I was honored to speak last night at “We Declare: Re-Reading Israel’s Declaration of Independence.” The event was sponsored by BINA, the Jewish Movement for Social Change and held at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
This is what I said:
The Declaration of Independence was made possible by the UN partition vote six months earlier. David Ben Gurion, in his diary entry for that day, November 29, 1947, listed his 17 priorities. They range from the profound, “Government, Name, and Capital,” to the lyrical, “National Anthem.”
Courtesy of the Jacob Blaustein Institute at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, I have a copy of that page from his diary. Above that list of priorities is the heading, “Decision reached: 10:13:33.” Reading from right to left, that’s 33 votes for, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. An absolute majority. One of those votes was secured by Jacob Blaustein.
The next day’s entry has another vote tally. Tel Aviv Printing Workers: Hamiflaga, Hadshomer Hatzair, and Polalei T’Zion.
For Ben Gurion, a Histadrut labor leader:
כל הפוליטיקה היא מקומית Kol Hapolitica He Mikomit. Translated: All politics is local
“This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” So reads the 118th Psalm. Who knows how many of the signatories to the Proclamation of Independence thought of that verse that day in May 1948?
Four of them were rabbis, but most however, were secular and Socialist. Who knows how many of them would recite those words at the Kotel after the Old City was recaptured, as so many of us have?
The democracy they created was in a land sacred to three religions, where democracy would be tested by how the followers of those faiths get along – on matters profound and mundane.
On May 14, 1948, those signatories – 35 men and two women, including Golda Myerson, like their all-male counterparts in Philadelphia in 1776, pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor..
