Aftermath
Front cover of
The Palestine Post, 16 May 1948 (there was no paper on 15 May as it was
Shabbat)
Eleven minutes after the Declaration of Independence was signed the
United States formally recognised the State of Israel, followed by
Iran (which had voted against the UN partition plan),
Guatemala,
Iceland,
Nicaragua,
Romania and
Uruguay. The
Soviet Union recognised Israel on 17 May 1948, followed by
Poland,
Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia,
Ireland and
South Africa.
The declaration was followed by an invasion of the new state by troops from
Egypt,
Iraq,
Lebanon and
Syria, starting the
1948 Arab-Israeli War, known in Israel as the War of Independence (
Hebrew: מלחמת העצמאות,
Milhamat HaAtzma'ut). Although a truce began on 11 June, fighting resumed on 8 July and stopped again on 18 July, before restarting in mid-October and finally ending on 24 July 1949 with the signing of the
armistice agreement with Syria. By then Israel had retained its independence and increased its land area by almost 50% compared to the partition plan.
Following independence, Moetzet HaAm was transformed into the
Provisional State Council, which acted as the legislative body for the new state until the
first elections in January 1949.
Many of the signatories went on to play a prominent role in
Israeli politics following independence; Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir both served as
Prime Minister,
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the country's second
president in 1952, and several others served as
ministers.
David Remez was the first signatory to pass away, dying in May 1951, whilst Meir Vilner, the youngest signatory at just 29, was the longest living, serving in the
Knesset until 1990 and dying in June 2003.
Eliyahu Berligne, the oldest signatory at 82, died in 1959.
[edit] The scroll
Although Ben-Gurion had told the audience that he was reading from the scroll of independence, he was actually reading from handwritten notes; by the time of the declaration, only the bottom part of the scroll had been finished by artist and calligrapher
Otte Wallish (he did not complete the entire document until June).
[6] The scroll, which is in three parts bound together, is now kept in the country's National Archives.
[edit] Context and content
The document commences by drawing a direct line from
Biblical times to the present:
ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel, Palestine] 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.
It acknowledges the Jewish exile over the millennia, mentioning both ancient "faith" and new "politics":
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.
It speaks of the urge of Jews to return to their ancient homeland:
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.
It describes
Jewish immigrants to Israel in the following terms:
Pioneers… 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 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 what it claimed to be its own country. This right was supported by the British government in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 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 Palestine and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.
The European
Holocaust of 1939–45 is part of the imperative for the re-settlement of the homeland:
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 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 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.