IN DEFENSE OF A JEWISH STATE: MORDECHAI NISSAN
Israel Affairs, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537121.2013.778088
The idea of a Jewish state is rooted in ancient Jewish peoplehood based
upon essential features of collective identity and ties to the territorial
homeland. From this emerges the natural goal of statehood in modernSE
times that was propelled by the dynamic and revolutionary Zionist
movement. Nonetheless, a major campaign of de-legitimization has sought
to invalidate Israel’s right to exist. Israel’s Arab citizens charge their state
with racism while adamantly rejecting its Jewish demographic, cultural,
and political character. In defending Israel’s national existence, unique in
the annals of human history, one highlights the principles of life, truth, and
justice, as inherent in the Jewish state’s historical rebirth in its ancestral
homeland.
The role of nationality in politics has been subject to divergent views in modern
times.1 The major difference in political conceptions pitted a ‘republican’ citizen
polity, like the revolutionary French and American examples, against an ethnic
national polity as reflected in the cases of, say, Poland, Ireland, and Japan. With
the founding of Israel in 1948, a Jewish nation-state was constituted in the name
of a historic people, bound and integrated by ancient Torah-faith and way of life,
a shared experience and memory, around a land and a language, and the pervasive
self-consciousness of uniqueness, perseverance, and persecution. Jewish
nationality, and not an undifferentiated numerical democracy, was the selfdeclared
ideological banner in the reconstitution of a Jewish state in the Land of
Israel.
In these dark days of a de-legitimization campaign targeting Israel, when its
political existence – no less significant than its precarious physical survival – is
challenged by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and more, it is
necessary to go back to fundamentals. While countries like the Maldives and
Micronesia, Barbados and Granada, Bahrain and Belgium enjoy international
recognition and diplomatic legitimacy, Israel and Israel alone among the UN’s
196 states must deposit its affidavit of self-defence in the dock of the world
tribunal of opinion and judgement.
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