Israel’s entire rationale is based on the validity of a so-called biblical promise from God of the land either side of the River Jordan – yet, astonishingly, your post advocates a secular state.

Where did you get this idea that Israel’s entire rationale is based on the validity of a biblical promise?

Sure, there are some people who believe this but they don’t run the government of Israel, they didn’t found Israel, they were a tiny minority of the Zionists who built the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community) and are not representative of either the country’s foundations or its intentions. The country was founded by secular Jews who believed that the Jewish people are a nation and not just a religion. They believed that the Jewish people, like other nations, deserve their own state where they could determine their own fate. This was due, in some measure to the failure of the Enlightenment to alleviate societal anti-Semitism in many countries where Jews lived.

Israel’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence does not mention a biblical right to the land either. Israel respects Jewish traditions in the same way that it permits Muslims and Christians to have legal civil authority from their religious leaders.

I hope that clarifies things for you.

Which argument would you like to retain in order to validate your position – the latter or the former? You can’t have it both ways.

Really?

If Israelis are predominately non-religious, which they are, then on what do they base their claim for ejecting an indigenous Arab people that had lived continuously on and in the land for over 1000 years?

First of all, only some of these Arabs are indigenous. Second, there were Jews living continuously on that land for 2500 to 3000 years. Jews always lived in Tiberias, Safed and Hebron with small breaks at times from living in Jerusalem because Christians or Muslims were evicting them.

The claim to the place is based on ancient history and on modern history. Ancient history teaches us that this was the home of the Jewish people. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, are written in Hebrew and Aramaic and contain the canon of the Hebrew Bible. These are 2000 year old documents that not only precede your indigenous Arab population but also precede Islam.

Modern history teaches us that the Jewish people strove to reclaim their historic homeland using money to purchase the land and with democracy, intending to grow the Jewish population until it grew sufficiently to be able to run and win elections. This vision was supported by the international community through the League of Nations which gave the British a Mandate to turn Palestine – until then a province of the Ottoman Empire – into a home for the Jewish people. The British proceeded to then give most of Palestine, 83% of it, to the Hashemites who formed TransJordan (today’s Jordan) and the remaining 17% is what the UN suggested the Jews and local Arabs (now known as Palestinians) divide between them. The Arabs, as they did in 1937 when the Peel Commission suggested a similar division, refused. The Jews accepted again, as they did in 1937. This time, however, the Jews declared a state when the British Mandate concluded. The result was an attack by several Arab armies including the local Arabs. In this war, the Jewish community of Palestine, now Israel, lost 1% of its population and many more were injured and maimed. But it won that war, just as it won the war in 1967 and the one in 1973. Those wars are the other reason that Israel can lay claim to this land. The other side was intent on ejecting the Jews – if you need evidence of this, just look at the Jordanian behavior in the “West Bank” where they evicted every single Jew from their territory), but failed. The Israelis did not eject all the Arabs and in fact kept a sizable number. Others were ejected or left on their own. But the decades of violence prior to that war and the war itself led to the fate of the Palestinians today.

And now, for your edification, Israel’s Declaration of Independence (you would do well to read this and then read the charters of the PLO and Hamas to understand where your sympathies lie):

ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma’pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called “Israel”.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it 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; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.

Thanks for this Jewlicious!

You hit the nail on the head

And I see many flaws in Israel and its direction. In part this is why I’m waiting until after he’s 18. I want him to decide for himself whether he feels compelled to live there, and not force military service or life there upon him.