It won't be long before Israel turns 75 years old.

75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's sovereignty,

a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national

home of the Jewish people located in their ancestral homeland. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your

host, Jonathan Silver. Today we look at the document that was the instrument of that declaration.

We'll look at the drafting process that produced it. We'll look at the

history of Israel's Declaration of Independence. My guests are co-authors of a new book on that

subject, Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Ziegler. Now, before I bring you our conversation,

let me say a word about what's so distinctive and fascinating about their treatment of Israel's

Declaration of Independence. After all, the longtime mosaic contributor and distinguished historian

Martin Kramer has written an eight-part series, and indeed also offered an eight-part video

course in which he too foregrounds this document and allows the battles of Israel's

War of Independence to recede to the background. Kramer too documents various drafts and their

authors. It's a wonderful treatment of the history behind Israel's declaration, and I think it

complements Rogachevsky and Ziegler's book in mutually beneficial ways.

You see, Rogachevsky and Ziegler, as you'll soon hear, are not blind to the history behind the drafting of this document.

Indeed, tracing in detail that history is the manner in which they conduct their inquiry.

But historical analysis is not altogether their

objective. Instead, it's to look at the drafting process and to try and distill from the elements

that endure from draft to draft, and the elements that are changed or removed and replaced.

From that, they're able to articulate a political theory of the Israeli founding,

in which the ends or purposes of Israeli sovereignty are made more clearly manifest. How did

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