The
Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel
Primary
historical document
Provisional Government of Israel
Official Gazette: Number 1; Tel Aviv, 5
Iyar 5708, 14.5.1948 Page 1
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, defiant returnees, 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 of
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 community 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).
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
