Three Weeks in May: How the Israeli Declaration of Independence Came Together

This is the second installment in the historian Martin Kramer’s series on how Israel’s declaration of independence came about, and what the text reveals about the country it brought into being. The previous essay can be seen here.—The Editors

Israel’s declaration of independence wasn’t something the founders had time to debate at leisure. It was compiled over a fairly brief period of time. The active interval was about three weeks long, from the third week of April 1948 right up to the hard deadline of May 14, the day prior to the date scheduled by the British for the end of the mandate and their departure from the land.

We owe a lasting debt to the Israeli legal scholar Yoram Shachar, who did the painstaking reconstruction of the declaration’s drafting process. Having tracked down the early versions, held in private hands, he pieced together the puzzle in an 80-page article in the Tel Aviv University Law Review (2002). His yeoman work was published before the papers themselves became a hot item when, in 2015, the heirs of the lawyer who composed the first drafts tried to sell them at auction at a starting price of $250,000. The state of Israel blocked the sale. In 2019, with arbitration having failed to resolve the issue, the Supreme Court ruled that the drafts were “part of the cultural property of the state of Israel, testament to our past, and part of our collective identity,” and were thus to be handed over to the state archives.