“One night, I was reading Israel’s Declaration of Independence and looking at the names of everyone who signed the declaration, wondering who they were and what they represented,”

Israel’s most popular podcaster, Mishy Harman, tells the JC. It was the beginning of a fascinating journey.

Together with his team, Harman, 39, spent months tracking down the closest living descendants of the signatories, who had all been members of the Va’ad Leumi, the organisation that oversaw the running of the nascent country.

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Mishy Harman

The result is 40 episodes within his Israel Story podcast of interviews with 50 children and grandchildren, entitled, Signed, Sealed, Delivered?. It has been released to coincide with Israel’s 75th

"I was interested in finding out who the signatories were as people, not as historical figures,” says Harman, “and in getting a sense of what [they] would think about the Declaration of Independence today, about the extent to which we have fulfilled its promise or veered off the path.”

He also wanted to discover what their descendants felt about the Declaration today. Not all of them were easy to find. “We went to archives, read people’s obituaries, went onto social media and called people,” he says. “We called a lot of wrong people.” Once they found the right people, many of the interviews turned out to be revelatory.

“While there were people on the left who say things like ‘Israel is an apartheid state’, including David Ben-Gurion’s grandson, and people on the right saying that democracy isn’t a Jewish value, the vast majority of the descendants were centre and centre-left.

Pinchas Rosen

Pinchas Rosen

“There weren’t many people who came out in favour of Netanyahu.”
Contrary to popular belief, the word “democracy” is not mentioned in the Declaration. “Of course, equality and justice are mentioned — as is not discriminating based on ethnicity, race or sex — but the word ‘democracy’ was taken out at the last moment,” says Harman.

Despite this, “almost all of the interviewees expressed concerns about what they perceive to be assaults on the institutions of Israeli democracy.”

The most moving interviews were with descendants who were old enough to remember the founding of the state. “They recall their own sense of pride and happiness.” This generation,

Harman says, “represent a different kind of Israel”, one which was rooted in socialist ideals.
“Something interesting that one of the descendants said was that Israel’s effective response to

Covid was based on these social welfare roots,” he remarks.

Although Jerusalem-born Harman was expecting to pursue an academic career — he studied at Cambridge, Harvard and Hebrew University — it is perhaps unsurprising that he has ended up hosting a podcast about Israel, as he grew up steeped in the country’s politics.

His grandfather, Avraham Harman, was an Israeli ambassador to the US. His grandmother, Zena Harman, represented Israel at the UN and his aunt is Naomi Chazan, a former Meretz member of the Knesset.

Nonetheless, the podcast Israel Story, which began as a hobby for Harman and his three closest childhood friends and now has hundreds and thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish listeners in 190 countries, endeavours to steer clear of politics with a capital P.

“We wanted to show an Israel that wasn’t Bibi or Iranian bombs or Security Council resolutions or the occupation. But at the same time, I think that this Israel story is inherently political because we’ll only learn and grow as individuals and as a society from listening and learning from each other.”

Now living in the Jewish-Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Abu Tor with his Italian-Catholic wife, Frederica, daughter, Hallel, and dog, Golda — “she is named after one of the signatories, but that is just by chance” — Harman describes Signed, Sealed, Delivered? as “quite an outlier” for the podcast.

“Most of the time, we tell these complicated human interest stories.”

It is, however, impossible to separate the Declaration of Independence from the human element, especially when so many Israelis believe its values are under threat. As Harman says:

“The signatories had this idea of what they dreamt this place could and should be and it’s an interesting moment to see how we measure up to this initial idea.”