The world has turned against Israel. This turn of events has led me to wonder what the world would be like without the state of Israel. I assume that many people standing on street corners with signs reading “Free Palestine” would like Israel to be wiped off the map. Yet I doubt that the majority of my neighbors envision that solution to the never ending debate over the Jewish state. In fact, I doubt that the majority of my neighbors think much of anything about Israel beyond their desire to be free of this particular conundrum. 

Still, I’d like to ponder the possibility that through some unknown sequence of events playing out over the next few years, Israel ceases to exist. Though this might not be the goal of many whose attitudes toward Israel have hardened recently, unintended consequences do occur. There are many ways this could happen. Jews could simply tire of never-ending conflict and take their chances elsewhere; Iran could send a nuclear bomb to Tel Aviv which would destroy the very small state; civil strife within Israel could devolve into civil war leading to mass exodus; Arab neighbors could succeed in defeating Israel’s armed forces. 

Ten million Israeli citizens live in a challenging neighborhood. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza hold a total of 166 million mostly Muslim neighbors who are not necessarily friendly despite peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt. These 166 million neighbors are just a fraction of the 2 billion Muslims worldwide. Muslims are not all jihadis seeking the end of Israel, but neither are they defenders of the lone Jewish state. Given these numbers, Western support for Israel could be vital to its continued existence. Hence my unease with the rising antagonism towards Israel, but also my curiosity about the necessity of a Jewish state. 

Let’s consider the Jewish diaspora. Many of the world’s 15 million Jews do not live in Israel. Recent data shows 7+ million, or 45% of Jews worldwide do live in Israel, 6+ million, or 40% live in the US, while the rest are dispersed around the western world in communities ranging from 400,000 down to as few as 10,000. If over 50% of Jews currently live outside of Israel, do Jews really need the Jewish state? 

If you have a globalist attitude, the answer might be simply that no state should explicitly exclude anyone outside their group and only give citizenship to their own people. If that’s your position, you win! There are currently no countries that meet that definition of an ethno state. There are three states that give preference to returning members of their diaspora for immigration and citizenship: Israel, Armenia, and Hungary, but all afford citizenship to people not of their ethnic or religious identity.

Back to the Jews. Do they really need their own state, or do they just want it very, very badly? I’ll confess that for many years, I thought that creating the state of Israel was simply a mistake. Jews were doing fine elsewhere; we’d learned our lesson from the Holocaust. I don’t think that any more, mostly because I’ve done a lot of reading. As millions of Europe’s WW II refugees were slowly being sent to new homes in the aftermath of the war, the Jews who’d survived the various concentration camps remained in refugee camps. No one wanted them. Let me repeat that: No one wanted the Jews. 

During the war, Arabs had pressured Germany to not send Jews to Palestine leading some to blame Arabs for the final solution. I’m content to let Hitler shoulder the blame for the final solution, but the fact is that the Arabs pressured Germany during the war and Britain both before and after the war to not send Jews to Palestine. So Jewish emigration was limited before the war, and Jews were kept in refugee camps after the war until the newly created state of Israel could begin accepting them. When Israel’s enemies failed to extinguish the new state, they and other Muslim countries began expelling Jewish residents with ancient ties to their regions. Hundreds of thousands made Israel their new home.

I would love to think that Jews would be safe anywhere in the world, that a safe haven for Jews is unnecessary. But Jew hatred has a long, long history, and the numbers are not comforting. 15 million Jews in a world of 8 billion people with anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism on the rise? Less than 0.2% of the world’s population in a sea of hostility? 

Jews, along with other minorities, are considered dhimmi in Muslim majority countries. Essentially, they are second class citizens. Perhaps the Jihadis who want to erase Israel from the map should consider the option of welcoming Jews as equals in their various existing countries. Muslim politicians in the US talk about a democratic Palestine in which all people are equal, but no one has created such a state anywhere Muslims are the majority. I don’t see how anything less than a 180º turnaround in their attitudes obviates the need for a Jewish state. 

Sadly, the history of Jew hatred is such that I don’t see it retreating anytime soon. It’s just too easy to blame a scapegoat rather than work through challenging issues, and scapegoating Jews has such an extensive history that I only see it continuing for the foreseeable future. I’m more pessimistic than most Jews who speak publicly about this. Am I wrong, or are they naive? Unless the Jews of Israel tear themselves apart, something I hope not to see, my current sense is that the Jewish state is essential far into the future. I would love to see attitudes of people in my community change. I would love to see Muslim attitudes change. I’d love to see people acknowledge the ways Israel’s enemies have stood in the way of a two state solution, the only solution that could help heal the region. 

I’m now old enough to know that this enduring conflict is unlikely to be resolved in my lifetime. I realize that this and other conflicts that worry me will continue long after I’m around. Only recently do I think about this. Is it comforting to think that I can offload this worry onto the shoulders of younger souls? Hmmm.