Fifty-eight years ago, on May 15, 1948, the modern State of Israel was established. The “Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” declared, in part, that:
ERETZ-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 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. . . .
WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the [British] Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948) . . . [there] 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.
In 1954, David Ben-Gurion wrote an historical perspective on the creation of the State of Israel (reprinted in Walzer, Lorberbaum and Zohar, eds., “The Jewish Political Tradition”), in which he said the establishment of the state evidenced a miracle greater than independence:
On the eve of the establishment of the state, the Jewish yishuv in the Land was perhaps the most divided and fragmented of all the Jewish settlements in the world.
In no other land could one find such a conglomeration of different ethnic groups, cultures, organizations and parties, beliefs and opinions, shifting ideologies and international orientations, conflicting economic and social interests, as in the yishuv — as a result of the ingathering of the exiles, the center of all the divisions and splits in Israel.
With the wondrous occurrence of . . . independence, it was as if all the divisions were overcome.
Representatives of all the parties in Israel signed the Declaration — from the Communists, who had forever fought against the Zionist enterprise as reactionary, bourgeois, chauvinistic, and counter-revolutionary, to Agudat Yisrael, which had perceived as apostasy any attempt to bring about the redemption of Israel through natural means . . .
However, it was not only these two extremes that . . . overcame their prolonged and bitter opposition to the state of Israel. The representatives of Shomer Hatzair, who for over twenty years had maintained that a binational state was the only means to realize the Zionist goal . . . participated in the signing. . . .
And representatives of the Revisionists, who had vehemently fought against a state based on partition, also signed the Declaration.
The only obstacle . . . was the last paragraph [of the Declaration] referring to “trust in the Rock of
Israel.” Some radical intellectuals considered those words an apostasy against atheism; on the other side were ultra-Orthodox extremists who perceived the failure to add “and its Redeemer” . . . as an apostasy against fundamental dogma. Nevertheless, everyone signed after negotiations. And not only the parties in Israel but the Jewish people throughout the world were united on that day in their joy and pride over the establishment of the state.
It is difficult to assess which of the two miracles was greater — the miracle of independence or the miracle of unity.
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And both countries will need to re-establish their internal unity in order to survive.