AN ANSWER TO THE NEW ANTI-ZIONISTS: THE RIGHTS OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO A
SOVEREIGN STATE IN THEIR HISTORIC HOMELAND

Dore Gold and Jeff Helmreich

A new critique of Israel proposes its elimination and replacement with a bi-national
Palestinian-Jewish state. Israel's new detractors doubt the legitimacy of Jewish
statehood, though they say nothing about the validity of dozens of new states that
have emerged in the last half century, many of which lack any firmly rooted national
identity. The new attack on Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is particularly
ironic since Jewish nationhood preceded the emergence of most modern nation-
states by thousands of years.

The new critics of Jewish statehood neglect the fact that Israel's communal
expression - like that of many communal states around the world - in no way
infringes the rights of minority citizens, who enjoy full equality under the law and the
political system. They also ignore that this form of national expression is not unique;
indeed, most states identify in some formal way with the religious or cultural
heritage of their predominant communities. Yet only Israel is singled out for
criticism.

Israel is the only state created in the last century whose legitimacy was recognized
by both the League of Nations and the United Nations. The League of Nations
Mandate did not create the rights of the Jewish people to a national home in
Palestine, but rather recognized a pre-existing right - for the links of the Jewish
people to their historic land were well-known and accepted by world leaders in the
previous century.

By 1864, a clear-cut Jewish majority emerged in Jerusalem - more than half a
century before the arrival of the British Empire and the League of Nations Mandate.
During the years that the Jewish presence in Eretz Israel was restored, a huge Arab
population influx transpired as Arab immigrants sought to take advantage of higher
wages and economic opportunities that resulted from Jewish settlement in the land.
President Roosevelt concluded in 1939 that "Arab immigration into Palestine since
1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during the whole period."

Israel's new detractors seek to delegitimize Jewish national rights by arguing that
their assertion was an extension of European imperialism. In fact, Jewish
underground movements waged an anti-colonial war in the 1940s against continuing
British rule. Israel was an anti-imperialist force when it first emerged, while the Arab
states were aligned with the imperial powers, their armies trained and supplied by
the French and British Empires.

There was no active movement to form a unique Palestinian state prior to 1967. In
1956, Ahmad Shuqairy, who would found the PLO eight years later, told the UN
Security Council: "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern
Syria." In the early 1960s, many Palestinians looked to Egypt's Abdul Nasser as their
leader as much as to any Palestinian. Given the historical background, it is
impossible to argue that the Palestinians have a claim to the Land of Israel superior
to that of the Jews, as Israel's detractors contend.

The new assault on Israel is partly based on ignorance of Jewish history in today's
highly secularized world. But it also emanates from a new anti-Semitic wave
reflected in a public opinion poll by the European Commission showing Israel as the
country most regarded by Europeans as a threat to world peace. The president of the
European Commission, Roman Prodi - alluding to the anti-Semitic underpinnings that
led to the poll's results - said, "to the extent that this may indicate a deeper, more
general prejudice against the Jewish world, our repugnance is even more radical."

The New Anti-Zionists

Although Israel won its existence more than fifty years ago, a new and insidious
critique has begun to spread, attacking anew the legitimacy of Israel's very
establishment as a Jewish state. The new line does not come from Tehran or Riyadh
but, surprisingly from largely European intellectuals and certain voices on the fringe
American Left, surfacing recently in The Guardian and The New York Review of
Books. It proposes the elimination of Israel and is generally accompanied by calls to
establish a bi-national Palestinian-Jewish state in its place.

1: The new anti-Zionists invariably start with the claim that there are no Jewish rights to sovereignty in Israel, or that, in any case, Jewish nationalism is inherently unjust.

Curiously, this campaign is accompanied by no corresponding questions about the
validity of any other of the more than 190 states that belong to the UN, whether
they resemble Israel or not. There is no such scrutiny of the mini-states of Europe -
from Liechtenstein to the Vatican - or the multi-tribal states of Africa, many of which
are breaking down. Nor is there any questioning of the rights of expressly Catholic,
Protestant, or Muslim states to exist. The exclusive focus on Israel raises troubling
questions about the real motives of these commentators. As Michael Gove, assistant
editor of the Times of London, recently noted: "I do not know how newspapers can
get away with it. You can have criticism of the State of Israel but it is entirely
different to say it shouldn't exist. It is applying to the Jew a different standard than
you apply to anyone else."

2: Equally remarkable, for all the singular focus on Israel, the attack on Jewish
statehood avoids even the slightest consideration of the specifics of Israel's case.
The attackers fail to examine the legal or political consequences of Israel's national
expression as a Jewish state (perhaps because they find none) with regard to its
non-Jews, religious and racial equality, or the civil and political equality of all
citizens. They also ignore the specific historical circumstances and perils that gave
rise to the need for Israel to identify Jewishly. In short, it is an attack on Israel
without regard to the cost, benefit, or uniqueness of Jewish statehood - indeed,
without any grounding at all. That becomes clear after a brief examination of the
history, the law, and the facts surrounding Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

The Rights of States and the Rights of Israel

International law has traditionally held that in order to be defined as a state, political
communities must meet four qualifications: First, there must be a people; second,
there must be a territory; third, there must be a government; and fourth, there must
be a capacity to enter into relations with other states. In advocating Israel's
admission to the UN in 1948, the U.S. representative to the UN Security Council
argued that Israel fulfilled these conditions. In fact, the new attacks on Israel's rights
are particularly ironic since Jewish nationhood preceded the emergence of most
modern nation-states by thousands of years. Still, today's discourse has created
doubts about the basis of Jewish peoplehood and the connection of the Jewish people
to Israel's territory. Whether the new assault on Israel is a byproduct of the radical
secularization of certain intellectual circles who have no understanding of Jewish
history, or whether it emanates from a more insidious anti-Semitism that has been
re-born, its handmaiden is the general ignorance that is rampant about Israel's
unique roots.

The Jewish claim to a right of sovereignty in the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel;
Palestine) emerged in the last century for three essential reasons:

First, it was not a new claim, but rather a reassertion of a historic right that had
never been conceded or forgotten. Even after the destruction of the last Jewish
commonwealth in the first century, the Jewish people maintained their own
autonomous political and legal institutions: the Davidic dynasty was preserved in
Baghdad until the thirteenth century through the rule of the Exilarch (Resh Galuta),
while the return to Zion was incorporated into the most widely practiced Jewish
traditions, including the end of the Yom Kippur service and the Passover Seder, as
well as in everyday prayers. Thus, Jewish historic rights were kept alive in Jewish
historical consciousness.

Second, the security of the Jewish people in the Diaspora became completely
untenable as the threat from anti-Semitic persecution and assault was replaced in
the twentieth century with the threat of actual annihilation - or genocide - as
demonstrated by the Holocaust. While this threat initially was focused in Europe, it
soon extended to the Middle East, as newly independent Arab states came to view
their ancient Jewish communities as European foreigners and systematically violated
their basic human rights, either by denying them protection or by confiscating their
properties. From the 1840 Damascus blood libel to the 1941 farhud (pogrom) against
the Jews of Baghdad, an uneasy Arab-Jewish coexistence that existed earlier
collapsed even before the rise of the State of Israel. Far from receding, the danger of
rabid anti-Semitism persists, thereby necessitating a strong Jewish state that can
serve as an ultimate refuge for Jews under threat, anywhere. The Jewish people
have learned that they must not return to a state of powerlessness.

Third, the steady growth of assimilation threatened to eliminate Jewish communities
worldwide. The existence of a Jewish state, whose public culture is based on the
unique practices of the Jewish people, is the best guarantor for Jewish continuity -
both religious and non-religious - and the birth of a new Jewish civilization that can
continue to contribute to the world community.

3: Israel's Historic Basis: The Unbroken Jewish Connection with the Land of Israel

Israel is the only state that was created in the last century whose legitimacy was
recognized by both the League of Nations and the United Nations.

4: The League of Nations Mandate that was issued by the victorious powers of World War I did not
create the rights of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine, but rather
recognized a pre-existing right, for the links of the Jewish people to their historic
land were well-known and accepted in the previous century by world leaders from
President John Adams to Napoleon Bonaparte to British Foreign Secretary Lord
Palmerston.

5: These rights were preserved by the successor organization to the
League of Nations, the United Nations, under Article 80 of the UN Charter. The
ancient, even biblical, association of the Jewish people with the Land of Israel was
accepted in the Judeo-Christian tradition as a historical axiom.

From a legal standpoint, an opportunity arose to assert these historically recognized
rights. Since 1517, Eretz Israel had been under the sovereignty of the Ottoman
Empire; when the Ottomans lost to the British in 1918, in the Treaty of Sevres they
surrendered sovereignty over their Asiatic territories outside of Turkey. A vacuum of
sovereignty was created in which the historic claim of the Jewish people could be
raised. Yet the Jewish people themselves had begun raising it much earlier.

Since the loss of the Second Jewish Commonwealth to Roman legions in 70 CE, and
the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish people never lost their
connection to the Land of Israel (Palestine). The land, in fact, was never claimed to
be the unique home of another nation, but rather was a province of other larger
empires. As the renowned historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, has written:
From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the beginning of British rule, the
area now designated by the name Palestine was not a country and had no frontiers,
only administrative boundaries; it was a group of provincial subdivisions, by no
means always the same, within a larger entity.

6: In the interim, the Jewish people never stopped exercising their claim to the land.
Lewis, in fact, notes "there had been a steady movement of Jews to the Holy Land
throughout the centuries."

7: In 135 CE Jews took part in the Bar Kochba revolt against imperial Rome and even re-established their capital in Jerusalem. Defeated by the most brutal of the Roman legions under the command of the emperor Hadrian, Jews were forbidden to reside in Jerusalem for nearly five hundred years. Once a year on the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, they were allowed to weep at the remains of their destroyed Temple at a spot that came to be called "the Wailing Wall." In the meantime, the Roman authorities renamed Judea as Palestina in order to obliterate the memory of Jewish nationhood.

During this period, the Jewish national center shifted from Judea to the Galilee,
where hundreds of synagogues were erected from the Mediterranean to the Golan
Heights. Jewish law was then codified in the Mishnah by Judah Ha-Nasi. Despite the
catastrophic losses in Jewish lives during the wars against the Romans, Jews still
constituted the majority of the population of the Galilee in the fourth century. In the
Upper Galilee village of Pek'in there remained a continuous Jewish presence from the
Roman era to the rise of the State of Israel.

With the defeat of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) by Persian armies in 614,
the Jewish people recaptured Jerusalem and made it again their capital briefly. Yet
Byzantine rule was soon restored and Jews were forced again to vacate Jerusalem
until the defeat of the Byzantines in 638 by the Islamic armies of Caliph Omar, who
again opened the city for Jewish resettlement. Eretz Israel became a part of
successive Muslim empires - the Rashidun (the immediate followers of the Prophet
Muhammad, who ruled from Medina), the Umayyads (who ruled from Damascus),
the Abbasids (who ruled from Baghdad), and the Fatimids (who ruled from Cairo).

Under Islam, Jews were to be protected as a "people of the book," but were
nonetheless forced to pay discriminatory taxes like the jizya (poll tax) and the kharaj
(land tax). The crushing burden of these land taxes led to a loss of Jewish land
control in the Galilee during the first several centuries of Islamic rule. During the
Crusader occupation of Eretz Israel, many Jews were physically slaughtered,
especially in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the great Jewish scholar and poet Rabbi
Yehuda Halevi (1075-1141) still called for the mass immigration of Jews to the Land
of Israel.

8: The beginnings of Jewish recovery in Eretz Israel started with the defeat and
expulsion of the Crusaders in 1187 by the Kurdish Muslim warrior Salah ad-Din who,
like Caliph Omar, allowed the Jews to resettle in Jerusalem. For example, between
1209 and 1211, three hundred rabbis made their way from France and southern
England to settle in Jerusalem, once it was safe again to do so. They were joined by
rabbis from North Africa and Egypt. The great Jewish scholar Nachmanides (Ramban)
erected a synagogue in Jerusalem in 1267 that still stands in the Old City.

In the thirteenth century, Jewish families restored the community of Safed, which
would become the international center for the study of Jewish mysticism by the
sixteenth century. Reinforced by their rising numbers, Jews became assertive again
about their claim in Jerusalem, so that the pope forbade sea captains from
transporting Jews to Palestine in 1428.

9: Despite the hardships, Jews continued to return. The great commentator of the Mishnah, Ovadia Bartinura, left Italy to settle in Jerusalem in 1488; his tomb is at the foot of the Mt. of Olives.

The influx of Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 into the Ottoman
Empire, which took control of Eretz Israel in 1517, led to a substantial expansion of
the Jewish presence in Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias, where Sultan Sulaiman the
Magnificent allotted his Portugese Jewish advisor, Don Joseph Nasi, land grants for
Jewish resettlement. Even before the rise of modern political Zionism, Jews
continued to stream into the land from Yemen and Lithuania, whose numbers
included the students of the halakhic scholar the Vilna Gaon in 1809-1811. By 1864,
a clear-cut Jewish majority emerged in Jerusalem, more than half a century before
the arrival of the British Empire, the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, and the
establishment of the League of Nations Mandate.

The Palestinian Arabs Include Waves of Arab Immigrants

During the restoration of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, the overwhelming
impression of Western visitors in the nineteenth century was that there were few
Arab inhabitants. The British Consul General, James Finn, wrote in 1857 that "the
country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants." He added that the land's
"greatest need is that of a body of population."

10: Mark Twain visited Eretz Israel in 1867, traveled through the Jezreel Valley, and related, "there is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent."

11: Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the great British  cartographer, reached similar conclusions in 1881: "In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or
habitation."

12: Geographers had long concluded that it was improbable "that any but a small part of
the present Arab population of Palestine is descended from the ancient inhabitants of
the land"; indeed, according to their analysis, Palestine was "peopled by the drifting
populations of Arabia, and to some extent by the backwash of its harbors."

13: Additionally, the Ottomans settled Muslim populations as a buffer against Bedouin
attacks; Ibrahim Pasha, the Egyptian ruler, brought Egyptian colonists with his army
in the 1830s. It is noteworthy that the common Palestinian name al-Masri, used by a
clan in Nablus, literally means "the Egyptian."

14: Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization has perpetuated a myth, put forward on the
world stage by Yasser Arafat at the United Nations in 1974, that "the Jewish invasion
[of Palestine] began in 1881." Moreover, he asserted that there was already a large
indigenous Arab population when the Jews arrived. His implicit message was that
there was a well-entrenched Palestinian society in place before Israel's rebirth, a
society that had rights superior to those of the returning Jews.

Yet it is now clear that during the years that the Jewish presence in Eretz Israel was
restored, a huge Arab population influx transpired from neighboring countries as
Arab immigrants sought to take advantage of higher wages and economic
opportunities that resulted from Jewish settlement in the land. Indeed, President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt concluded in 1939 that "Arab immigration into Palestine
since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during the whole
period."

15: The Restoration of Israel Was Not a Product of European Imperialism

Another common argument put forward by the PLO is that Israel is really the product
of European imperialism and hence it does not represent a legitimate national
movement of its own. As a result, Zionism came to be portrayed in the Arab world as
"a hyperaggressive variant of colonialism."

16: This perception has also penetrated the discourse of Israel's European detractors. Initially, it is true that the idea of a restored Jewish homeland received its greatest push from the declaration in 1917 of the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, who called for its establishment after the
British defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, ironically, during the subsequent years of
the British Mandate over Palestine, European (and especially British) imperial policies
actually obstructed the emergence of the Jewish national home.

First, the territory of Transjordan was cut off from the Palestine Mandate and granted
by the British to the Hashemite dynasty from Arabia, who had lost their ancestral
homeland, the Hijaz, to the Saudi clan of eastern Arabia. Second, the British sought
to further partition the remaining territory of western Palestine into Jewish and Arab
states, reducing the area for Jewish settlement even more. Finally, with the 1939
White Paper, the British restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine just as Nazi
Germany began its conquest of Europe and its Holocaust against European Jewry.

In this context, it is not surprising that Jewish underground movements waged an
anti-colonial war in the 1940s against continuing British rule. In other words, Israel
was anti-imperialist when it first emerged. By contrast, the Arab states at the time
were aligned with the imperial powers. The Arab states that invaded the nascent
State of Israel fielded armies that were trained and supplied by the French and
British Empires. During Israel's War of Independence, British officers commanded the
Arab Legion of Transjordan, while the Royal Air Force, defending Egyptian airspace,
fought the Israeli Air Force over the Sinai Peninsula in 1949. And the nations of the
world did not lift a finger when the Jews of Jerusalem were surrounded and faced
annihilation, even though the UN had called for internationalization of the city. Only
the Israel Defense Forces broke Jerusalem's siege and saved its Jewish residents. In
short, Jewish independence in Israel was won by a native and indigenous community
acting in its own defense with little help from outside.

Is Jewish Statehood Discriminatory?

Today, some argue that Israel's very establishment as a Jewish state discriminates
against non-Jewish Israelis, even, as a recent article claimed, rendering them
second-class citizens.

17: Such a claim is not only utterly false, as any student of
Israeli law or politics knows; it also seriously distorts the harmless - and quite
beautiful - ways in which states can reflect the identity of their majority
communities, or pay tribute to their founding histories, without infringing the rights
of individual citizens. Israel's critics go too far when they seek to cloak Israel's mere
communal expression in the inflammatory garb of religious discrimination.

Nearly every country in the world boasts one majority community, and nearly all
reflect the cultural identity of that community in one way or another. The United
States officially celebrates only Christian holidays; many European countries openly
identify as either Catholic or Protestant; and many Muslim countries
uncontroversially refer to themselves as an "Islamic Republic," whether they are
democratic or not. For some, such identification is simply a sign of the spiritual
persuasion of the majority; for others, it is homage to the story of the country's
founding. There is nothing obviously wrong with such expression.

Indeed, in today's multi-culturalist environment, with a renaissance in public
appreciation of communal identity, it is anachronistic to suggest that in the case of
Israel, alone, communal identification is problematic. One can only wonder why
Jewish national expression, with no discriminatory effect, is so uniquely hard to
bear.

18: Perhaps the reason stems from the history of opposition to Jewish
statehood: it was first raised by Arab nationalists and religious Islamic radicals, who
opposed Jewish rule on what they had deemed "Arab" soil. This opposition, though
prominent in the rhetoric of Palestinian groups like Hamas today,

19: is largely unacceptable in Western political discourse. That forces its proponents to reformulate
their anti-Israel animus in the more universal language of rights and equality. Still,
as convenient a target as it seems, Israel's self-expression as a Jewish state, like the
communal identification of any state, has little bearing on questions of rights and
equality.

The important point is not whether a state adopts some communal theme but
whether it in fact discriminates: Are minority citizens equal under the law? Can they
express their own heritage publicly and communally? Do they have the same
opportunities for power and representation in the system, even the ability to become
the majority? In short, are they first-class citizens?

For non-Jewish citizens of Israel, the answer to all these questions is "Yes.
Unequivocally." Israeli Arab citizens are by law equal to Jewish citizens; they enjoy
the same rights and are legally protected from discrimination. Non-Jews enjoy every
freedom that democracies recognize, including freedom of worship, the free
expression and exercise of religion, equality of financial, material, and employment
opportunity, political power, and all legal rights. Indeed, Israel's Declaration of
Independence demands nothing less. According to the Declaration, the Jewish state
"will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants
irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience,
language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions."
Israel's Arab citizens have, in fact, reached positions on Israel's Supreme Court and
have elected powerful parties in the Israeli Knesset that fully participate in Israeli
political life.

Some critics of Israel, often with questionable motives, exploit the nature of Israel's
parliamentary political system to falsely depict Arab citizens as a vulnerable minority.
Indeed they are - but only inasmuch as all minorities in a parliamentary government
that are outside the ruling coalition suffer some disadvantages. Israel contains a
lively system of distinct communities living side-by-side, often vying for the same
limited supply of the largely socialized national welfare and aid programs. Israeli
Arabs, for example, compete with other minorities that do not typically reach the top
- ultra-Orthodox Jews, Russian immigrants, and religious Sephardim. That some of
these groups sometimes do better than others does not show discrimination; it
simply shows the system at work.

Most important, however, the disadvantages of political minorities in Israel have
nothing to do with Israel's ceremonious identification as a Jewish state. Their
situation will change if and when Israel transforms itself from a system of
proportional representation, with each minority having a party to call its own, into a
district-based election system. Many Israelis support such a change, though it has
shortcomings, too. But even under the current, imperfect, political reality, Jewish
and Arab citizens are equal under the law.

All this is not to deny that Israel has one special mission as a Jewish state - albeit
one that does not affect the rights of its non-Jewish citizens. Israel was built as a
haven for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. The legendary Israeli statesman Abba
Eban referred to this aspect of Israel as a case of "international affirmative action,"
because it was designed to correct an inherent disadvantage suffered by a particular
group throughout history, which has deprived them of a level playing field.
Unfortunately, Jews still need a place of refuge from persecution. For that reason,
Diaspora Jews deserve the special treatment they receive in this one respect. When
the Jewish community of Ethiopia stood defenseless against the onslaught of armed
partisans in the 1991 civil war, or when Argentina's Jews became the target of
scape-goating and attacks during the recent economic depression, or when Soviet
Jews fled Communism, Israel alone opened its doors unconditionally. For Jews
seeking refuge in Israel, the state grants immediate citizenship. Nevertheless, a non-
Jew enjoys the same right and opportunity to become a citizen of Israel as any other
country offers, including the United States. And once a citizen, he or she enjoys all
the rights and privileges granted by Israel's laws and government to the majority of
its people, based on a principle of equality now enshrined in the basic law of the
country and the fabric of its political culture.

Israeli Rights Versus Palestinian Rights

Still, regardless of the rights that Israel has granted its non-Jewish citizens, critics
malign it on different grounds: that Palestinians boast a stronger claim for national
sovereignty over the same land. This claim needs to be examined separately. In
particular, was there, prior to Israel's establishment, a distinct Palestinian
nationalism vying for its own separate place in the land?

The Palestinian Arabs originally saw themselves in the early twentieth century as
part of a greater Arab national movement. For much of the first half of the last
century Arab states sought to unify as they supported various schemes for Arab
unity. In Arabic there are, in fact, two terms for nationalism: qawmiyah - loyalty to
the Arab nation as a whole, and wataniyah - loyalty to the local country in which one
resides. For decades, qawmiyah was far more predominant for Palestinian Arabs.

For example, Bernard Lewis has written that while the Palestinian Arabs had a
growing sense of identity with their struggle against Jewish immigration in the
1930s, still "their basic sense of corporate historic identity was, at different levels,
Muslim or Arab or - for some - Syrian; it is significant that even by the end of the
Mandate in 1948, after thirty years of separate Palestinian political existence, there
were virtually no books in Arabic on the history of Palestine."

20: Moreover, the 1947 Partition Plan still described the Palestinians as "Arabs" and
called for an "Arab state" in Palestine alongside of a Jewish state. In May 1956,
Ahmad Shuqairy, who would found the PLO eight years later, stated before the UN
Security Council: "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern
Syria."

21: In the early 1960s, many Palestinians looked to Egypt's Gamal Abdul
Nasser as their leader as much as to any Palestinian. And there was no active
movement of the Palestinians to separate the West Bank from Jordan or the Gaza
Strip from Egypt to form a unique Palestinian state prior to 1967. Today, a third
source of loyalty is emerging among Palestinian Arabs connected to Hamas or
Islamic Jihad - loyalty to the Islamic nation or umma. Hamas, after all, is the
Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with pan-Islamic
ambitions.

Still, Israel recognizes that a unique Palestinian national identity exists today. But
given its historical background, it is impossible to show that Palestinian nationalism
has a claim to the Land of Israel superior to that of the Jews.

In the future, whatever Palestinian political entity emerges from part of the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, it very well might decide to federate with the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan in ten or twenty years, where a Palestinian majority already
exists. In the Balkans, for example, it is difficult for Europeans to predict the future
of Bosnia or Kosovo. Will their populations seek to unify with states containing the
same ethnic makeup, so that Croats in Bosnia will merge with Croatia, while
Kosovars will seek to unite with Albania? The same long-term question applies to the
Palestinian territories after Arafat.

The Continuing Need for Jewish Statehood
Regardless, a uniquely Jewish democratic society will continue to exist in Israel,
where it will serve as a vital refuge for Jews facing anti-Semitism from France,
Russia, South America, or Yemen. Israel remains the only country that allows
unconditional Jewish immigration. In a few years Israel will comprise the largest
Jewish community in the world. Only the army of the Jewish people, the Israel
Defense Forces, can protect that community.

Some now argue that Jews no longer face the existential threats that anti-Semitism
once posed. It is even suggested that today's anti-Semitism is caused, not
counteracted, by Israeli policy. But the recent experiences of Jews in Ethiopia,
Argentina, and across Europe, along with the vile slurs about world Jewry on the part
of Islamic leaders like Malaysia's Mohammed Mahathir, give lie to such euphoria.
Anti-Semitism has existed for centuries, well before the rise of the State of Israel.
Indeed, it could be argued that it is not the reality of Israeli policy that is causing the
new anti-Semitism, but rather the prejudices of European editors who feature
difficult anti-Israeli photographs, out of context, as lead news items, while
downgrading serious cases of massacre, such as on the continent of Africa.

Today, world leaders are willing to admit that the harsh critique that Israel receives
can be traced to older, anti-Semitic roots. For example, the president of the
European Commission, Roman Prodi - commenting on a new opinion poll showing
that Israel is the country regarded by most ordinary Europeans as a threat to world
peace - said the results "point to the continued existence of a bias that must be
condemned out of hand," and "to the extent that this may indicate a deeper, more
general prejudice against the Jewish world, our repugnance is even more radical."

22: There is even a new strain of anti-Semitism that has emerged in the radical
opposition to globalization, which now targets Jews as a kind of transnational
economic force and, in chillingly familiar terms, blames them for economic upheaval.
The anti-Semitic threat, unfortunately, is alive and well.

Not only is Jewish security at stake but so is Jewish continuity. Throughout Jewish
history, national independence was perceived as a condition for Jewish self- fulfillment.