17 September 2019
“The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
So proclaims Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
As Israel has no formal constitution, it is customary to treat the Declaration of Independence as the value-based infrastructure on which the state was founded and in whose merit it exists. But the Declaration of Independence does not mention the word “democracy” even once.
Journalist and researcher Dov Elboim found that “democracy” was actually included in the first few drafts of the declaration, worded by the senior leaders of the Assembly of Representatives – the elected parliamentary assembly of the Jewish community in pre-1948 Israel. They toiled over the draft for three weeks, but when it came time for Moshe Sharett, who would later serve as Israel’s second prime minister, to edit the wording, he omitted it.
