Identity

The question "why does Israel exist?" is sometimes posed as if the answer is self-evidently problematic. The honest answer is that Israel exists because every available alternative was tried for two millennia and failed — not occasionally, but systematically, across every civilisation that hosted Jewish communities.

Theodor Herzl's insight after the Dreyfus Affair was not paranoia — it was a structural observation. Jewish safety had been permanently contingent on majority tolerance, which is structurally fragile regardless of individual Jewish achievement or integration. The most assimilated communities in history had been destroyed. The lesson was not that Jews needed to be more integrated. It was that integration was not a durable solution.

October 7 confirmed the thesis in the most liberal societies in history. European synagogues now require security infrastructure no other religious community needs. French Jewish emigration runs at rates not seen since the 1930s. Israel is not an anomaly requiring special justification. It is the rational response of a people that tried every available alternative for 2,000 years.

The claim that Jews are foreign to the Land of Israel — settlers imported from Europe — requires ignoring three independent lines of evidence: population genetics, the archaeological record, and 2,000 years of continuous documented Jewish presence in the region.

Multiple population genetics studies confirm continuous genetic connection between modern Jewish populations and ancient Levantine populations. Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and other Jewish communities cluster genetically with each other and with ancient Israelite and Canaanite samples. This connection predates and is entirely independent of the Zionist movement — it reflects ancient demographic reality, not 19th-century ideology.

The archaeological record is unambiguous. Continuous Jewish presence in the Land of Israel is documented through the archaeological record, Roman-era sources, Byzantine-era sources, and medieval travel accounts. The claim that Jews have no connection to the land rests on ignoring this record entirely.

Judea and Samaria — the West Bank — is the geographic heartland of ancient Jewish civilisation. Jerusalem, Hebron, Shiloh, Bethel, and the core sites of biblical and Second Temple period Jewish life are all located there. Calling Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria "settler colonialism" requires the remarkable logical move of treating a people as foreign in the precise geographic region named after them.

Through every displacement over 2,000 years, Jewish communities maintained Hebrew as a liturgical language, oriented their prayers toward Jerusalem, and preserved cultural memory of the same geographic point. This is not the behaviour of a people with no connection to a land. It is the behaviour of a people in exile from a land they considered their own.

The colonial settler framework assumes that Israeli Jews are predominantly European transplants who arrived from outside the region to displace an indigenous population. The demographic reality is the opposite. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi — from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and other countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Their communities predate Islam in most cases by centuries or millennia.

These communities were not recent migrants exploring economic opportunity. They were expelled by Arab governments in the decades following 1948 — stripped of citizenship, their property confiscated, some subjected to organised violence. They went to Israel because no other option was available to them, and because Israel was the place their communities had prayed toward for the entirety of the diaspora.

Israel absorbed these communities — the majority of its Jewish population — into the region they had inhabited for millennia. This is not what colonialism looks like. Colonialism involves a metropolitan power sending settlers from outside a region to extract resources and displace an indigenous population. What happened with Mizrahi Jews is the precise opposite: a Middle Eastern people returned to their regional homeland after being expelled from the countries that had hosted them.

The decolonisation frame does not survive contact with this demographic reality. If the majority of Israeli Jews are Middle Easterners returning to the Middle East, the colonial framework requires a different explanation for why their return is illegitimate while the Arab states' expulsion of them is not discussed.

Israel is regularly described as an "ethnostate" — a state defined by ethnic identity that systematically excludes non-members. The factual record of Arab life inside Israel does not support this characterisation. The characterisation's selective application to Israel and not to states that more clearly meet the definition confirms it is a conclusion, not an applied principle.

The reality of Arab citizenship in Israel:

The strongest legal objection is the Nation-State Law of 2018, which establishes Jewish self-determination as a constitutional principle. This is worth engaging honestly: the law does not formally strip individual rights from Arab citizens, but it does establish a hierarchy of collective rights that Arab citizens are not equal participants in. That is a legitimate political objection — but it is not evidence of an ethnostate in the operational sense, since Arab individual rights remain legally protected and judicially enforced.

The states that more clearly meet the ethnostate criteria — yet are not subjected to the same label:

A label applied exclusively to Israel while exempting states that more clearly meet its definition is not a principled analytical category. It is a rhetorical weapon. The universal principle test applies: if ethnostate criteria were applied consistently across all states, either Israel would not qualify on the evidence, or at least a dozen other states would qualify more clearly and would be subject to the same delegitimisation campaign. They are not.

Opposition to Israeli statehood is categorically different from opposition to any other state's policies. The reason is arithmetic.

Jews are the only major religious or ethnic group for whom the elimination of their single state leaves the group with no national home anywhere on earth. There is no Plan B. There is no second country to absorb the Jewish population if Israel ceases to exist. The 2,000-year historical record documents what happens to Jewish communities without a state of their own.

This asymmetry means that opposition to Israeli statehood is not equivalent to opposition to American foreign policy, British imperial history, or French governance. Those states exist within a network of many states where the same population has citizenship, legal protection, and national identity. Opposing their specific policies is a normal political act.

Opposing the existence of the one state where Jews have national self-determination — given that the historical alternative is documented — is a different category of act. It requires explaining what the proposed alternative is. "Jews can live as minorities in other countries" is the proposed alternative that the 2,000-year record has already tested and answered.