The Redemption of Israel: The Jewish State’s Independence

Stand for Israel  |  May 14, 2020

Israel celebrated her independence a couple weeks ago on Yom HaAtzmaut. But since the Jewish state goes by the lunar Jewish calendar, today is the Gregorian calendar’s anniversary of the modern state of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

For on May 14, 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared the newly formed nation’s official establishment. Reading from handwritten notes (as the official scroll had not been completely filled out), Ben-Gurion finalized what a United Nations resolution the year before had set into motion – Israel was a nation in the eyes of the world!

You can read Israel’s official Declaration of Independence here. It begins with this, an overview of God’s people and the land He promised them:

ERETZ-ISRAEL (the Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

And we’ll leave you with its final words, especially moving to those of us who stand for Israel, and who to this day work to bring Jewish people home from around the world:

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream — the redemption of Israel.

So let us continue to work toward bringing the remnants of Israel home to their biblical and historic homeland. And let Israel continue to be a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 51:4).