This year, the main national holiday of the Israelis – Independence Day of the State of Israel, which is celebrated on the Jewish calendar on 5 Iyar, falls on April 22.
On 5 Iyar 5708 (May 14, 1948), the Jewish National Council met in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the leader of the Zionist movement, the future head of the Israeli government, David Ben-Gurion, officially proclaimed the text of the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel.
This event was a consequence of the end of the British mandate for Palestine, which had lasted since 1922. It was considered that the Jewish people had been associated with Palestine for a long historical period. Apparently, the unprecedented sacrifices of the Jewish people during the Nazi rule in Europe - six million Jews who became victims of the Holocaust – were also considered.
The creation of the State of Israel was preceded by a long preparatory process, begun at the end of the 19th century by supporters of the Zionist movement led by the famous public and political figure Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). This movement was of decisive importance, and by the second half of the 1940s had already educated two generations of Jews in the worldview of striving for the revival of Jewish statehood. The most active Zionist organizations ensured the resettlement of Jews to Palestine, the purchase and development of lands, which contributed to the emergence of a Jewish national-state home. The Balfour Declaration (named after the British Foreign Secretary), adopted in 1917, allowed the creation of a Jewish national center in Palestine, and in fact legislated the process that was already unstoppable.
However, it was only after the end of World War II that the international community turned its attention to the issue of recognizing an independent Jewish state. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution No. 181, “The Future Government of Palestine,” which provided for the division of British-mandated Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab (Palestinian) state, with a special regime for the city of Jerusalem. As a result of Israel’s declaration of independence, the very next day the armies of Arab countries attacked the Jewish state, which marked the beginning of the War of Independence, which lasted for over a year and ended in July 1949.
In May 2016, an exhibition dedicated to the development of the State of Israel opened at the Museum of Jewish Memory and the Holocaust in Ukraine. It demonstrates the indomitability of the Jewish people, who, in the conditions of “unfavorable geography,” not only gained land, but also managed it: transformed the desert into blooming oases, revived the national culture, created an innovative economy and a combat-ready army.
We congratulate Israelis and all Jews on the holiday of political freedom and statehood, and wish the country prosperity, development, and peace! Yom ha-Atzmaut Sameach!