Why Israel Is Called Israel and Not Judea

This is the third 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. Previous installments can be seen here.—The Editors

Modern Zionism was based on the principle that, in the absence of sovereign statehood, Jewish identity could no longer be secured. The world had become divided into nation-states with defined borders; in such a world, Jews could not long thrive, or even survive, as the perennial and universal “other.” But could they really organize, create, and establish a self-governing nation-state? They had lived for two millennia as scattered religious minorities. To do otherwise, they would have to change themselves.

Israel’s declaration of independence was an announcement to the world that, in fact, a new kind of Jew had been (re)born in the Land of Israel, and this new Jew was fundamentally different from the Jews the world had known, persecuted, and repeatedly sought to eliminate during the two millennia of Jewish dispersion. In the words of the late Meir Shamgar, who for twelve years served as president of Israel’s Supreme Court, the declaration of independence was at once “the birth certificate and the identity card of the state as a political, sovereign, and independent entity.”