That Which Binds Our Hearts to the Jewish State

...As a non-Jew, I simply want to add that the founding of the Jewish state also touches my heart because it is an unbelievable human drama, a transcendent story of hope and redemption, a nearly miraculous testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. Israel is a place and a state. But it is also a story, among the most riveting and inspiring ever written. For many of us it is that story, its beauty and wonder, its defiance and courage, that further binds us to the Jewish state. First and foremost, the fate of the Jewish people is tied to Israel. But not their fate alone. Jews are in need of Israel. So are the rest of us.

Peter Wehner..
Commentary Magazine..
14 January '15..






I want to commend COMMENTARY’s powerful and bracing editorial, “The Existential Necessity Of Zionism After Paris.” In its words:

The battle lines are drawn. The French elite may occasionally condemn anti-Semitism, as did Hollande after the attack on the kosher market. And on January 11, Hollande, arm-in-arm with world leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, led more than a million people in a march supporting the victims of the January attacks and condemning hate.

But there are no substantive signs that France’s leaders are prepared to stop the radical Islamists who have declared war on French Jewry. Meanwhile, members of the French working class are coming to see the Jews more and more as a hindrance to their own economic well-being. And Europe’s steady turn against Israel has sharpened anti-Semitism of all stripes.

… For every French Jew at risk, for every Jew everywhere at risk, and for every Jew who chooses, Israel is home. Its existence before the Holocaust would have saved millions. Its existence after the Holocaust saved and created millions. Seventy years after the Holocaust, Jews in Europe are in need of it again.

This editorial should be alongside of this front-page story in the New York Times that begins this way: “French Jews, already feeling under siege by anti-Semitism, say the trauma of the terrorist attacks last week has left them scared, angry, unsure of their future in France and increasingly willing to consider conflict-torn Israel as a safer refuge.”


The rise of anti-Semitism in France–most especially the Muslim attacks on French Jews, of course, but also the tepid and equivocal response by the French government–is a moral disgrace. In one respect, it’s staggering to see the rise of anti-Semitism on the continent that produced the Holocaust. In another respect, I suppose, it’s not, as history demonstrates that there is no half-life to anti-Semitism. Its lethally corrosive evil may be contained now and then, but it usually finds a home. And this explains in part why the Jews need their home, too. That home has been, and must ever be, Israel. “In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen,” the prophet Amos wrote, “and close up the breaches thereof; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old.”

The Jewish people deserve a Jewish state. As a non-Jew, I simply want to add that the founding of the Jewish state also touches my heart because it is an unbelievable human drama, a transcendent story of hope and redemption, a nearly miraculous testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. Israel is a place and a state. But it is also a story, among the most riveting and inspiring ever written. For many of us it is that story, its beauty and wonder, its defiance and courage, that further binds us to the Jewish state. First and foremost, the fate of the Jewish people is tied to Israel. But not their fate alone.

Jews are in need of Israel. So are the rest of us.

Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/01/13/binds-hearts-jewish-state/

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