Martin Kramer on the Israeli Declaration of Independence
The beginning of a new series investigating how the Israeli Declaration of Independence came about, and what the text reveals about the country it brought into being.
The declaration came together so hurriedly that if the drafters had argued for even a few hours more it would have read much differently.
The name Israel came by a process of elimination, because there wasn’t time to come up with anything better.
Going by the usual telling of the founding, religious and secular Jews clashed over whether Israel’s declaration should evoke God’s covenantal promise. How accurate is that account?
On May 14, 1948, Israel’s founders wanted to emphasize to the world that while the Jewish people had been born in the Land of Israel, its state was the adopted child of the United Nations.
In all but one of the instances in which “rights” appear in the Israeli declaration, they refer to a collective right, not an individual one.
Israel’s founders made little of the declaration at the time. It took decades of work by figures of widely different political stripes to make it the towering document it is today.
Israel’s declaration was never intended to function as domestic law. There’s no reason it should have been transformed into the quasi-constitution it is today.
In part it is because Israelis have a higher regard for the people who wrote it than for the politicians they now elect to office.