Page 226 - יום שישי הגדול
P. 226
The Declaration of the
Establishment of the State of Israel
Tel Aviv, 5th Iyar 5708 (May 14, 1948)
ERETZ-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,
224
Establishment of the State of Israel
Tel Aviv, 5th Iyar 5708 (May 14, 1948)
ERETZ-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,
224
