The Case for the State

Two Cases,
One Land

The Jewish bond to this land rests on two foundations: a historical one, a state rebuilt by a returning people and recognized, step by step, in international law, and a religious one, the covenant promised to Abraham and the return foretold by the prophets.

I · The Historical Case II · The Religious Case
I · The Historical Case

Born in Law

The modern legal case runs in a straight line. A great power backed a Jewish national home (Balfour), the Allied powers gave it the force of international law (San Remo), the League of Nations made it a binding trust that recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people” to the land (the Mandate), and the United Nations voted to partition that land into a Jewish and an Arab state (Resolution 181). The Jewish side said yes. The Arab side said no, and went to war. Israel declared independence and survived.

Studio portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism.
Theodor Herzl, who convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897 and gave the movement for a Jewish state its modern political form.Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Group photograph of the founders of Ahuzat Bayit, the association that built Tel Aviv.
The founders of Ahuzat Bayit, the association that built Tel Aviv, the first modern Hebrew city, on the dunes north of Jaffa.Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Why the State Was Necessary

Nowhere to Go

The road above runs from Balfour to independence, but it steps over the years that turned a national project into a matter of survival. Between the Mandate and the UN vote came the Shoah, and the discovery that when the Jews of Europe most needed somewhere to flee, the world had bolted every door, including the door to their own homeland.

1938Évian, France
As Nazi persecution mounted, 32 nations met at Évian to discuss taking in Jewish refugees. One after another, they refused to raise their quotas. Only the tiny Dominican Republic offered real refuge. The Nazis took note: the world did not want the Jews either.
May 1939The White Paper
At the worst possible moment, Britain issued the White Paper, capping Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over five years and then to nothing without Arab consent. The one homeland that would have taken them was sealed shut as Europe's Jews were being trapped.
1939The St. Louis
A ship of 937 German-Jewish refugees was turned away from Cuba, the United States and Canada, and forced back to Europe. 254 of them were later murdered in the Holocaust.
1942The Struma
A barely seaworthy ship carried 769 Romanian Jews toward Palestine. Denied entry, it was held off Istanbul for weeks, then towed out to sea, where it sank. There was one survivor.
1947The Exodus
Even after the war, Britain turned back the Exodus 1947 and its 4,500 Holocaust survivors, sending them all the way back to displaced-persons camps in Germany. The world watched, and began to change its mind.

They came anyway. Defying the gates, the clandestine ships of Aliyah Bet ran the blockade and brought in tens of thousands. After the war, a quarter of a million survivors sat in displaced-persons camps, liberated but unwanted, with nowhere on earth that would have them.

This is the foundation beneath the two cases. A people that must beg others for the right to exist can be murdered when the answer is no. So the very first law the new state passed was the Law of Return: any Jew, fleeing any persecution, anywhere, would always have one country that must open its door. That is what a state is for. See also the Jewish refugees the world forgot.

The Evidence in Your Hand

Struck in their own land

Two coins, nearly two thousand years apart, say the quiet part in metal: this was, and is, the land of Israel.

66–70 CE · The Great Revolt
A silver shekel struck during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, with a chalice and three pomegranates.

A shekel of Israel

שֶׁקֶל יִשְׂרָאֵל · יְרוּשָׁלַיִם הַקְּדוֹשָׁה

When the Jews of Judaea rose against Rome, they minted their own silver coins in Paleo-Hebrew: “Shekel of Israel” and “Jerusalem the Holy.” The revolt's bronze coins added the cry “Freedom of Zion” (חרות ציון). Sovereign Jewish money, struck in this land, nineteen centuries ago.

First Jewish Revolt shekel, year two. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
1927 · The British Mandate
A British Mandate for Palestine coin, inscribed Palestine with the Hebrew abbreviation for the Land of Israel.

“Palestine,” in Hebrew: Land of Israel

פָּלֶשְׂתִּינָה (א״י)

Even the colonial currency conceded the point. British Mandate coins read Palestine in English and Arabic, and in Hebrew פלשׂתינה followed by א״י, the standard abbreviation for Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. The official name of the place, in the Jewish tongue, was the Land of Israel.

Photo: Arabmuslim12, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Both are real artifacts in public collections. The First Revolt coinage (66–70 CE) and British Mandate coinage (1927–1948) are documented in standard numismatic catalogues.
Written in Stone

Named before Rome, before Islam

Five monuments, carved by Egyptians, Arameans, Assyrians, Persians and Romans, none of them friends of the Jews. Each records the same people, in this same land, across thirteen centuries.

The Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian granite monument bearing the earliest known mention of Israel.
1208 BCE · Egypt

The first mention of Israel

A victory monument of Pharaoh Merneptah lists the peoples his armies struck in Canaan, and among them, “Israel”. It is the oldest mention of Israel anywhere on earth, carved by an enemy 3,200 years ago, long before Rome or Islam existed.

Merneptah Stele, Cairo. Photo: Webscribe, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Tel Dan Stele, an Aramaic inscription mentioning the House of David.
c. 840 BCE · The House of David

King David, in his enemy's stone

An Aramean king's victory stele, unearthed at Tel Dan, boasts of killing a king of Israel and a king of the “House of David” (ביתדוד). It is the first mention of David outside the Bible, written by the very enemy who fought his dynasty.

Tel Dan Stele, Israel Museum. Photo: Liadmalone, CC BY-SA 4.0.
An Assyrian palace relief from Nineveh depicting Sennacherib's army at the siege of the Judahite city of Lachish.
701 BCE · Assyria

Judah, under Assyria's chisel

Palace reliefs from Nineveh show King Sennacherib's army storming the Judahite fortress of Lachish, the invasion the Bible records in detail (2 Kings 18). The Kingdom of Judah, its walls, soldiers and exiles, carved by the empire that besieged it.

Lachish Reliefs, British Museum. Photo: Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay cylinder inscribed in cuneiform recording Cyrus the Great's policy of returning exiled peoples.
539 BCE · Persia

The return, in Persia's own clay

After taking Babylon, Cyrus the Great proclaimed on this clay cylinder that he freed captive peoples and restored their temples. It is the contemporary witness to the very policy the Bible credits with sending the Jewish exiles home to rebuild Jerusalem (Ezra 1).

Cyrus Cylinder, British Museum. Photo: Prioryman, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Arch of Titus relief in Rome showing the menorah and Temple vessels carried in triumph.
81 CE · Rome

The Temple, carved by Rome

On Rome's own triumphal Arch of Titus, soldiers parade the menorah and the sacred vessels looted from the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The conquerors themselves recorded the Temple that stood here, and the exile that followed.

Arch of Titus, Rome. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
All five are real monuments in public collections, from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Israel Museum to the British Museum and the Roman Forum. None was made by Jews; each, in an enemy's hand, records the Jewish people in this land. And the same land was not only carved but drawn: see fifteen centuries of maps in The Map Room → This is also the answer to the line about a promise in an old book: "God promised it 3,000 years ago" →
Proof in the Sand · מְגִלּוֹת יָם הַמֶּלַח

The Unbroken Text

The deepest proof of the Jewish bond to this land is the one you can hold up to the light: the same scripture, copied and recopied for two thousand years without breaking.

The cliff caves at Qumran above the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
The cliffs at Qumran, above the Dead Sea, where the scrolls lay sealed in jars until 1947.Photo: Holyland2026, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a cave above the Dead Sea and heard pottery shatter. Inside the jars lay the oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible ever found.

Among the first scrolls was the Great Isaiah Scroll: all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah, copied around 125 BCE, more than a thousand years older than any complete Hebrew Bible known before it.

When scholars laid it beside the text Jews read today, the result was staggering. It was, in essence, the same book. The differences are spelling and scribal habits. The meaning is unchanged.

  • About 972 manuscripts recovered from 11 caves at Qumran.
  • Fragments of every book of the Tanakh except Esther.
  • The Isaiah Scroll predates the next-oldest Hebrew copy by roughly 1,000 years.
  • Over 95% identical to the Masoretic text we use now; the rest is orthography.

The Great Isaiah Scroll: all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah, copied around 125 BCE and the best preserved of the Dead Sea biblical scrolls. Beside the text read today, it is in essence the same book.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority; the Great Isaiah Scroll is on display at the Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and digitized in the Israel Museum's Digital Dead Sea Scrolls. Dating and comparison follow standard scrolls scholarship.Photo: Ardon Bar Hama / The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Public domain.

II · The Religious Case

The Covenant

For those who hold the Bible, the bond is not political but covenantal. The land was promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as an everlasting holding, and the scattering and the return were foretold by the prophets long before they happened.

Jews praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in a photograph from the early 20th century.
Jews at the Western Wall, the surviving remnant of the Second Temple, photographed between 1898 and 1946. The devotion to this place predates the modern state by many centuries.Matson Collection, Library of Congress. Public domain.

The Temples stood on the Mount above for a thousand years before Islam existed. On how a later tradition was layered over that history, and stretched, see “al-Aqsa,” from one mosque to the whole Mount →

The Promise

Genesis 12:7
God appeared to Abram and said, “I will assign this land to your offspring.”
The first promise of the land, to Abraham.
Genesis 15:18
God made a covenant with Abram: “To your offspring I assign this land, from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.”
The covenant “between the pieces,” sealing the grant.
Genesis 17:8
“I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding.”
Not a lease, but an everlasting possession.
Genesis 28:13
God said to Jacob, “the ground on which you are lying I will assign to you and to your offspring.”
The promise renewed to Jacob, renamed Israel.

The Return, Foretold

Deuteronomy 30:3–5
“The Eternal your God will restore your fortunes… You will be brought together again from all the peoples where… God has scattered you.”
Exile and ingathering, written into the Torah itself.
Ezekiel 37:21
“I am going to take the Israelite people from among the nations… and bring them to their own land.”
The vision of the dry bones: a scattered people brought home.
Isaiah 11:12
God “will hold up a signal to the nations and assemble the banished of Israel… from the four corners of the earth.”
The prophetic ingathering from the ends of the earth.

Jerusalem in the Heart

Psalms 137:5–6
“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither… if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.”
Sung by the rivers of Babylon: the vow never to forget Zion.
Two thousand years of prayer
Jews have prayed facing Jerusalem three times a day, and closed the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur with “Next year in Jerusalem.”
The bond was kept alive in liturgy across every exile.
Even Islam's own scripture affirms it. The Qur'an has Moses tell the Israelites: “Enter the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you” (5:21), and “Dwell in the land” (17:104). See the Qur'an page →
עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי

A people that never left the land, returning to it openly, lawfully, and with an outstretched hand.

Sources. Scripture text via the open Sefaria library (JPS translation). Primary historical documents via the Avalon Project at Yale Law School: the Balfour Declaration (1917), the Mandate for Palestine (1922), UN Resolution 181 (1947), and Israel's Declaration of Independence (1948). The San Remo Resolution (1920) and Israel's UN admission (Resolution 273, 1949) are cited by record.