AN INSEPARABLE BOND

The purpose behind all wars is to capture as much enemy territory as possible. That is how all the world’s imperialistic Empires have been founded. The November 1947 United Nations vote to bring Israel into existence was a momentous reversal of imperialism. It gave back to the Jewish people the home taken from them by empire after empire. Judaism differs from the other monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, as it never created, or sought to create, an Empire.

It was the imperialism of the Roman emperor Hadrian that led him in the 2^nd century to change the country’s name to Palestine, one of the first - but certainly not the last – deliberate falsifications of history by those who seek to deny the Jewish people’s right to their land.

There are 56 Islamic nations, and 159 in which Christians form the majority. There is, and only ever has been, one Jewish state, tiny and vulnerable though it is - and always was. That is why Anti-Zionism, denying Jews the right to their one and only collective home by misrepresenting Judaism, is the new antisemitism - every bit as malicious and dangerous as the old.

Jews as a people, Judaism as a religion, and Israel as a state is an inseparable triangle. The connection between the Jewish people and Israel goes back long before the birth of either Christianity or Islam. Jews created a society there in the days of Joshua, a kingdom in the days of Saul, and a nation - with Jerusalem as its capital in the days of King David. All this more than 3,000 years ago.

Israel is the only non-artificial creation in the Middle East, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The rest ­– among them Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – are artificial creations that hadn’t been states before the 20^th century. Perhaps that is the reason why most of them still exist in a condition of ethnic, religious and tribal strife.

Only Israel had previously existed as a nation state. Jews are the only people who have maintained a continuous presence in the land. They are its indigenous, original inhabitants. At all other times in the past 3,000 years it was merely an administrative district in an Empire whose centre was elsewhere: the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian, Roman and Byzantine empires, the Crusaders of the Holy Roman Empire, the various Muslim empires such as the Mamaluks and Ottomans, and finally the British.

At least half of the 613 commandments of the Bible are only applicable to the land of Israel. 

They are based on agriculture, but their overriding aim is to shape a society based on the biblical ideas of justice, welfare, the sanctity of life – and caring for the stranger/other.

Although in the centuries of exile and dispersion Jews lived in almost every land under the sun, Israel has remained a focus of their prayers.  There was only one land where they were able to do what almost every other nation takes for granted: create their own society in accordance with their own beliefs and ideals.