The Declaration of the
Establishment of the State of Israel
Click on
flag to hear "Hatikva" - the Israeli national anthem
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 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
Back to
Activity page
Back to contents
page