A NATION LIKE ANY OTHER

The Jewish connection with Israel did not begin with Zionism, a word coined in the 1890’s. It goes back four thousand years. Judaism – twice as old as Chrisianity, three times as old as Islam – was the call to Abraham’s descendants to create a society of freedom, justice and compassion. A society involves a land, a home, somewhere where the “children of Israel” form the majority and can create a culture, an economy, and a political system in accordance with their values. That land was, and is, Israel.

Jews never left Israel voluntarily. They never relinquished their rights. They returned whenever they could: in the days of Moses, then again after the Babylonian exile, then again in generation after generation. There was a large community there in the sixteenth century. There are places, especially in the Galilee, where they never left at all.

The Balfour Declaration in 1917, ratified in 1922 by the League of Nations, endorsed the Jews right to their land -  hopefully ending their unparalleled history of suffering.

The idea that Jews came to Israel as outsiders, or imperialists, is among the most perverse of modern myths. Once there were Arab leaders who understood this too. In 1919, king Faisal wrote to the American-Jewish judge Felix Frankfurter: `We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement…. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement [Arab nationalism] is national and not imperialist…..Indeed, I thing that neither can be a real success without the other.` Winston Churchill never wavered from this view.

The Jews are the only rulers of the land in the past three thousand years who neither created, nor sought, an empire.

There must be some place on earth where Jews can defend themselves. Where they have a home in the sense, as the poet Robert Frost wrote, “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That right, to national self-determination, is among the most basic in politics.

Today there are 82 Christian nations and 56 Muslim ones, but only one Jewish one: in a country smaller than the Kruger National Park – one quarter of one percent of the land mass of the Arab world.