Natural rights are surprisingly evident in the Israeli charter, drawn by laborite Zionists; in turn, the Israeli’s contemporary judiciary claims sole competency to interpret the nation’s ‘credo’ from the Declaration, the country having no constitution but only Basic Laws. Hurriedly drafted amid British departure and Arab warfare, the document settled on rights inhering in individuals, not emanating from the state, through David Ben-Gurion’s force of influence.

After the Zionist Action Committee dissolved itself into Moetzet Ha’Am (a People’s Council of 13), Ben-Gurion sought to declare statehood such that Jews would be ‘masters of their own fate’. Mordechai Beham’s initial version combined Anglo-American political thought, as evidenced in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, with Jewish tradition as evidenced in the Torah, entailing fairness, supremacy of reason, the spiritual above material (contra Zionism), and the ethical above the practical. The community’s centuries-long exile maintained fidelity to the this approach, but natural rights were a notable innovation for no signer of the Declaration was born in western Europe or the Anglosphere.

Poorly received, these views were pared back in subsequent versions. Labor Zionism, which holds to the state’s preeminent authority (and origination of rights), progress through material gain, and equality of outcomes, came to the fore. These chimed with Roosevelt’s four freedoms and the new UN charter. It was also important to repudiate the UK’s governance (notably its white paper restricting Jewish immigration (‘ingathering’) – and to enshrine a nebulous democracy. Herschel Lauterpacht’s draft, drawing on nascent, postwar views of international law ,sought to align with UN resolution 181, which envisioned the dual-state solution as well as tests for sovereign capability and sufficiency. Moshe Shertok, a Washington DC lobbyist, sought for American support, which George Marshall opposed for fear of angering Arabs but Harry Truman overrode (albeit on the basis of UN boundaries of November 1947).

Ben-Gurion sought an Israeli state above all: his goals were sovereignty, a Jewish state, and principles of political right. Holding that founding implies disregard for status quo, he surpassed fractious colleagues, for example eschewing the declaration of boundaries as artificially limiting. He located the right to sovereignty in Israel itself, established by its ‘universal significant’ of the Torah, the ‘book of books’. He (unintentionally?) followed Blackstone in viewing rights as pre-existing the state; the state is to preserve these rights. Also, his state was to be more Jewish than democratic.

Menachem Begin’s Revisionist underground came in to ally with Ben-Gurion: more opposed to mandatory rule, he too sought a Jewish state, but was more comfortable with Anglo-American rights.

It’s ironic that the Anglosphere was largely ignored at the height of its postwar influence. In the continuing lack of a constitution, the Supreme Court, which has built up ‘a potent arsenal of normative language to interpret practices (p. 245).

NB: Jefferson’s draft of the American Declaration located rights in mankind’s equal creation, not in the Creator.