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Israel: The Most Legitimate State on Earth

(Tablet) Liel Leibovitz - Any way you look at it, Israel is the most legitimate state on Earth. A nation is a product of the collective culture of a group with its own unique language, history, traditions, and beliefs. The Jews had the world's first nation-state, setting "a precedent for all the states that followed," as David Goldman has written. "It united a group of tribes around a common religion and priesthood with a universal God, eschewing the worship of family or clan gods that otherwise was universal in the ancient world. Tribes, clans, and even city-states may unite for self-defense, as did the Greek city-states, but no other nation like the biblical Israel arose in the ancient world with a unified monarchy, a unified legal system and unified religion." Give or take a few differences - instead of a monarchy, for example, a raucous democracy - modern Israel remains a legible embodiment of this ancient idea. Israel's citizens, the first indigenous people in recent memory to return to their ancestral homeland, cultivate a stretch of the Earth over which they can claim ownership by summoning everything from the Bible to reams of archaeological discoveries empirically confirming it had once belonged to their forefathers. Jews with roots in Vienna and Jews whose grandmothers were born in the Atlas Mountains and in the deserts of Yemen all see themselves as belonging to the same extended family. The family speaks the same language and, with varying degrees of observance, practices the same faith. Everything in Israel springs naturally from a national culture shaped by a collective narrative and shared traditions. Israel's existence, and its continuing success, are an intimation that the light unto the nations may shine not from the embrace of universalist dogma, but rather from a small nation that insists on living by its own traditions and happy to simply lead by example. To those who despise the idea of national sovereignty and national character, to those who want us all to obey the same regulations and standards of virtue promulgated by a single authority, there can be no greater threat than the continuing existence of a strong, prosperous, and free Jewish state with its capital in Jerusalem.
2021-12-02 00:00:00
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