Menachem Begin’s Covenantal Zionism

This essay by Meir Soloveichik is, in part, a commentary on a speech that Menachem Begin gave in 1972. Mosaic published the first English translation of the speech in May 2020.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence. It is one of the most wondrous moments in Jewish history, worthy of religious reverence. And yet, reading the text of the declaration with religious sensitivities, it is hard not to notice something missing. The Israeli declaration of independence does not explicitly mention the divine. Secular Zionists, believing in the power of unassisted human will to make history, insisted that the God in Whom they could not believe be left out of it. Instead, the text concludes with a reference to Tsur Yisrael, the “Rock of Israel,” a traditional appellation for the Almighty, but a phrase which could also be interpreted as a reference to the flinty resolve of the IDF.

As for the Holocaust, no description was given of the Jews of the Diaspora who had just been murdered by the Nazis, no description was given of the lives they had lived, or of their faith. The Shoah was invoked in the declaration’s text, but only to justify the necessity of Israel’s founding: