The history of the Jewish people in Israel goes back some 3,500 years. Whenever they have been exiled from the land, the longing of the Jewish soul is to return. The centrality of Israel to the Jewish people is beautifully expressed in Israel’s national anthem HaTikvah (The Hope)

As long as within our hearts
The Jewish soul sings,

As long as forward to the East
To Zion, looks the eye –

Our hope is not yet lost,
It is two thousand years old,

To be a free people in our land
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

                                                                                                               

71 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion—who would later become Israel’s first prime minister—stood and read the declaration of independence of the state of Israel.

The Land of 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. 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…

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…

Placing our trust in the Almighty, we affix our signatures to this proclamation at this session of the provisional Council of State, on the soil of the Homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, on this Sabbath eve, the 5th day of Iyar, 5708 (14th May, 1948)