Zionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often constituted a personal transformation: many who arrived in the land of Israel, including key Zionist figures, took on entirely new Hebrew names or Hebraicized existing ones at some point in their lives.
Our practice is to refer to individuals as they were known (officially) in the days leading up to Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. Thus, the future prime minister Golda Meir is Golda Meyerson, the future prime minister Moshe Sharett is Moshe Shertok, etc. Figures who had already Hebraicized their names formally, such as David Gruen, who had been known as David Ben-Gurion for years, are referred to accordingly.
Despite some accompanying stylistic infelicities, we have chosen to transliterate certain Hebrew proper names, particularly those of organizations, military groups, political parties, and other institutions of the Jewish settlement in Palestine (which we always call the Yishuv). Thus, we refer throughout to the new governing bodies set up in April 1948 as Moetzet ha’Am and Minhelet ha’Am rather than as the National Council and National Administration. This leads to some grammatical problems – any Hebrew speaker will chuckle at occasional references to the Moetzet ha’Am – but we thought that the benefits of using Hebrew names while keeping the English language straight for a non-Hebrew speaker outweighed the costs.
Of some additional importance: this book studies the early drafts of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. In examining the early drafts, it was at times necessary to focus our study on a single text which was one amongst a sequence of similar drafts. The differences between these drafts are generally relatively minor, however, occasionally, they take on added significance. We explain our choices throughout the text. These deserve some attention.
An important primary source for this book has been the official minutes of the meetings of Zionist and Yishuv executive and deliberative bodies in the weeks leading up to independence, particularly those of Minhelet ha’Am, Moetzet ha’Am, and Va’ad ha’Poel ha’Tzioni (which we generally refer to using a dated but revealing translation, the Zionist Actions Committee, itself an English form of the original “Actionscomité.”) We treated the content of these minutes, and the discussion and speeches they contain, as accurate renditions of what was said at these meetings (as we have done for the records contained in Foreign Relations of the United States and elsewhere). Though the quality of these minutes is high, no such historical texts are free of possible elisions, oversights, abridgements, misquotations, and even additions. The reader should keep this in mind when encountering a direct quote from any of these meetings.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.
