Jews don't need a country of their own. A state built around one nationality is an anachronism, and Jews are safer as equal citizens of liberal democracies. The case for Israel is an argument from suffering.

The fuller answer

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Nobody has to authorise you to make this case. It is the only entry on this site that answers nothing. Everything else here corrects somebody. This one says what you are for, and you can say it at a dinner table without a title behind you.

One warning before any of the arguments. The material closest to hand is Jewish suffering, and it moves people. It also loses. A people arguing from what was done to them has accepted that it needs permission, and permission can be withheld. Lead with the right.

Start with the right, not the need

Begin where every other people begins.

The Charter of the United Nations was signed at San Francisco on 26 June 1945. Among the purposes it sets out is the development of friendly relations “based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples”. That principle was not decoration. It was the engine of the century that followed.

When the UN was founded, some 750 million people, close to a third of the world, lived in territories dependent on colonial powers. More than 80 former colonies have become independent states since. Seventeen non-self-governing territories remain, with fewer than two million people between them. Dozens of peoples turned themselves into states inside one lifetime, on every continent, and nobody asks them to account for it.

Nobody demands that a Slovak justify Slovakia. Nobody asks an Estonian which century their claim begins in. So the position requiring a defence is not ours. Somebody is proposing that one people, out of the dozens who claimed the same right in the same century, hand it back alone. Ask why that one, and let them do the work.

The single most useful comparison is Pakistan, and use it. It was created in August 1947, months before Israel, out of a partition drawn on religious lines, at a cost of well over ten million people displaced and several hundred thousand dead. Its founding proposition was that a religious community needed a state of its own. That proposition is now seventy-nine years old and nobody argues about whether it should be reversed.

So put it as a question, in the other person’s own words. You have no problem with Pakistanis. Does Pakistan have a right to exist? Almost everybody says yes without hesitating, and the moment they do, the objection to Israel has stopped being a principle about states founded on national or religious identity and started being an objection to one of them. Make them say which it is.

Say the fair counter yourself, because there is one and it is worth having. Pakistan’s creation was agreed by the departing power and the Indian National Congress, and its partition was mutual. Partition in Palestine was voted by the United Nations, accepted by one side and rejected by the other, and the war that followed was not agreed by anybody. That is a real difference, and it is a difference about how the war started rather than about whether the state should exist. Concede it and the comparison holds.

Einat Wilf catches the shape of it. Many governments, she notes, want “for the Palestinians what they’ve never wanted for themselves, which is a state”, and want it on one condition, that it sits beside a Jewish one.

The objection in front of you is old and it is not disreputable. On 23 December 1789 the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre told the French National Assembly: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.” That was emancipation’s bargain, offered in good faith and widely accepted, including by the Reform rabbis at Pittsburgh in 1885. Know the pedigree. It buys you the right to disagree with it.

Why it is a return

This is the part most people on our side cannot put into words, and it is the part that carries the weight.

Start with the dates, because the objection you will meet is that all of this was invented in the nineteenth century. The organised political movement was: Hovevei Zion from 1881, the First Zionist Congress in 1897. What it drew on is around two thousand years older, and it is written down.

A people can be identified by what it faces. The Mishnah, compiled about 200 CE, already treats it as settled that a Jew anywhere in the world turns towards the Temple to pray, and rules on what to do when you cannot: turn your face if you cannot dismount, and fix your heart on the Holy of Holies if you cannot turn your face. The weekday Amidah, said three times a day from then until this morning, asks God to “raise a banner to gather our exiles, and gather us together from the four corners of the earth”, and to “return in mercy to Jerusalem, Your city, and dwell therein”. The same Mishnah fixes an annual fast for the destruction of the Temple. The Passover seder ends on “next year in Jerusalem”. Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot are the harvest seasons of one specific country, kept for centuries in Minsk and Marrakesh, where those seasons do not fall. The law and the liturgy are in the language of that place.

None of that was built as a claim on anything. It was calendar, prayer and law, kept by people with no expectation of moving. That is what makes it evidence rather than assertion.

And people acted on it long before there was a movement. Nachmanides reached Acre in the summer of 1267 and went up to Jerusalem, where he found two Jewish brothers, dyers, with about ten Jews joining them for Sabbath prayers. He organised what was left of the community and put a synagogue in a derelict house. The building still stands and still carries his name.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence, on 14 May 1948, opens there rather than on the Holocaust. “ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped.” After exile, it says, the people “never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it”.

Yossi Klein Halevi describes Zionism as “a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland”, resting on “a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith”. The archaeological evidence for the ancient presence is set out in the entry on settler colonialism, and it is worth carrying.

The whole distinction is one word. Arriving, or returning.

Two thousand years of depending on other people

Handle this structurally. The pattern is the argument, and no single episode carries it.

For most of two thousand years, Jewish physical safety was somebody else’s decision. A ruler granted it and a successor withdrew it. The Jewish Virtual Library’s record of expulsions runs from Rome in 139 BCE to the First World War: England in 1290, France in 1306 and again in 1394, Spain in 1492, Lithuania in 1495, Portugal in 1497, Prague in the 1740s, Moscow in 1891.

Now look at what varies across that list. Different centuries, different continents, Christian rulers and Muslim ones, monarchies, republics and empires. Each has a local explanation and the local explanations are real. Read together they describe a condition rather than a run of bad luck. A people living at the discretion of others has no floor underneath it.

Ruth Wisse names what that condition did to Jewish politics. Her Jews and Power came out from Nextbook Press in 2007. Its thesis is that the Jewish people were corrupted “not by power but by powerlessness”, having made weakness into a moral achievement. Her verdict on the change is worth carrying whole. “In three years, from 1945 to 1948, this people that had been reduced literally to ashes recovered its sovereignty.”

Daniel Gordis puts the same shift in one sentence. June 1967, he says, “transformed Jews from a people that tiptoed across the globe waiting to see what history would do to them next to a people who took some role in shaping their destinies”.

Then the demonstration, which is recent enough for anybody to check. The Jews of Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Egypt had nowhere to go, and after 1948 they had somewhere. What was done to them is set out in the entry on the other refugees. What matters here is narrower: a state existed to take them, and it made them citizens on arrival.

What was actually built

Give the specifics. Adjectives about a start-up nation land as advertising and get discounted as advertising.

A language. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda reached Palestine in 1881. His son Ittamar, born in 1882, was raised as the first all-Hebrew speaking child in modern history. Ben-Yehuda founded the Hebrew Language Council in December 1890 and compiled a seventeen-volume dictionary. On 29 November 1922 the British authorities recognised Hebrew as an official language. Hebrew is the only language known to have returned to everyday speech after having no native speakers at all.

A gathering. Israel’s population reached nearly 10.1 million in April 2025, a twelvefold increase since 1948. About 45 per cent of the world’s Jews now live there. In the decade to 2019 alone, more than 250,000 people immigrated from roughly 150 countries. On 24 and 25 May 1991, Operation Solomon flew more than 14,300 Ethiopian Jews out of Addis Ababa within 36 hours, on 35 aircraft.

Natan Sharansky spent nine years in Soviet prisons before he ever saw the place, and later ran the agency that met those flights. “Every time I saw a new immigrant walk down those stairs onto Israeli soil, I would start thinking about how many generations of prayers and hopes were standing behind that particular oleh.”

A democracy, under attack from the first day. The first national election was set for October 1948 and postponed three months by the war. It was held on 25 January 1949, with 506,567 eligible voters and a turnout of 87 per cent. Israel has voted on schedule ever since, through every war it has fought. Arab citizens are about 21 per cent of the population, and they vote and sit in the Knesset. The Declaration promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”, and Israelis argue about that promise constantly, in a parliament, in courts and in Hebrew.

Where this backfires. Recited as a list it sounds like a brochure and gets heard as one. Take two of these and know them properly.

“But not at somebody else’s expense”

Meet this now. It is the serious objection, and holding it back to the end reads as evasion by anybody who came with it.

Recognising a competing national claim does not require abandoning your own. Two peoples can have real claims to the same land, and saying so costs you nothing you needed.

Amos Oz gave the clearest statement of it. “My definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right,” he said in 2002, describing “one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim”. He held that and remained a Zionist for his whole life. The two are not in tension, and a lot of people in the room believe they are.

Palestinians were displaced in 1948, that is unresolved, and nothing above resolves it. What this page establishes is narrower and it holds under pressure. The Jewish claim is a national claim of the ordinary kind, made by a people who are from there, organised before most of the movements that produced the states around it, and won in the century when dozens of peoples made the same claim. A second claim makes the place contested. It does not make the first one void.

So the reply is a question, and it is a fair one. Does your position leave room for both, or does it need one of them to disappear?

Make them describe the day after

Nobody who demands that a state be undone is ever asked what replaces it. Ask. It is the most powerful question available on this subject and it is almost never put.

There are about 7.7 million Jews in Israel. Roughly half descend from families that left Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, Sana’a and Casablanca, who have nowhere to be sent back to and no other citizenship. So the questions are concrete. In your single state, who holds the majority. Under what constitution. Which army, and who commands it. What happens to the Law of Return, and to the people who arrived under it. What protects a Jewish minority when the arrangement comes under strain, and who enforces that protection.

The last one is not hypothetical. Every Jewish community in the Arab world lived under a constitution promising equality, and between 1948 and 1970 almost all of them ceased to exist. That is the only large-scale experiment the region has run on this question, and it has a result.

Put the questions calmly and let the silence sit. Some people have answers, and those are worth hearing and arguing with. Most have never been asked, and the room notices.

The lines

“Around eighty peoples got a state out of the last century. You’re asking one of them to give it back. Tell me why that one.”

“Jews prayed towards that city three times a day for two thousand years, in Hebrew, on a calendar built round its harvests. They didn’t arrive there. They went back.”

“England threw its Jews out in 1290, France twice, Spain in 1492, Moscow in 1891. Different centuries, different empires, same people. That’s not bad luck, it’s a condition.”

“Fourteen thousand Ethiopian Jews were flown out of Addis Ababa in thirty-six hours in 1991. Name me the other country that was going to do that.”

“Palestinians have a real claim. I’ve never said otherwise. Does your position leave room for both of us, or does it need mine gone?”

“You’ve no problem with Pakistanis. Does Pakistan have a right to exist? It was founded in 1947 on exactly that argument.”

“Say what the one state looks like. Who’s the majority, whose army, and what happens to seven million Jews in it. I’ll listen to the answer.”

Say the case out loud once

Write two lines with a real day in them.

Action. “On Sunday evening after the washing up, I will make the positive case out loud in sixty seconds, in this order: the right, the return, the record, and what got built.”

Coping. “If somebody says nationalism has a poor record, I will agree that it does, say the cost fell on people who did not earn it, and then ask which of the eighty other peoples they would also like to hand their state back.”