Why Israel Matters

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews — nearly two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of the world's entire Jewish population. It was the largest, most methodical, most industrialized genocide in human history. Trains ran on schedules. Gas chambers were engineered for throughput. Human ashes were sold as fertilizer.

The scale is almost impossible to hold in the mind. If you spoke aloud the name of every Jewish person murdered in the Holocaust — one per second, day and night, without stopping — it would take you almost two months to finish. Entire civilizations were erased in five years: Yiddish Warsaw, Vilna, Salonika, Odessa, Lodz, Krakow — cradles of Jewish learning for a thousand years — silenced forever. One and a half million of the murdered were children.

And the world knew. The 1938 Evian Conference — thirty-two nations convened to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis — ended with only the Dominican Republic willing to accept meaningful numbers of Jews. The SS St. Louis, carrying 937 German Jewish refugees, was turned away from Cuba, the United States, and Canada in 1939, forced back to Europe where a quarter of its passengers were later murdered. The British choked off Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939, precisely as Europe's Jews needed somewhere — anywhere — to flee.

The Shoah is not simply a chapter of history. It is the moral backdrop against which the modern State of Israel was born. It is the answer to every question that begins "why do the Jews need a state of their own?"

Jewish civilization is unusual in world history. For nearly two thousand years — from the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE to the founding of the modern state in 1948 — the Jewish people had no country of their own. They were guests, tenants, minorities, scapegoats. Repeatedly expelled — from England in 1290, from France in 1394, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, from dozens of German cities across the medieval centuries, from Arab lands after 1948 — the Jewish story is a map of exits.

And yet, across all those centuries, in every corner of the diaspora, Jews prayed three times a day facing Jerusalem. They ended every Passover Seder with the words "L'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim" — Next Year in Jerusalem. They broke a glass at every wedding to remember the destroyed Temple. They named their children after ancestors from a land they had never seen but never forgotten. When a Baghdadi Jew and a Yiddish-speaking Jew from Vilna met on a boat in the 19th century, they could pray from the same siddur, in the same Hebrew, because the connection to the Land of Israel had never been broken — only deferred.

This is why the Jewish return to Israel in the 20th century is not a story of colonization. Colonization is a foreign people arriving. The Jewish people did not arrive in the Land of Israel; they returned to it, from the very exiles the Romans had forced them into.

On May 14, 1948 — a Friday afternoon in a small art museum on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv — David Ben-Gurion stood beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl and read a 979-word declaration. It ended two thousand years of exile. Eleven minutes later, President Harry Truman recognized the new state, overruling his Secretary of State George Marshall, who had warned him it would be a political disaster.

Within hours, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded — five nations bent on strangling the new state in its cradle. The infant Israel had no formal army, no air force to speak of, no heavy weapons. It faced a full-scale conventional invasion from every direction. By the end of the war in 1949, one out of every one hundred Israelis was dead — a per-capita loss the United States has never come close to suffering in any war.

Israel's founding is inseparable from that war and from the tragedy of Palestinian displacement that accompanied it. Historians distinguish between the historical facts of 1948, the religious meanings assigned to it, and the political interpretations that continue today. Honest conversation about the region requires holding all three in view — but also remembering that the Jewish leadership accepted the UN's 1947 partition plan, and the Arab leadership rejected it and went to war to prevent any Jewish state from existing at all.

In Judaism, the Land of Israel is not merely territory. It is the setting of the covenant with Abraham, the site of Abraham's binding of Isaac, the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs at Hebron, the location of Solomon's Temple, and the country in which most of the Hebrew Bible is set. Sixty-one of the 613 commandments in Jewish law can only be fulfilled within its borders. Every direction in Jewish prayer is toward Jerusalem; every calendar is Jerusalem's; every hope of the Messianic future centers on it.

For Christianity, the same land holds the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The Sermon on the Mount was preached above the Sea of Galilee. The Last Supper took place in Jerusalem. The Via Dolorosa still winds through the Old City. Every Christian church on earth traces its origin to this land.

For Islam, Jerusalem is the third-holiest city — the destination of the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey and the site from which, Muslim tradition holds, he ascended to heaven. The Dome of the Rock, built on the site of the Jewish Temples in 691 CE, is one of the most sacred buildings in the Muslim world.

Few pieces of earth are so densely layered with sacred meaning across so many billions of believers. Israel today is the only country in the region where all three faiths worship openly and freely at their holy sites — a fact worth pausing on, given the fate of religious minorities almost everywhere else in the Middle East.

There are more than fifty Muslim-majority countries in the world and twenty-two members of the Arab League. There is one Jewish state — roughly the size of the U.S. state of New Jersey. Within its borders, Arab citizens (about 20% of the population) vote, sit on the Supreme Court, serve as ambassadors, lead major hospitals, and have on occasion held the balance of a governing coalition. They are, by every serious international measure, the freest Arab population in the Middle East.

Israel is the only country in the region ranked "Free" by Freedom House. It is the only country in the region with an independent judiciary that regularly rules against its own government. It is the only country in the region where a Prime Minister has been sent to prison. It is the only country in the region with a fully free press. It is the only country in the region where LGBT people are not persecuted by law.

This does not mean Israel is beyond criticism — every democracy invites debate about its policies, and Israel's own citizens argue more loudly than most. But Israel's endurance as a pluralistic democracy under near-constant existential pressure is one of the quiet miracles of the modern world.

Israel's very existence has been treated by much of the Arab world — for most of the past seventy-five years — as a wound. Seven full-scale wars have been fought to destroy it; countless smaller conflicts and campaigns of terror have followed. And yet the world Israel finds itself in today is dramatically different from the world of 1948. Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco (2020) now have formal peace with Israel. Direct flights connect Tel Aviv to Dubai; Israeli technology powers Emirati hospitals; Saudi Arabia edges closer to open normalization.

The one force that has united much of the Sunni Arab world with Israel is a shared understanding of the threat from Iran — a regime whose leaders openly call for Israel's destruction, sponsor Hamas and Hezbollah, and pursue nuclear weapons. In that alignment lies the possibility of a Middle East less defined by conflict and more by cooperation — a possibility that October 7 tested but did not extinguish.