half, Israel’s Supreme Court expanded individual rights, claiming a basis in the declaration’s principles, was it being true to it? Similarly, what were the aspirations and apprehensions behind the declaration’s discussion of collective Arab rights?

1. Law. If I were writing a series of essays on the American Declaration of Independence, this one would be unnecessary. The American declaration served an immediate political purpose: independence. The Bill of Rights and then the Constitution served as the foundation of American law.

Indeed, something similar was supposed to have happened in Israel. The declaration of independence promised a convening within six months of a “constituent assembly” charged with drawing up a constitution. But because of the war and then postwar politics, this never happened.

In the absence of a constitution, a declaration that was never meant to serve as the basis of law became a kind of quasi-constitution, retroactively vested with legal standing. Far from being only a historical document, it became and remains a presence in contemporary debates, especially over rights. Has the declaration stood up to this test? Is it really the ultimate bulwark of the Jewish and democratic state?

To this day, these five topics are among the most vexing and controversial issues surrounding Israel. Religion, borders, democracy, rule of law, rights—not to mention Zionism itself: about each, the declaration raises a host of questions not all of which it answers unequivocally. The reason had partly to do with the need to find internal consensus, and partly with the need to satisfy international opinion. Jurists today read and reread the document in the search for answers, and to discover intent.

But another way to read it is as a contingent document—that is, for what it tells us about a moment in the history of Israel: a defining moment, at a point where every decision and every word had fateful consequences.

Improvised Israel

The declaration isn’t preserved in memory only as an image of the parchment. Equally famous is the sound of Ben-Gurion’s voice reading the declaration, as well as a brief film clip of him reading parts of it. But there is no film of him reading the whole thing.

Why? After all, 1948 was already well into the age of mass media. True, the radio still ruled. When Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to reach their audiences quickly, they did so via the radio. For some famous speeches, we have only audio, a prime example being Churchill’s “darkest hour” speech after Dunkirk in 1940.

But this was also the era of newsreels in movie theaters. From 1933, for example, we have full filmed versions of Adolf Hitler’s first speech as chancellor and FDR’s first inaugural address. And we also have many films of famous speeches during the war years, including FDR’s so-called “infamy speech” in Congress right after Pearl Harbor in 1941. So why not a full film of Ben-Gurion declaring Israel’s independence?

The answer says much about the improvised nature of the whole episode. An audio version wasn’t going to be a problem. A recording was made in the museum, and listeners made their own recordings from the live radio broadcast. But the only moving-picture camera at the May 14 ceremony belonged to a cinematographer, Nathan Axelrod by name, who owned a company that produced weekly newsreels. At the last minute, the Jewish Agency commissioned him to film the great occasion, but he had only four minutes of film in stock to cover a ceremony that was expected to last a half-hour.

Ben-Gurion then arranged to signal Axelrod at the most important points in the proceedings to indicate when the camera should roll. After the ceremony, the Jewish Agency press handlers cut up the film into four parts, and sent them out to various news agencies for use in newsreels. As a result, less than a minute of the original survived in Israel. At a later time, the sound recording was overlaid with this fragment, but watching it closely reveals that there is no synchronization between the movement of Ben-Gurion’s lips and his words.

So we are left with Ben-Gurion’s voice and some excellent still photographs, including by Robert Capa, one of the world’s most famous photographers. But the absence of a good filmed version creates a certain distance between us and the declaration, as if it were something from another era, not ours.

That is not entirely bad, however. It was a different era, in the history of the world and in the history of the Jews: an era of desperation, uncertainty, and hope in the brief interval between the horrors of the Holocaust and the resurrection of Israel. If the new state couldn’t cobble together a 30-minute film of its most historic moment, think of how difficult it must have been to fight a battle for survival with scraps of outdated technology left over from a previous war.

The fragmentary state of the film is a reminder: we must understand the founders in their own time. The certitude and security we enjoy today were utterly alien to them. The declaration is a testament not only to the supreme wisdom of its authors but also—despite everything—their sheer, unadorned courage.

- Martin Kramer

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2021/04/the-most-significant-document-composed-by-jews-since-antiquity

Appendix E: How the Proclamation of the State of Israel came to be

Israel’s declaration of independence wasn’t something the founders had time to debate at leisure. It was compiled over a fairly brief period of time. The active interval was about three weeks long, from the third week of April 1948 right up to the hard deadline of May 14, the day prior to the date scheduled by the British for the end of the mandate and their departure from the land.

We owe a lasting debt to the Israeli legal scholar Yoram Shachar, who did the painstaking reconstruction of the declaration’s drafting process. Having tracked down the early versions, held in private hands, he pieced together the puzzle in an 80-page article in the Tel Aviv University Law Review (2002). His yeoman work was published before the papers themselves became a hot item when, in 2015, the heirs of the lawyer who composed the first drafts tried to sell them at auction at a starting price of $250,000. The state of Israel blocked the sale. In 2019, with arbitration having failed to resolve the issue, the Supreme Court ruled that the drafts were “part of the cultural property of the state of Israel, testament to our past, and part of our collective identity,” and were thus to be handed over to the state archives.

Three weeks

The drafting process itself was hugely complicated; what follows is a simplified outline that greatly compresses the process but will suffice for our larger purposes in this series of essays.

After various abortive starts and suggestions, the process really began on April 24, when Felix Rosenblueth (soon to be Pinḥas Rosen, the future first justice minister of Israel) asked Mordechai Beham, a thirty-three-year-old Tel Aviv lawyer, to try his hand at a draft. Beham went home and in turn asked help from a friend, Harry Solomon Davidovitch, a Lithuanian Jew who in the interim had served as a Conservative rabbi in America.

Davidovich had the text of the American Declaration of Independence. Copying parts of it by hand, Beham then translated it into Hebrew, making suitable emendations along the way, and submitted his draft to Rosenblueth. Dissatisfied with what he read, Rosenblueth gave it to his friend, the future Supreme Court justice Zvi Berenson, who would later claim to have written the declaration himself over a period of 48 hours without the aid of a preliminary text. The draft—clearly drawing upon Beham—then came back to Rosenblueth, who still wasn’t satisfied. So Beham and another jurist, Uri Yadin, took another stab at it.

At this point, May 12, the draft went to a five-man committee effectively headed by Moshe Shertok (later Sharett, Israel’s first foreign minister). Shertok worked through the night, at first from scratch but eventually making use of some of the previous draft. The next day, May 13, he presented his version to the committee, where it encountered disagreements. So David Ben-Gurion took the text home, closeted himself in his office, and in perhaps ten minutes reduced the declaration by a quarter and added crucial elements.

The next day, May 14, Ben-Gurion presented the draft as a fait accompli to the People’s Council, the yishuv’s proto-parliament, where a truncated debate took place. Promised by Ben-Gurion that they could make amendments later, the members adopted his version and rushed off to the Tel Aviv Museum where Ben-Gurion read the text before the nation and the world. Not a word has been changed since then.

Over the course of the three-week process, things had gone into and come out of the text in consonance with the preferences of individual drafters. Beham, the young lawyer working under the influence of a rabbi, entered the most religious elements. Berenson, a man of very liberal tendencies, made greater room for individual rights. Shertok and Ben-Gurion were concerned with establishing legitimacy.

Although the mix changed over time, all of these elements feature in the document as read on May 14. If the drafters had argued for another week, or a few days, or even a few hours, it would have read differently, just as it might have done had Ben-Gurion himself been as free to dwell on it as Thomas Jefferson was when working on the American Declaration of Independence.

But he wasn’t. While the declaration is identified with Ben-Gurion more than with anyone else, he didn’t spend much time on it. He believed there should be a declaration of statehood, but he let others do the drafting and didn’t devote much of any waking day to its content. In taking his final cut at it on the night before the declaration, he gave it his unique imprimatur but did so on the fly.

Ben-Gurion’s prime concern, though not his exclusive one, seems to have been to assure that the declaration said nothing that would limit Israel’s war plans. Thus, his diary entry for May 13, 1948, the day he edited the text, is almost entirely devoted to war matters. At that time (as we saw in last month’s essay), the Etzion Bloc, a cluster of Jewish settlements outside Jerusalem, was under siege by the Jordanian Arab Legion. In his diary, Ben-Gurion is clearly preoccupied with this emergency: lives are at stake, and so is the fate of Jerusalem itself. Only at the end of the entry does he laconically write: “At six o’clock, a People’s Council meeting to discuss the phrasing of the declaration which Moshe [Shertok] prepared. In the evening, I prepared the final edit of the draft”—namely, the draft he would offer to the People’s Council for its approval in the early afternoon of the next day.

When, at that meeting, objections were raised by attendees who were seeing the draft for the first time, and Ben-Gurion responded that they could express their reservations later but that for now they should accept it, this is how he explained it to them:

We are living in an abnormal time. First, the mandate ends today. Second, a state of emergency. Third, over the last few days we couldn’t bring in a significant number of [People’s Council] members stuck in Jerusalem, despite their legitimate request. . . . The purpose of the declaration isn’t to delve into political clarifications (and we have lots of political scores [to settle]). Its purpose: anchoring the declaration of independence. This is its main function. I agree . . . that the text isn’t the height of perfection. And there is no one among its drafters who thinks it’s the height of perfection. But the purpose was to give just those things that, in our opinion, provide a basis for what we’ll do today, for the people of Israel, world opinion, and the UN. We’re declaring independence, nothing more. This isn’t a constitution. As for the constitution, we will have a session on Sunday, when we will deal with it.

Having been asked to put their reservations aside, the members agreed to do so as a matter of urgent expediency. Had they had time for a general debate, certain passages might have read differently.

A friend of mine once told me he had read the declaration together with his granddaughter, dwelling on every phrase as though they were reading a portion of the Torah. Not only is there a natural inclination to do so, but there is a visual cue: the official copy of the declaration was written on parchment like a Torah scroll and in the same calligraphic font, Ktav Stam, used in preparing such a scroll. Indeed, the artifact in Hebrew is called a megillah, a “scroll,” a word also used to describe certain sacred writings.

Does it deserve the appellation? In the interest of adding perspective, it may be helpful to adduce a few rather mundane facts. For one thing, Ben-Gurion didn’t read the declaration from this scroll but from three mimeographed pages; precisely because the text had been in flux until the last minute, the calligrapher had no time to produce a final document for the ceremony. There, signatories affixed their signatures to a piece of blank parchment, temporarily attached to the mimeograph. That parchment was later stitched to two larger sections of, in the apt description of the Israel State Archives, “parchment-like paper” containing the calligraphic text, and then the “three parts were treated and made to look identical.” (In fact, while the parts do look identical, the stitches are clearly visible.) The complete object wasn’t ready until June.

The proper way to read the declaration, then, is to focus not only on the text but also on the stitches. These remind us of the degree to which this is a contingent text, evolving against a deadline in the midst of other dramatic developments and stitched together as phrases appeared and disappeared. Later, the text would be canonized, and its every nuance parsed as to the intent of the “founders.” Although no one can deny such intent, it is important to remember that any phrase may read “exactly” as it does because the drafters just ran out of time to debate it.

Here is one example, related to style rather than substance. One of the changes made by Ben-Gurion was in the way paragraphs opened. In the penultimate draft by Moshe Shertok, each paragraph began with “Whereas” (ho’il v’-): “Whereas the Jewish people,” “And whereas in every generation,” “And whereas the Mandate,” and so forth. There were nine of these, culminating with “Therefore” (l’fi-khakh) we declare the state.

The evening before the declaration, Ben-Gurion crossed out all of the “whereases.” Shertok never resigned himself to this alteration, as he explained in an interview thirteen years later:

I believe that [Ben-Gurion] weakened the logical sequence of the document. . . . I was of the opinion that by beginning the declaration with the word “whereas” and repeating it at the head of each paragraph, a sense of close continuity would be introduced which would keep the reader in growing suspense till the final hammer blow: “Therefore!”

Ben-Gurion did not believe that this kind of formulation was suitable for such a document, particularly in Hebrew, so he began his draft by simply citing a series of facts, one after the other. His conclusion, which also began with the word “Therefore,” had, to my mind, no apparent connection with what had preceded it. I thought that this constituted a serious defect in the declaration, but there was no time to thrash out the matter properly, so that is how it went.

Independence or statehood?

Another characteristic of the declaration, certainly as compared with the rousing language of the American Declaration of Independence, is its subdued tone. The difference is perhaps analogous to that between The Star-Spangled Banner and Hatikvah. The American national anthem is a call to rally around an embattled flag. The Israeli national anthem is about long-term perseverance, a hope that never flags. Whenever, at contemporary events, both anthems are played with a quick transition between them, the difference is palpable. Both are moving, but in very different ways, and this difference in tone can be traced to a very fundamental divergence between the two declarations themselves.

In particular, although the Israeli document is called a declaration of independence, its actual formal name is otherwise: the Proclamation of the State of Israel. Not independence, but statehood: the two may seem identical, but they are not.

Not every state has a declaration of independence. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, for example, do not. Most states that do have declarations of independence had belonged to empires from which they separated or seceded, often in struggles of liberation. They thus declared independence from another polity; their declarations often include a long litany of complaints against the misrule of their former overlords, followed by a call to arms. Fully 70 percent of the American Declaration of Independence consists of a bill of particulars concerning King George III’s “repeated injuries and usurpations” and his trampling on the liberties of the colonists.

The yishuv likewise waged a struggle against the repeated injuries and usurpations of Britain under, in their case, King George VI. It was this Britain that shut the doors of the Jewish “national home” to the Jews of Europe at the hour of their greatest need—a greater injustice than any inflicted on the American colonies. Indeed, Britain’s decision to give up the Palestine mandate may have been partly the result of the blood-stained campaign waged against it by the Jewish underground in Palestine. Yet the Israeli declaration doesn’t include a single grievance against the departing imperial overlord.

Why not? There are two reasons.

First, a bill of particulars had already been delivered, and quite recently. This was the “Declaration of Political Independence” made by the Zionist Executive Council, the highest body of the Zionist Organization, on April 12—that is, a month before the end of the mandate. In a dramatic midnight session, the Council had declared “its decision to establish in the country the high authority of our political independence. . . . Immediately upon the end of the mandate, and no later than May 16, there will come into being a Jewish provisional government.” It was precisely to implement this decision that the Zionist Executive, in the same declaration, created the People’s Administration headed by Ben-Gurion.

The “Declaration of Political Independence” was written by Zalman Rubashov (later Shazar, the future third president of Israel), a man justly renowned for his rhetorical powers. Scholars don’t include it in the drafting history of the May 14 declaration because it can’t be shown that it was used as a source-text by the drafters. In my view, this underestimates its role as an inspiration. But, whatever its influence, the earlier declaration certainly exempted the later declaration from the need to settle open accounts with Britain. “Behold,” it cried,

the days of the British mandate have ended. On May 15, the UN will take back from the British government the trust given to it by the League of Nations 28 years ago, and which it did not uphold. The denial by the British mandate of its purpose grew and grew, and became in the last ten years the basis of Britain’s policy in the East. Instead of assisting the immigration of Jews to their national home, the gates were closed before the persecuted of our people in the most tragic hour of their dispersion. Britain imposed a blockade on those who reached these shores, and recruited forces from afar to condemn them to lives of danger and loss. They [the British] forfeited the barren lands of our country to the eternal desert and our dogged rivals; they chose as an ally the allies of the greatest tormentors of our people and the enemy of all humanity. The hand that locked the gates of the land in the face of our tortured brethren, for whose salvation the national home was mandated by the entire League of Nations, opened those same gates to the [Arab] vandals and invaders who entered through the crossings to prevent the implementation of the decision of the nations, and to plot to finish that which Satan [that is, Hitler] did not complete.

And now before Britain’s departure, the mandatory government strikes at the foundations of our creative work, and forfeits to chaos that which we built up with painstaking perseverance over generations. The land of our redemptive hope is about to become, God forbid, a trap for the remnant of Israel. Therefore, the world Zionist movement, in agreement with the entire house of Israel, is resolved, upon the end of the failed mandatory government, to banish foreign rule from the land of Israel, so that the people will rise up and establish its independence in its homeland.

Now, that sounds like a declaration of independence in the best American tradition. The British closed the gates of Palestine to the Jews? The British also closed the gates to the American colonies in order “to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; [and] refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.” The British in Palestine allied themselves with our tormentors, opening the crossings to invaders? The British did the same to the American colonists by “endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” And so on.

Thus, if none of this spirit made its way into the Israeli declaration, one reason is that Rubashov’s declaration already delivered the bill of indictment. But there is a second and more profound reason: the British didn’t have to be defeated and thrown out. That struggle had ended, and they were leaving. Nor was the Israeli declaration compelled to rally anyone against Perfidious Albion. The Jewish state, in the Israeli declaration, would arise as of May 15, 1948 in a void resulting from “the termination of the British mandate.” There would be no governing authority from which to declare independence.

The declaration doesn’t even declare the state now. In its words, the state just “comes into effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate, being tonight”—not in opposition to or rebellion against anyone but as the successor to a vacated authority.

True, there had been one last stab at including a condemnation of the British. At the People’s Council meeting on the day of the declaration. Meir Vilner, of the Communist party, proposed an article denouncing the oppression of both Jews and Arabs by British colonialism. Shertok replied: “If we go into historical assessments and definitions, I’m afraid it will spoil the celebratory spirit of the declaration, and also its political logic at this time.” When another participant argued that Britain’s conduct since 1939 should at least be condemned by omitting any mention of the promises of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Ben-Gurion ruled otherwise. “I disagree with the proposal to erase the Balfour Declaration. It’s ridiculous, and it would be understood as vindictive small-mindedness, and bad form.”

The new Jewish state also had something going for it that the American colonies lacked. States declaring independence from another polity usually have to build their legitimacy from scratch. Israel’s declaration assumes that the legitimacy of the state is a settled matter thanks to the UN General Assembly resolution of November 1947. It is the UN, says the Israeli declaration, that “passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution.” The yishuv, in establishing a state, was simply fulfilling a requirement of the international community.

In all of these respects, the circumstances of Israel’s birth were an anomaly, as was duly noted by Arthur Koestler in his 1949 book Promise and Fulfillment:

Virtually all sovereign states have come into being through some form of violent and, at the time, lawless upheaval which after a while became accepted as a fait accompli. Nowhere in history, whether in the time of the [post-Roman Empire] migrations, the Norman Conquest, the Dutch War of Independence, or the forcible colonization of America do we find an example of a state being peacefully born by international agreement. In this respect, Israel is a freak. It is a kind of Frankenstein creation, conceived on paper, blueprinted in the mandate, hatched out in the diplomatic laboratory.

Later, Koestler writes, at the implementation stage, Israel would secure its independence in a violent cataclysm, like all other states. But, like no other state in history, it received its license to exist by a two-thirds majority vote of the world’s other independent states. In declaring independence, moreover, Israel could claim to be on the side of international agreement, while the Arabs were in rebellion against it. So the declaration doesn’t include a call to arms; instead, it includes a call to Israel’s Arab neighbors for peace.

“Great modesty”

Because Israel never declared independence but merely statehood, some have complained that the declaration itself is anemic—a weak combination of self-justification and legalistic exposition. Drafted not by the nation’s writers or poets but by lawyers and politicians, it may legitimate the state but it hardly stirs its citizens to any kind of action.

This was one of the factors behind a contemporary expression of disappointment by Uri Yadin, one of the lawyers who had collaborated with Beham in working on the drafts. As he confided to his diary at the time:

It was a terrible disappointment for me; a deep depression descended upon me. The ceremony in the museum before a small audience, as though this was hidden. Without celebration, without an uplifting of the spirit, without inspiration of the historic hour. Such was the content of the declaration: watered-down, without strong emphases, confused, lacking all daring, decisiveness, or pride. What a distance between this speech-in-a-Zionist-committee and the ringing echoes of destiny we hoped would be sounded by the declaration.

Others have sounded a similar note from time to time. In response to such criticism, Elyakim Rubinstein, a former Supreme Court justice, has maintained that the declaration does indeed convey a “spirit of celebration.” But, whichever side one comes down on, there was and is a larger issue here.

America’s declaration is strident and bold because the resolve of American colonists needed to be stiffened. After all, they shared language and descent with their British overlords. They had once been loyal subjects of the same king, and now they were taking up arms against their brethren.

The Jews dwelled alone, and they knew it. They didn’t have to be told that they must fight, because they knew that if they didn’t, they would perish. No American colonist had anything like the Holocaust in the back of his mind.

What is more, the yishuv had been in a state of preparation for years. Arab attacks that had grown in intensity after November 1947; threats by Arab states to invade; the knowledge that Holocaust survivors, family, were still being turned away from Palestine’s shores—all of these meant that there was no need for a call to arms. In fact, the clandestine armies were already in place. All they needed now were real arms, which would begin to flow in with independence.

In this light, the declaration shared something of the character of the ceremony in which it was read out 73 years ago. This is how the journalist and Zionist functionary Yitzḥak Ziv-Av, who attended the proceedings, described them only a few days later:

The ceremony was very brief, slightly hurried, overly dry and without external markings of festivity. No features stimulating excitement or imagination. The ceremony began with the pounding of a gavel, and without words. With nothing more than a gesture of his hand Ben-Gurion invited us to stand for the singing of the anthem. While some might have expected to hear grand words—about fire, blood, shadows of the past, an end to subjugation, and an historical occasion—these words were not voiced. Everyone kept his emotions inside. One day we will appreciate the great modesty with which an embattled nation declared its state, its dream that had come true. Some perspective of time is needed for a person to understand that those 33 minutes changed him to the core—himself and every other Jew.

Indeed, the restraint in the document, as in the ceremony, was in some ways deceiving. Golda Meir, one of the two women signatories, described Shertok as “very controlled and calm as compared with me.” But, she would write in her memoirs,

he later told me that when he wrote his name on the scroll, he felt as though he were standing on a cliff with a gale blowing up all around him and nothing to hold on to except his determination not to be blown over into the raging sea below—but none of this showed at the time.

That is perhaps how best to appreciate the character both of the declaration and of the mood on that day in May: a lifeboat being outfitted in the midst of a brewing storm by a crew unbendingly determined to prevail even as the winds howl about them, water cascades over the deck, and shoals loom ahead.

- Martin Kramer

​​​​​​​https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2021/05/three-weeks-in-may-how-the-israeli-declaration-of-independence-came-together/