Israel’s Declaration of Independence, The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment,
by Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler, Cambridge University Press, 2023
Declaring Israel’s Independence,
by Martin Kramer, www.martinkramer.com, 2018.
“Who wrote Israel’s Declaration of Independence?” I recently asked a class of Israeli undergraduates. “An assistant to Ben-Gurion,” offered one. “A Jewish lawyer,” quipped another. It is not surprising that they didn’t know the name. The “scroll of independence” (its Hebrew name) is widely revered in the Israeli public, but its authorship and the history of its adoption are little known.
The principal drafter was Moshe Shertok, Israel’s diplomatic leader at the time of independence. He later Hebraized his family name to Sharett and became Israel’s first foreign minister and second prime minister. His draft of the declaration, written overnight just two days before independence, was the final one. Just as in Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the American declaration, others made significant edits but, as Rogavachevsky and Zigler describe, over two-thirds of the final document was Shertok’s wording.
It is an exciting story, well told by both Rogachevsky/Zigler and Kramer. Both of their accounts follow the traditional Israeli narrative that focuses on the role of David Ben-Gurion who was, after all, the political leader, the war leader and dominant figure, the “Old Man” (then in his early 60’s). But in reading Rogachevsky/Zigler and listening to Kramer, I was also drawn to Shertok, the quiet diplomat who shared Ben-Gurion’s determination to seize the moment to declare the state and who, in light of his literary talents, was given the drafting assignment.
Shertok was in the US between the fall of 1947 and spring of 1948, first leading a successful diplomatic campaign at the UN to adopt the partition plan dividing the British mandate into two states, Jewish and Arab. Then he pivoted to an equally difficult effort to secure US recognition of the Jewish state. In a final meeting in the US on May 8, Secretary of State George C. Marshall told Shertok that he wished the Jews well but that the State Department wouldn’t approve US recognition of a Jewish state. Others in the administration – including President Truman’s domestic policy advisor Clark Clifford – had signaled their support for a Jewish state.
When Shertok returned home to Tel Aviv on May 12, three days before the final British withdrawal, he went straight to the pre-state executive cabinet to report on his latest US meetings. There he and Ben-Gurion prevailed in securing a majority to declare a state on the eve of the British withdrawal, May 14; the state would be called Israel. On the night of May 12, Shertok sat down and drafted the declaration.
Rogachevsky and Zigler describe in detail the earlier drafts of a declaration, done by lawyers, though Shertok started from scratch and then apparently incorporated isolated phrases from them. Most significantly, he took from the opening of an earlier draft the sole reference to God in his draft – “the Rock of Israel” – and placed it in the final paragraph as follows: “Placing our trust in the Rock of Israel, we affix our signatures…”
It was a diplomatic choice of words. The People’s Council, the pre-state legislative body that convened on May 13 to discuss his draft, included quite a few atheistic socialists. Ben-Gurion rose to defend Shertok’s phrasing, stating that everyone understands the meaning of Rock of Israel. For atheists, he implied, this could mean the inner strength of the Jewish people, while for religious Jews, the phrase is one of the traditional references to God repeated in the daily prayers. Orthodox members of the Council tried to amend the phrase to include “the Rock of Israel and its Redeemer,” but this was too far in the direction of recognizing an activist deity for the leader of the Mapam party (doctrinaire socialists). The Orthodox leaders dropped their amendment out of solidarity with the Jewish community at this decisive moment (they were at this time a fairly small minority of the pre-state community).
Ben-Gurion took the draft home on the night of May 13 to make final edits. He understood the lasting significance of the document, but his focus was elsewhere, on the war for Jewish survival. Earlier that day, the last 127 Jews in the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem had surrendered to Jordan’s Arab Legion. There were reports, later confirmed, that the Legion had allowed local Arab irregulars to massacre them. Jerusalem was besieged and ten members of the People’s Council in the city were unable to attend the meetings in Tel Aviv. As Kramer describes, Ben-Gurion’s diary entry for May 13 is mostly about the war. In one sentence he adds laconically that he went over “Moshe’s draft” of the declaration.
Nearly all of Ben-Gurion’s edits that night were stylistic in nature, cutting out legalisms (“whereas” in the preamble paragraphs) and Yiddishkeit (“from generation to generation”), adding a paragraph to the preamble. But he made important edits to two operative paragraphs:
First, in the paragraph on “equality of social and political rights” Shertok had written the new state shall bestow such rights upon all citizens regardless of religion or race; Ben-Gurion changed it to say the state “will ensure” such rights “to all inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” The rights are not given by the state but inherent in the people, Ben-Gurion insisted, and they include gender equality. Among the signers on May 14 were two women, including his protégé Golda Meyerson (later Meir).
Second, in the key paragraph declaring the state of Israel, where Shertok had written “on the basis of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly,” Ben-Gurion added “by virtue of our natural and historical right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations.” Ben-Gurion wanted the Jewish people’s right to self-determination to be the primary justification, though he kept in Shertok’s language that conforms the declaration to the wording of UN Resolution 181.
In the People’s Council debate the next afternoon, May 14, there was little time for wordsmithing. The British mandate was ending at midnight. The socialists wanted to amend the list of freedoms (religion, conscience, education, culture) to include freedom of language – Shertok agreed and it was voted in. Otherwise, the Shertok text with Ben Gurion’s edits was approved without change. At about 4:00 pm, at the Tel Aviv Art Museum (site not publicly disclosed owing to Egyptian air attacks), Ben-Gurion read the text on live radio, members of the People’s Council signed a blank parchment (a calligraphic version of the text of the declaration was added later), a rabbi said the “Shehechiyanu” blessing, everyone sang “Hatikvah,” and the state was born.
The close collaboration between Ben-Gurion and Shertok didn’t last. Their approaches to governance began to diverge after independence. Ben-Gurion served as defense minister throughout his 13 years as prime minister. Strengthening the country’s military and its deterrence power was his single most important mission. Shertok, now Sharett, retained the foreign ministry portfolio during his two years as prime minister. He believed in a powerful network of foreign allies, and focused in particular on building postwar relations with Germany.
Ideally, these two different approaches to state-building could have complemented each other, and for a while they did. But when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser began building the first “ring of fire” around Israel, sending terrorist squads into Israel from multiple fronts, Sharett opposed the Ben-Gurion policy of tough reprisals and was forced out of government.
Today, the remembered founding father of 1948 is Ben-Gurion. The Israeli people then and now appreciated his approach to the state’s ability to survive and flourish in the tough neighborhood of the Middle East. Sharett is largely forgotten; his face appeared for a while on the 20-shekel bill, but that too has now gone.
And yet, the book of Rogavachevsky/Zigler and the lectures of Kramer recall a different time, when the Ben-Gurion and Shertok approaches were melded together and supported one another. Then, the Israeli government wasn’t merely a military power that out-sourced its diplomacy to America. Then, Israel had a diplomatic leader who fully and independently complemented the military side of the government.
Today, with Israel in the second year of a regional war, one question is whether Israel is capable of translating an evanescent military victory into a lasting diplomatic settlement that secures the country’s place in what is likely to remain a hostile region. As the works under review indicate, the country will continue to need both Ben-Gurions and Shertoks.
