Contrary to the opinion held by those trying to de-legitimise the State of Israel, Israel does not owe its existence to the Holocaust. The League of Nations, in 1917, recognised the right of the Jewish people to re-establish their homeland in Palestine (historically known as Israel, Judah and Judea until the name was changed by the Romans in the second century), where the nation was born and from which it was twice exiled.
Many of the people I have guided over the years are puzzled by the fact that the words “Israeli” and “Jewish” are not interchangeable. Every citizen of Israel is an Israeli, whether Jewish, Moslem or Christian and twenty percent of the population of Israel is not Jewish. Like most countries of the world Israel too has its laws of naturalisation – only new immigrants who are Jewish can become citizens of Israel.
“Who, and what, is a Jew?” is much more difficult to define. According to the Halacha (Talmudic law), for the last two thousand years at least, a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother. By that simple definition, Jews throughout the world are all part of the Jewish people. This people-hood has nothing to do with race as we have Jews who are blond and light skinned, brunette and olive-skinned, dark and black-skinned, some with large noses, some with petite noses, none with horns. Contrary to a commonly-held, usually anti-Semitic claim, it is not possible to “recognise a Jew from a mile” by racial features.
Being Jewish is also being part of a religion, one of the oldest in the world, if not the oldest, still following the laws and guidelines dictated to Moses over three thousand years ago, faithfully and accurately preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures also known as the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses. Many Jews throughout the world who do not obey the biblical laws in their daily life still feel a cultural, or otherwise indefinable, attachment to the Jewish people and thus to Israel.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 Jews can therefore be defined as all three together – a people, a religion and a nation. To the best of my knowledge, this is unique and so it is difficult for non-Jews, in particular, to understand. But there are many Jews today who do not appreciate that it is due to this uniqueness, this combination of all three components, that we have persevered and been preserved despite thousands of years of dispersion and persecution.
In the modern western, democratic world of the past few decades, liberal intellectualism is leading the move to eradicate differences, whether religious or national. This can be most clearly seen in the European Union where the member countries have blended into “oneness” and the number of “practising” Christians is fast declining.
Jewish liberal intellectualists have followed suite. They too wish to “blend”, to assimilate, and see no reason to practise an “archaic religion”, to be part of a unique people or to support a state which does not want to “blend” and lose its unique identity.
The situation in the Moslem world is very, very different. So different that liberal intellectuals cannot understand it and therefore, instead of studying it assiduously, tend to ignore it.
Unlike Christianity and Judaism, where the number of practising followers is in decline, Islam is on the rise. Most Moslems have no desire to blend, to assimilate, in the countries to which they have moved for a better life. On the contrary, they desire to impose their beliefs and religious legal system, the Shari’a, on the non-Moslem world they are invading, if not by force then by sheer numbers.
