Bookstore Glossary Library Links News Publications Timeline Virtual Israel Experience
Anti-Semitism Biography History Holocaust Israel Israel Education Myths & Facts Politics Religion Travel US & Israel Vital Stats Women
donate subscribe Contact About Home

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel

(May 14, 1948)

On the day the British Mandate over Palestine expired – Friday, May 14, 1948 – the Jewish People’s Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum to declare the establishment of the State of IsraelDavid Ben-Gurion created the Council with representatives from a broad swath of the yishuv, including some of his rivals. They were all required to Hebraicize their names, so, for example, Golda Meyerson became Golda Meir.

Two weeks earlier, Ben-Gurion had asked Pinchas Rosen to write the first draft of a declaration of independence. Rosen gave the assignment to a Tel Aviv lawyer, Mordechai Beham, who asked an American rabbi named Harry Solomon Davidovitz for help. The two men wrote a draft in English inspired by the U.S. Constitution. The language was considered too religious for the secularists and sounded too Christian for the Haredim. Dissatisfied, Ben-Gurion turned to his confidante Moshe Sharett for revisions. The next draft was more formal, with no references to God but the addition of the words “a democratic state.”

Ben-Gurion was still unhappy. The United States was pressuring him to delay declaring independence as the State Department still hoped to scuttle partition. Ben-Gurion was committed, however, to declaring the establishment of a Jewish state when the British left and made his own edits to the draft. He removed some of the legalese and reinserted a mention of God and references to the Torah and the prophets. It contained no reference to democracy. Yochai Maital suggests it was “unnecessary to state the obvious – the nascent state would be a democratic one.” 

With only a day before the end of the mandate, Ben-Gurion hashed out a final draft with a haredi rabbi, Yehuda Leib Maimon, and a secular kibbutznik, Aharon Zisling. In response to their protests, Ben-Gurion said, “Each one of us believes in Tzur Israel – the Rock of Israel – as he understands it. For you, Harav Maimon, Tzur Israel is the God of Israel. And for you, Mr. Zisling, it is the might of our people. Please, let’s get on with it.”

One more addition was made to the text after Ben-Gurion’s wife Paula overheard him practicing the declaration. When her husband said the new state would ensure equality irrespective of religion or race, Paul interjected, “And sex.” Acknowledging she was right, the text was changed to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

There is no record of who attended the meeting, but 350 invitations were sent out instructing the recipients to keep the information secret. Word got it out, however, and people started singing Hatikvah in the streets even before David Ben-Gurion began reading the declaration he had written.

The ceremony was held at 4 p.m. before the British left to avoid making the declaration on Shabbat. It took 17 minutes to read the entire 664-word document (by comparison, the U.S. Constitution is almost 8,000 words) in a 32-minute ceremony. The 37 signatories to Israel’s Declaration of Establishment were the members of the Provisional Council of State. Mishy Harman noted, “The group that did sign the document represented many factions of the Jewish population. There were revisionists and Labor Party operatives; there were communists and socialists and capitalists, kibbutznikim, moshavnikim, and city folk; Haredi rabbis and atheists; 35 men and two women; 35 Ashkenazim (mainly Russians and Poles) and two Mizrahim (one Sephardi and one Yemenite. There was a single signatory who had been born in the Land of Israel and a few whose mother tongue was Hebrew.”

Ben-Gurion and 24 others signed the scroll during the declaration of the state; 12 more members of the People’s Council (11 of them, who were besieged in Jerusalem, and one more who was in the U.S.) signed retrospectively. A 38th signature appears but has never been identified.

After Ben-Gurion finished reading the declaration, Rabbi Maimon recited the prayer, “Praised are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, for granting us life, for sustaining us, and for helping us to reach this day,” to which the assembled responded, “Amen!”

Four hours later, Egypt bombed Tel Aviv. The new state was recognized that night by the United States and three days later by the USSR.


THE DECLARATION

ERETZ-ISRAEL (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. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma'pilim (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.

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 community 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ALMIGHTY, 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.

Aharon Zisling
Sa'adia Kobashi
Daniel Auster
Rachel Cohen
David Zvi Pinkas
Mordechai Bentov
Moshe Kolodny
Eliyahu Berligne
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir David Loewenstein
Felix Rosenblueth
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Zvi Luria
Berl Repetur
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Golda Myerson
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Eliyahu Dobkin
Zvi Segal
Bekhor Shitreet
Meir Wilner-Kovner
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
Moshe Shapira
Zerach Wahrhaftig
Moshe Shertok
Herzl Vardi
 

Sources: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Shlomo Cezana, “The Declaration of Independence: Who is the Unknown Seal?” Israel Hayom, (February 26, 2013).
Shlomo Maital, “Megilat Ha’atzmaut: The Real Story,” Jerusalem Report, (August 21, 2023).