Tikvah
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TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – MAY 14: In this handout from the GPO, David Ben Gurion, who was to become Israel’s first Prime Minister, reads the Declaration of Independence May 14, 1948 at the museum in Tel Aviv, during the ceremony founding the State of Israel. (Photo by Zoltan Kluger/GPO via Getty Images)
David Ben-Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948 during the ceremony founding the state of Israel. Zoltan Kluger/GPO via Getty Images.
Observation

April 14, 2021

The Most Significant Document Composed by Jews since Antiquity

By Martin Kramer

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.

“We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

.אנו מכריזים בזאת על הקמת מדינה יהודית בארץ ישראל, היא מדינת ישראל

This sentence was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon, May 14, 1948; in the Hebrew calendar, Iyar 5, 5708. As the most significant and consequential sentence uttered by a Jew since antiquity, it announced at once an end to 2,000 years of exile and dispersion and the restoration of the Jews’ sovereign self-determination in their own land. “We hereby declare” is the modern equivalent of the biblical hineyni, “Here I am”: an affirmation of presence and an assumption of responsibility. It is the key passage in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

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