The State of Israel Is Declared
Hours before the British Mandate ends, Ben-Gurion reads a declaration and five armies invade
Quick facts
- Date
- May 14, 1948 (5 Iyar 5708)
- Declared by
- David Ben-Gurion, Jewish People's Council
- Location
- Tel Aviv
- Immediate aftermath
- Invasion by Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria (May 15, 1948)
What happened
As the British Mandate for Palestine expired at midnight, David Ben-Gurion, on behalf of the Jewish People's Council, read a declaration in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948 (5 Iyar 5708) proclaiming the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. The declaration, whose full text is preserved by Yale Law School's Avalon Project, grounded the new state's claim in both a biblical and historical connection to the land and in the United Nations' 1947 partition resolution, and it pledged the state would ensure complete equality of social and political rights for all its inhabitants regardless of religion, race, or sex. Within hours, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, and Syria entered the territory of the former Mandate, beginning the first Arab-Israeli War.
Why it matters
The declaration ended the roughly 1,800 years since the Bar Kokhba revolt in which Jews had no sovereign state of their own, and it fulfilled, on almost the exact timeline Theodor Herzl had guessed at in 1897, the central goal of the Zionist movement founded fifty-one years earlier, arriving three years after the Holocaust had devastated European Jewry.
How we know
The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel survives as an original signed document, and its full text and the surrounding diplomatic and military events of May 1948 are preserved in Israeli state archives and reproduced by academic archives including Yale Law School's Avalon Project.
Sources
- The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Declaration of Israel's Independence 1948 · Primary source (author-declared)avalon.law.yale.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World Zionist Organization. History of the First Zionist Congress · General sourcewzo.org.il · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- World War II → · Israel's founding came three years after the Holocaust, carried out during World War II, which shaped international support for a Jewish state.