Israel’s Situation Today Looks Much as Ben-Gurion Envisioned It

Since publication of my essay, “The May 1948 Vote that Made the State of Israel,” the date (by the Hebrew calendar) of Israel’s 70th anniversary has come and gone. Among the many commemorative events, Israel’s cabinet held a festive session in Independence Hall on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the place where David Ben-Gurion declared the state on May 14, 1948. On display at the center of the cabinet table, courtesy of the state archives, was the Declaration of Independence itself. The building will be open through the summer for extended hours and is then slated to close for renovation, after which it will perhaps become the national museum of Israel’s birth—something the country has never had.

As I showed in my essay, however, it was not at this building but at the building of the Jewish National Fund, tucked away on a residential Tel Aviv street, that the state was actually born. There, in the days immediately preceding May 14, the People’s Administration—the pre-state cabinet—made the preparations for independence. A marathon session lasting a whole day led up to the brief 32-minute ceremony in which the state was declared.

The May 14 ceremony took place before the public and the cameras. But the prior deliberations, behind closed doors, are much more difficult to reconstruct. In my essay, peering behind those doors, I tried to dispel a common myth about the deliberations and also to shift attention to a forgotten truth. I thank Benny Morris, Efraim Karsh, and Avi Shilon—the three respondents in Mosaic to my essay—for helping to complete the picture in informed and interesting ways.