Provisional Government of Israel
Official Gazette: Number 1; Tel Aviv, 5 Iyar 5708, 14.5.1948 Page 1
The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel
The Land of 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,
defiant returnees, 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, which would open the
gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish
people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of
nations.
Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other
parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by
difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their
right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national
homeland.
In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country
contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and
peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the
blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be
reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.
On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly
passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in
Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of
Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the
implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United
Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is
irrevocable.
This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of
their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.
Accordingly we, members of the People's Council, representatives of
the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are
here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over
Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on
the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly,
hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to
be known as the State of Israel.
We declare that, with effect from the moment of the termination of
the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th
May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities
of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted
by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948,
the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and
its executive organ, the People's Administration, 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.
The State of Israel is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and
representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of
the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to
bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.
We appeal to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the
building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the
community of nations.
We appeal in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us
now for months to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to
preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the
basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its
provisional and permanent institutions.
We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an
offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to
establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish
people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do
its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle
East.
We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round
the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and
to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the
age-old dream the redemption of Israel.
Placing our trust in the Almighty, we affix our signatures to this
proclamation at this session of the provisional Council of State, on the
soil of the Homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, on this Sabbath eve, the
5th day of Iyar, 5708 (14th May, 1948).
David Ben-GurionDaniel Auster Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi Eliyahu Berligne Fritz Bernstein Rabbi Wolf Gold Meir
Grabovsky Yitzchak Gruenbaum Dr. Abraham Granovsky Eliyahu Dobkin Meir
Wilner-Kovner Zerach Wahrhaftig Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen Rabbi Kalman
Kahana Saadia Kobashi Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria Golda Myerson Nachum Nir Zvi Segal Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen
Fishman David Zvi Pinkas Aharon Zisling Moshe Kolodny Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson Felix Rosenblueth David Remez Berl Repetur Mordekhai
Shattner Ben Zion Sternberg Bekhor Shitreet Moshe Shapira Moshe Shertok
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