In a recent interview, Mayor Mamdani was questioned about his widely reported refusal to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." His response was that, consistent with his beliefs, he does not recognize a country that elevates one religion above another.
Israeli pundits immediately launched an all-out campaign against the mayor, compiling lists of countries that have an official state religion in an attempt to portray his position as inconsistent. Once again, Mamdani was branded with the familiar accusation of antisemitism.
While we agree that granting special constitutional status to adherents of one faith is not a democratic ideal, that is not the conversation that applies to the State of Israel.
The issue with the State of Israel is not that it values one religion over another. The fundamental incongruity of Zionist ideology is that it seeks to transform the Jewish people, in their entirety, into a single national collective. There is no such historical precedent.
Take the United Kingdom, for example. It has an established church, yet it does not claim to be the political representative or nation-state of Christians or Anglicans worldwide. The same is true of Denmark. While its constitution recognizes the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Denmark does not make the extraordinary claim that it represents all Lutherans across the globe.
Now imagine if England declared itself the nation-state of every Christian in the world, or if Denmark insisted that every Lutheran belonged politically to Denmark. Such a claim would be one of the greatest affronts to Christians and Lutherans everywhere. It would insult their religious identity while simultaneously attempting to confiscate their national identity and citizenship in the countries where they actually live.
That is precisely what Zionism has attempted to do with the Jewish people.
The raison d'être of Zionism was never simply to combat antisemitism. Its defining ambition was to transform the Jewish people from a religious community into a modern national identity. The fact that Jews possessed no collective national identity apart from our sacred faith did not deter Zionist thinkers. On the contrary, they viewed that reality as an obstacle to be overcome.
As David Ben Gurion himself expressed, “One could hardly find a revolution that goes deeper than what Zionism wants to do with the life of the Jew… It is a revolt against a tradition of many centuries.“
Zionists sought to create a new kind of Jew.To achieve that goal, Zionism nationalized every aspect of Judaism in order to buttress its political movement and manufacture its newly minted national identity. They transformed our sacred faith into a “culture,” our Holy Land into a “nation state,” and our Holy Tongue into a “national language.”
Its ultimate aspiration is reflected in Israel’s foundational conception of itself: that Jews are to Israel what the Finns are to Finland or the French are to France.
This “national Jew” is the aspiration of atheists who sought to sever Jews from their Eternal Source, Hashem and His Holy Torah.
In the Torah, the Jewish people are indeed called an am a nation but only within the context of being the custodians of God’s eternal Torah. We became a people upon receiving the Torah at Sinai: “And today you have become a people.” Deuteronomy 27:9.
We were never a nation in the modern nationalist sense that emerged in nineteenth century Europe. With the rise of European nationalism, Zionist leaders became increasingly frustrated with what they derisively called the “ghetto Yid” and sought instead to fashion Jews into a “normal nation” by nationalizing our religion and recasting Judaism into a political nationality.
Their obsession around changing the meaning of Jewish Identity also explains why Zionists willingly forsook European Jewry during the Holocaust. Their reasoning was that every nation suffers collateral damage and that, if the realization of a Jewish state required sacrifice, those sacrifices would be justified in pursuit of statehood. The same mentality is the basis of contemporary Zionist actions.
Today, despite growing awareness that Jews and the State of Israel are neither synonymous nor inseparable but rather two separate entities, one a religious collective and the other a modern political entity the Zionist establishment, with Benjamin Netanyahu at its helm, continues to do everything possible to fuse Jewish identity with the State of Israel. There is nothing authentically Jewish about defining Judaism as a nationality. By failing to condemn Israel’s self definition as a “Jewish state,” one lends legitimacy to Zionism’s sweeping social engineering project of transforming the ancient People of the Book into a single modern nationality.
That project endangers Jews throughout the world. It creates the impression that Jews everywhere are politically represented by Israel, that they share responsibility for its policies, and that they seek the domination or subjugation of Israel’s neighbors. It forces Jews across the globe to bear the consequences of actions over which they have no control.
This fusion of Judaism with the State of Israel is exactly what Zionism has always sought to achieve.
But the truth shall previal. It always does.
