When Was the State of Israel Established?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

When was the State of Israel established?

The official answer is easy: David Ben-Gurion, on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, proclaimed the formation of the Jewish state on May 14, 1948, as the British were pulling down the Union Jack and departing Palestine, which they had governed as a League of Nations Mandate after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

But modern Israel is, in many ways, older than that. The World Zionist Organization, created by Theodor Herzl in1897, had been building the infrastructure of a Jewish country for many decades. 

One document on the road to statehood was the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917. Signed by the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, it stated that Britain was “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The text of the Mandate for Palestine (which incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration) was approved by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and Britain became the official Mandatory power. Jews arrived in Palestine, building cities, farms, and infrastructure – a de facto state.

One can also point to the Nov. 29, 1947 passage, by a vote of 33-13, with 10 abstentions, of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states to follow the termination of the Mandate. Among those in favour were the Soviet Union and the United States. The resolution was accepted by the Jews in Palestine but rejected by the Arabs.

Yet, to my mind, there is yet another, symbolic, date that predates the formal establishment of the state, though it is a day that surely ranks among the darkest in Jewish history.

By the end of 1942, most of the Jews of Poland, herded into ghettos after the Nazi conquest of the country in 1939, had been murdered in Hitler’s Holocaust. Those that remained, in cities such as Bialystok, Częstochowa, Vilna (Vilnius), and Warsaw, were mostly younger people, who knew the fate that awaited them, and, though knowing they could not prevail against the might of the Nazi war machine, were determined to fight.

In Warsaw, members of the Revisionist Zionist movement formed the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, or ZZW), and began to acquire arms, much of it from the mainstream Polish underground, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK). On the left, a number of political groups organized the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB); they gained some help from the Polish Communist-led Gwardia Ludowa militia.

When Nazi SS troops entered the ghetto in mid-January 1943, to deport more Jews to their deaths, they were met with gunfire and Molotov cocktails, and were forced to retreat.

Furious, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, on Feb. 16 ordered the entire ghetto destroyed. Two months later, the assault began. Though of course completely outnumbered and outgunned, the Warsaw Jews fought against these overwhelming odds for a month.

As the ghetto was being demolished, some Jews managed to escape through underground sewers into Warsaw proper, but at least13,000 were killed in the battle (almost half burnt alive  in the collapsing buildings set on fire by the Nazis.

However, on April 19, 1943, during the battle, the ZZW raised two flags atop the highest building in the ghetto:  the red-and-white Polish Eagle and the blue-and-white Zionist banner (today’s Israeli flag). That day, too, should be considered one of the founding dates of Israel.