[[{“value”:”

Israel’s flag. The ol’ star and two stripes, rendered on a white background in a deep blue, has become a symbol of Israel — which is good because that’s literally the one job that a flag has to accomplish. 

As it happens, though, there were several contending concepts that had a fair shake at becoming Israel’s banner, and quite a few were considered before the country settled on the current design.

The flag we know today

While early iterations of the centered star and bordering blue stripes exist, the current Israeli flag is largely considered to be the brainchild of early Zionist Leader David Wolffsohn, who was inspired by the traditional Jewish tallit (prayer shawl). 

The design that eventually became Israel’s current flag was adopted as the official Zionist flag in 1897 and was first used officially for the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, that year.

Blue is mentioned throughout religious texts as a sacred hue that connects the wearer to both heaven and sea. The Star of David (Magen David), while not originally an exclusively Jewish symbol, had by the late 19th century become widely recognized as representing Jewish communities across Europe.

Seems like a slam dunk from the get-go, but there was actually a brief period of uncertainty among the nation’s founders regarding whether the fledgling country should have a brand-new flag to cement its identity.

The great flag contest of 1948

After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, the Provisional Government announced a public competition inviting citizens to submit proposals for the new state’s official flag. The contest pulled in a total of 450 unique designs.

These submissions reflected the diverse visions Israelis had for their new nation. Some leaned heavily on religious symbolism, others on agricultural motifs representing the pioneering spirit, and still others on more modernist abstract designs. (Many of them shared the fact that they were pretty ugly, in my humble opinion.)

One common motif was the inclusion of seven golden stars — an idea that stemmed from Theodor Herzl’s initial concept for an Israeli flag, which was not very aesthetically pleasing and featured a group of seven yellow stars on a bright white background. 

In his 1896 book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), Herzl explained the symbolism behind his design: “The white field signifies our new, pure life; the stars are the seven golden hours of our working day,” he wrote. 

While stars typically found their way into most of the flag designs, there were some who thought that the new flag’s focus should be on symbols that were a little more inherent to the Jewish experience. Some members of the flag committee strongly advocated for designs incorporating the menorah, arguing it had stronger historical precedent as a Jewish symbol than the relatively new Star of David.

A third portion of flag design ideas featured geometric nuances, making up a category of submissions that I refer to as “the classic flag but with uglier shapes.” 

These included attempts to jam the Star of David into triangles for no reason, rotating the orientation of the stripes and simply taping the original design onto a larger, less interesting flag.

The decision

Despite the creativity of many submissions, the flag committee ultimately chose familiarity over novelty (plus a lot of these designs probably had them shaking in their boots at the thought of spending so much money on blue ink).

After consulting with Jewish leaders worldwide, the committee voted unanimously on October 28, 1948, to retain the historic Zionist flag with its blue stripes and Star of David. 

The blue-and-white flag had already become embedded in Jewish consciousness through decades of Zionist activism, serving as a symbol of hope for Holocaust survivors and Jewish communities worldwide.

After Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, Rebecca Affachiner, an American Jewish Zionist activist who’d moved to Israel in 1934, sewed what is considered the country’s first flag.

She fashioned the flag from a bedsheet and used a crayon to add the blue stripes and star. “It was my personal way of welcoming Israel into existence,” Affachiner was quoted as saying at the time. 

She flew the flag out of her window in Jerusalem that year and on every Israel Independence Day thereafter, until her death in 1966. In 2018, her homemade flag was donated to the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

“}]]