Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode is sponsored by Debra and Avi Naider and Andrea & Larry Gill. To sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or just to say what up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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If you’ve been following Unpacking Israeli History for a little while now, you know that I open and close almost every episode with the same request: write to me! We’ve now turned a bunch of these emails into Israel open mic episodes, where I address your questions directly, explicitly, and I have to tell you, these episodes are some of my favorites. They truly feel like a conversation – often, about questions that make me say hey, I wish I’d thought of that!
That’s exactly how I felt when I got the following email from listener Aviva:
Hi Noam! (Hey Aviva!)
…Former New Yorker, current resident of Israel (of 5 years), and frequent listener of your superbly entertaining podcast. (Aw, thanks Aviva!) Anyways, here’s my issue: What is this “Israel has a right to exist” phrase?
Does any country have a “right” to exist? …Who is in charge of this “right”??
I’m a Zionist but I don’t think Jews are OWED Israel by the world. There’s plenty of marginalized people who don’t have a nation state. …for thousands of years, nations and empires were created and won and existed. Israel was won (by people who have had a historical presence and claim, but still – won). So why isn’t that argument enough – what’s this “right?”
Avivaaaaaa. I LOVE THIS QUESTION.
Like, LOVE IT.
Because it highlights a unique dimension of the conversation around Israel. Both Zionists and anti-Zionists talk about Israel’s “right” to “exist” – or lack thereof – seemingly ignoring the obvious fact that it does exist.
This is not theoretical. I literally just returned from this theoretical place. Just last month, November 2025, I danced at the Western wall, the kotel. I walked the streets of Zichron Ya’akov. I nearly died at the Nahal Me’orot nature preserve hiking up the jagged rocks holding my two-year-old with one arm. I ate so many schnitzel sandwiches for almost every meal. Alarming? Yes, especially for my arteries. Worth it? Also, yes, for my taste buds.
And this is important. When we talk about Israel’s “right to exist,” we often add in a corollary. We don’t just talk about whether the state itself should exist, ignoring the fact that, duh, it does exist. Both Zionists AND anti-Zionists talk about its right to exist in its current form, as the world’s only Jewish state.
And there’s no better illustration of this phenomenon than the 2025 New York mayoral debate, in which Israel, somehow, became a key topic.
After candidate Andrew Cuomo demanded that his fellow candidate, Zohran Mamdani, affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, here’s how Mamdani responded:
“I’ve said time and again that I recognize Israel’s right to exist. I’ve said that I will not recognize any state. I said that I will not as a Jewish state if I would be allowed to finish that I would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race of religion.”
Seemingly absent from this debate, and from the national conversation we’ve been having for the past two years, is the fact that Israel already DOES exist as a Jewish state.
But, despite multiple wars and intifadas and government collapses and five elections in four years and a devastating invasion on October 7, 2023, the country has soldiered on, straddling the line between being a Jewish state and a democratic one.
And that’s important. Because when some people – like Zohran Mamdani – talk about Israel’s “right to exist,” they often follow up with its right to exist as a democracy. They put conditions on the state’s existence, claiming that if it just stopped being so Jewish, if it granted “equal rights” to everyone, it would be fine. As though the conversation isn’t about whether Israel exists, but how it exists.
That framing, by the way, is disingenuous. (This is my opinion.) And here’s why: The state does grant equal rights to its citizens. Non-Jewish citizens vote. They have full access to social services. They serve on the Supreme Court, in the government, in the army. Everything I’m saying is a fact. Under the law, they’re guaranteed the same right to housing, to education, to healthcare. It’s not a perfect bastion of equality. Humans discriminate. Racism exists. Those guaranteed rights don’t always materialize.
But we don’t measure whether states have a right to exist based on whether they are democratic. Mamdani isn’t devoting vast amounts of his time and energy to handing down conditions to countries like, say, Egypt, or Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon – just to name a few – saying their right to exist is dependent on their status as democracies. It’s only Israel that gets the litmus test: you deserve to exist only if you meet MY specific criteria. Criteria that mandate that Jews not be allowed to have their own state, where they are the majority, where they make the decisions, where they do what’s best for them as a people.
So you’d be right to wonder: why has the conversation shifted to scrutinizing the country’s right, when the country is right there? And why is this framing exclusive to Israel, and not any other country? Why have Zionists and anti-Zionists alike singled out Israel in this way, made it Other, made it different?
Even the people who throw down for Israel on social media talk about the Jewish state’s right to exist as though the country is theoretical.
I don’t always agree with New York Times journalist Ezra Klein. But I’m fully on board with his claim that litigating established history isn’t just silly – it’s unproductive, even obfuscatory. Here’s how he frames it:
The question is engineered to trap the conversation in the past rather than capture the urgency of the present. Israel does exist. It is a rich, nuclear-armed power with the strongest military in the region, by far. It decapitated Hezbollah and humiliated Iran. … Israel has more than the right to exist. It has the strength to exist. The Jews who live there have more than the right to self-determination. They have self-determination.
In other words, the question “does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state” is fundamentally… boring.
But Ezra says something else here. (Yeah, we’re on a first name basis, me and Ez. Ezzie. Ezra.) And this is what I want to zero in on. Which is: what does it even mean for a state to have a “right” to exist? What does it mean for Israel to “exist” as a Jewish state? And that, to me, is the crux of the matter. Because what’s really on the line in this debate is what it should look like for Jews to have self-determination.
Okay, you ask, but what is self-determination?
Yes, I’m about to go deep in the weeds of nerd-dom, but stay with me, because it’s important for everyone listening and watching.
The concept of self-determination is a modern one. It started with Enlightenment thinkers, who proposed that the legitimacy of a government rests on the consent of the governed. (Why does everyone start dozing off when the enlightenment is mentioned?!) The American and French revolutions sharpened that idea, invoking “popular sovereignty,” or the idea that political power is vested in and derived FROM the people. 19th century nationalists in Europe took that idea and ran with it, but added one more dimension – specificity. In other words, every nation, every ethnic group, has a specific and unique identity and culture that distinguishes them from everyone else. Meaning, it ain’t just about empires anymore.
But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that this idea crystallized into self-determination, helped along by US President Woodrow Wilson, who repeatedly invoked the concept during and after World War I. His post-WWI peace plan, The 14 Points, was built around the idea that huge multi-ethnic empires were out. Done. Smaller, self-governing nations based on shared language, culture, and customs, were in.
And when the United Nations was established after WWII, self-determination became a guiding principle of its charter.
So when we talk about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, what we’re really asking is, do Jews have the right to self-determination? And if so, what does that look like? How far does that go?
Let’s start with that first question – whether Jews specifically have a right to self-determine, to live in a nation based on their common language, customs, culture, history, etc.
But Noam, you might say, not all Jews speak Hebrew! Ani ohev iparon! (Most people won’t get that joke.) Not all Jews have the same customs! Not all Jews have the same culture! We’re diverse! We’re diasporic! And all of that is facts, mostly, but all of that kind of misses the point. Things can both be true and miss the point. (See most fights amongst boyfriends/girlfriends or spouses for reference.)
Because when we talk about self-determination for Jews, what we’re really saying is that Jews are a unique and distinct people. Yes, you can be a Jewish American, or Jewish-French, or Jewish-Argentinian. (Argentine? Sorry, Latin Americans, I never know how to say it.)
But being Jewish means being part of a specific people.
And that is what I think is difficult for so many people to understand. Judaism is NOT simply a religion. It’s not grounded ONLY in faith, or in ritual, though of course those things are huge, too. There’s a peoplehood component too, a shared ethnic identity regardless of whether you’re American, French, Argentine, whatever.
Why has the chant “go back to Poland” been so popular since October 7th? Why are anti-Zionist activists plastering cities with hostage stickers that say “bring them home to EUROPE”? (Yep, that’s real.)
[insert clip – just the parts of “go back to Poland/Europe/Germany”]
The most charitable explanation is that these so-called activists know nothing about Jewish history. I find it hard to be generous to anyone who sincerely believes that “go back to Poland” – pause and think about that – is somehow not hideously offensive, but I’ll do my best.
If you truly, truly believe that Judaism is “just” a religion or faith, not a nation or tribe, then what’s the problem with saying “Go to Poland”? There are Polish Jews, after all.
Here’s the problem with that.
First of all, Jews aren’t from Poland, or Germany, or wherever. If we – the Jews – were, Europeans wouldn’t have spent roughly 2,000 years murdering, expelling, and oppressing us, forcing us to convert, claiming we drink blood and poison wells… you get it.
If Jews were actually Polish, then they wouldn’t have been murdered by their neighbors when they returned to their towns in 1946, AFTER the Holocaust.
The town of Kielce was once one-third Jewish, but Nazis murdered the vast majority of its 24,000 Jews. Roughly 200 of these Jews returned after the war, though most were not able to regain any of their property or assets.
In July of 1946 – a year AFTER the Holocaust ended! – a mob of police, soldiers, and civilians in Kielce murdered 42 of these Jews, and injured 50 more, because a non-Jewish nine-year-old claimed that he missed curfew because “the Jews” had kidnapped him.
No one stopped to investigate or think for a second that maybe, MAYBEEEE, this kid was looking for an excuse to avoid getting grounded, or whatever the 1940s Polish equivalent is, for disappearing for hours without permission and making his parents worry. Within hours of this kid making his claim, the mob descended, murdering or injuring nearly 50% of Kielce’s Jewish population.
So yeah, “go back to Poland” really triggers me not just because it’s offensive, but because it’s ahistoric. And this is history pod. So that’s annoying to me. I find it hard to believe that anyone is that ignorant of Jewish history. You don’t need to know the story of the Kielce pogrom to know that Europeans have always seen Jews as “the Other.” Of course there are Righteous Gentiles, but by and large, I think this is true.
But fine.
Let’s put Poland aside. Let’s talk about the U.S. instead. You can be proudly and freely Jewish in America, right? So what exactly do Jews need Israel for? Merely practicing the same religion isn’t enough to unite people under a shared banner, right? Remember the 1971 civil war in Pakistan that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh? No, me neither, I wasn’t born yet, but I just listened to a really good podcast series about it and the TL;DR, the bottom line, is that shared religion isn’t enough to unite two populations with wildly different identities.
And this is what’s really interesting. Judaism is not merely a religion.
And that, I think, is the root of the misunderstanding.
An inaccurate definition of what Judaism is.
Now, I want to be clear. Plenty of people, including some Jews, believe that Judaism is nothing more than a religion. That a Jewish person from France and a Jewish person from Australia have no culture in common, other than going to the same type of services. And a French Jewish person is represented by the French government, while the Australian Jewish person is represented by Australia, and boom: self-determination.
But that is not how Judaism functions.
Judaism is not just a religion.
It is a people.
A people whose HISTORY is inextricably linked to a specific piece of land.
A people whose RELIGION is largely organized around that LAND – whether we’re marking its agricultural cycles, as we do during Passover and Shavuot, or celebrating our right to self determination in that land, as we do during Chanukah.
Whether we’re praying thrice daily in that land’s direction, whether we’re wishing each other “next year in Jerusalem” at the end of the seder, whether we’re celebrating its fruits as we do during Tu B’Shvat or mourning its destruction as we do during Tisha B’av.
And it is THAT shared identity and culture that unites us, whether our grandparents fled Yemen or Poland. It is on that ground that Jewish people deserve self-determination.
We are a people.
We are called Am Yisrael all over the place; we are the Nation of Israel.
Judaism is our religion. Jewish-ness is our ethnic identity, whether we’re Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, whatever.
My friend Toba Hellerstein recently conducted a study entitled American Perceptions of Jews & Israel: Narratives of Antisemitism, Insights & Strategies for Change. One of the participants in her study defined Zionism as something awesome, quote, “It’s people fighting for their spot, man. Fighting to live and be able to be free. That’s what everybody wants.”
Fighting for their spot.
That is self-determination.
But why does self-determination specifically have to mean a JEWISH state? Why does it have to mean ISRAEL, as it looks now?
Well, that’s where Jewish history comes in. That’s where we start talking about security. About why the only formula that works is a majority-Jewish country with a majority-Jewish government that looks out for its majority-Jewish population. This sounds controversial, but it really, really should not be. All nations have unique and specific identities.
That doesn’t mean other cultures and identities aren’t welcome. FAR from it. That doesn’t mean other cultures and identities are less than or demonized. That doesn’t mean exclusion and it doesn’t mean discrimination.
It means that countries have a specific character based on their populations. Japan is extremely distinct from China, from Korea, from Myanmar. It is majority-Japanese, with a majority-Japanese government that looks out for its majority-Japanese population and hopefully its minorities as well. Japanese.
Same with European countries like Italy or Finland. Same with African countries like Ethiopia or Senegal. Same with Israel’s fellow Middle Eastern countries, like Jordan, or Qatar, or Iran.
These are all nations with distinct and non-fungible majority cultures. Some have a national identity stretching back thousands of years, like Japan, like Iran, like Ethiopia.
Like Israel.
That doesn’t mean there’s no room for minority cultures within these countries. It doesn’t mean these countries are somehow bad. It just means that there is a wider national culture that is set by the majority. And that is what Israel is: the only country in the world where Jews are the majority. Where the country is built around our identities. And where we can protect ourselves from threats to our people.
Those threats are numerous.
They can be existential, like an Iranian nuclear bomb. Israel’s existence means having a government that will ACT to stop that threat.
But those “threats” can also be relatively small, diaspora annoyances that pile up over time. The constant vandalism of Jewish-owned business in the diaspora isn’t an existential threat. It just isn’t. It might become one, as it did in 1938 Germany or 1940s Egypt. But regardless of whether casual diaspora antisemitism is an existential threat, it sucks. Sorry for saying that word. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s really nice to know that there’s a place on this earth where that just doesn’t exist in the same way. Where Jewish people are the majority. Where you don’t need to explain to your professor what “Sukkot” is and have her look at you like, you need time off to do what now?
Heck, it’s just nice to be in a place where people can pronounce your name correctly. Where people see N.O.A.M and say Noam, not Gnome. Where TV shows tell our stories, refer to our culture, in a way that is accurate and true and rich and deep and representative and flattering and not flattering, but spot on!
But all that is the cherry on top. Acceptance, belonging, representation, all that fuzzy warm stuff is nice, but it’s not the reason the Jewish people have a state. When you get down to brass tacks, Jewish self-determination is largely about security. Yes, there are other things too. But it’s largely about living in a place where your neighbors won’t turn on you.
If history has taught the Jewish people anything, it’s that strength can be deceptive, security can be fleeting, and memory, especially the memory of helplessness, is not paranoia but prudence. We have a two-thousand-year long record of the fact that bad things happen to stateless Jews. Not just violence, but a negative self-perception. That the Jewish people cannot rely on the world’s good will. We might all be born with innate rights – but that doesn’t mean those rights will be recognized.
The Nazis did not seem to care about our innate human rights.
Neither did the mobs of Egypt and Syria and Iraq and Libya.
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood blew up synagogues and muscled Jewish students out of university classrooms in 1940s Cairo with impunity.
In 1840s Syria, a century earlier, Jews were accused of kidnapping and killing a Catholic friar and his Muslim servant in order to make matza out of their blood. No one stopped the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced conversion, or death of the accused men. No one pointed out that hey, BLOOD IS NOT KOSHER. No one condemned the kidnapping of 63 Syrian Jewish children, which was meant to make their mothers “confess” to the crime. In fact, The Times of London published an editorial stating, among other things:
“[The affair is] one of the most important cases ever submitted to the notice of the civilized world … Admitting for the moment [the accusation to be true] … then the Jewish religion must at once disappear from the face of the earth … We shall await the issue as the whole of Europe and the civilized world will do with intense interest.”
That wasn’t written in the 1340s, when the Black Plague was ravaging Europe and the Jews were accused of poisoning all the wells. That was written in 1840. Different accusation, same result, five hundred years apart.
When Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants rose up against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, they didn’t just target Polish nobles. They also massacred between 15 and 30 thousand Jews, in addition to all the awful things that go along with mass slaughter. Looting, pillage, rape, mass destruction… etc.
I could go on and on about every historical example of Jewish rights, safety, and culture being ignored, dismissed, and trampled. I could talk about university quotas in the USSR and in the United States. I could talk about American hiring practices that explicitly excluded Jews. I could talk about everything from the most minor microaggression to the slaughter of one in three Jews worldwide between 1939 and 1945. I could talk about the fact that at least four Jews have been murdered by so-called “antizionist” “activists” in the United States over the past two years.
I don’t mention these murders to scare anyone, or to suggest that we’re about to experience another Holocaust. No, no, no. But I bring this up to remind you that a significant percentage of the world sees Jews as guilty no matter what they do or don’t do. Which makes it easy to deny our peoplehood. Our right to self-rule. Our right to security.
When Hamas says it wants to destroy Israel, when Iran funds and arms a ring of proxies, when Israeli Jews are targeted and murdered in their beds or slaughtered at a music festival, that is not just a lapse in Israeli intelligence. That is the direct result of a worldview that says Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate.
Because Israel’s enemies labor under the delusion that they can erase or erode the state, eating away at it with constant attacks, with a nuclear threat, until the whole project seems to be more trouble than it’s worth and the Jews simply pack up and leave.
But, friends, the Jews are not the French, and the Palestinians are not the Algerians. The Jewish people are home.
So when we talk about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, what we’re really talking about is the right for Jews to not be murdered in our homes. The right to not be kidnapped into Gaza. The right to not be blown up on the way to school.
Michael Koplow, chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum and past guest on Unpacking Israeli History, reframes this conversation in a way that I think is clear and smart. He doesn’t talk about “Israel’s right to exist,” but Israel’s right and obligation to be secure, democratic, and Jewish.
And THAT is what is at stake in this conversation. Not whether Israel should EXIST AT ALL. That ship has sailed – though it took some time for Israel’s neighbors to give up on trying to reverse history. Remember, for the first three decades of its existence, Israel’s neighbors simply refused to recognize that the Jewish country next door was here to stay. They even adopted the famous Khartoum Resolution of 1967 – also known as the Three Nos – promising they would never make peace with Israel. Or recognize Israel. Or negotiate with Israel.
But those days are long gone.
Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel. The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan – yes! Sudan! The same country where the Khartoum resolution was adopted – have normalized relations with the Jewish state.
In other words, many of Israel’s biggest adversaries opted out of this whole right to exist conversation decades ago and decided to just accept Israel’s existence, while still criticizing it heavily.
And that, to me, is where the conversation needs to start. Not with litigating the past, but with discussing the future. And that means that accepting that the mere existence of the Jewish state is not an automatic threat to the sovereignty and dignity of Palestinians.
For many quote-unquote “pro-Palestine” advocates, Israel/Palestine is a zero-sum equation. Israel’s existence automatically means that Palestinians are denied their right to sovereignty. And if we take them at their word, if we believe that they’re arguing out of good faith, then their formulation can make sense. Because if every human has the right to freedom and dignity, and they believe that Israel’s existence as a Jewish state threatens the freedom and dignity of many Palestinians, then of course they’ll say it has no right to exist. Its existence is impinging on other people’s rights.
But if a state’s quote unquote “right to exist” is contingent upon not oppressing others, then why single out Israel specifically? Why only talk about Israel? Why not also say I believe Peru has a right to exist as a democracy? Or I believe Egypt has a right to exist as a democracy? Why focus solely and specifically on Israel?
Again, my best faith reading of this take is that pro-Palestine activists believe that while human rights are a universal right, statehood isn’t. As long as people have rights, as long as they’re treated equally, they don’t necessarily “deserve” or “have the right to” their own state.
So when someone like Mayor Zohran Mamdani says “Israel has a right to exist as a democracy” – i.e., not a Jewish state, what he’s saying is basically “it’s fine for Jews to live wherever they want… but they will always be a minority. They don’t have the right to be a majority. To live in a country that is culturally and specifically theirs.”
All of which ignores the fact that Israel is a democracy. Yes, it’s flawed. Yes, it’s got huge problems. And the situation in the West Bank/Judea-Samaria is extremely complicated and undemocratic. But 20% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish, and under Israeli law, they have the same rights as anyone else.
Casual racism, discrimination, microaggressions, macroaggressions – those exist everywhere, including the Jewish State. But you don’t dismantle a country because it doesn’t always live up to its stated ideals. I’m not calling for America to be dismantled because Orthodox Jews get beat up on the streets of New York at least once a week, because that would be insane. If we applied this standard to any other country, very few countries, if any, would continue to exist.
The Jewish state is an expression of our innate human right to not be casually oppressed, slaughtered, and pushed from polite society. It is an insurance policy. A guarantee that there will always be one place we can go when the mob comes to our door.
I don’t want to be overly lachrymose, but if history teaches us anything, it’s that the mob will show up, sooner or later. It doesn’t matter how good life can seem for Jews. It doesn’t matter how powerful or well-connected we are. Antisemitism is a condition of history, not an aberration. So Israel has a “right to exist” because all human beings have a right to freedom and dignity – including Jews. And it is the only place on earth where that right is guaranteed and eternal. I love the US and I am proud to be an American. I would love to trust that this country will always have my back. And. AND! I would be naive to believe that the golden age of American Jewry is forever. That’s the nature of Golden Ages. They end.
But I want to be very clear about something: fear doesn’t mean Israel gets a blank check at all times in the name of protecting Jews. It doesn’t. The Israeli scholar Ruth Gavison said this better than I ever could, and I quote:
“If Israel is not a democracy, it has no justification to exist. If Israel is not Jewish, it has no reason to exist.”
So whether Israel should exist is no longer up for debate.
HOW Israel exists, what it does, how it behaves – that is the real question.
That is where the complexity comes in.
That is where we should be focusing.
That is where we should be aiming our critique.
Not at its existence, but at its policies.
Because Israel’s existence is not contingent on being perfect, just like my existence isn’t contingent on me never making a mistake. But its moral backbone relies on the people’s behavior, on the decisions the governments they elect make. A right to exist depends on how we exist. If Israel’s only concern is rights for Jews at everyone else’s expense, guess what – that’s not strength. That’s not liberation. That’s fear. That’s a profound disregard of Israel’s moral responsibilities.
And that’s why this “right to exist” language is so frustrating and so TIRED.
Zionism isn’t just about survival. It’s about aspiration.
Here’s a section from its 1992 Basic Law – which is very roughly analogous to a constitutional amendment in the United States. Quote: “The basic human rights in Israel are based on the recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of his life, and his being a free person, and they shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles included in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.”
It goes on in that vein for a while. It never, ever differentiates between Jews and non-Jews. The only time the word “Jew” or “Jewish” comes up is in context of democracy, quote: “The purpose of this Basic Law is to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to embed the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, in a basic law.”
Jewish and democratic. As in, all Israeli citizens have the same right to “life,” “dignity,” “property,” “liberty,” and “privacy,” as enshrined in this basic law and as stated in the Declaration of Independence.
The 2018 Nation State Law, passed 26 years later, is controversial, like I said, and it’s not the topic of today’s episode. But for our purposes, the law does not contradict that combo – Jewish and democratic.
Not when it makes Hebrew the official language of the state, guaranteeing, quote “Arabic has a special status in the State. Regulation of the use of Arabic in state institutions or in contacts with them shall be prescribed by law. Nothing in this article shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.”
Not when it declares, quote “The Sabbath and the Jewish holidays are the established days of rest in the State. Those who are not Jewish have the right to keep days of rest on their days of rest and holidays. Details regarding this matter shall be prescribed by law.”
And not even when it states, quote, “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.”
Because what that means is that the state itself is the only place in the world where Jews, and only Jews, have the right to define the state’s national symbols, public holidays, official language priorities, and collective identity. It still preserves individual civil rights for all citizens regardless of their identity – voting, political representation, free speech, and equality under other Basic Laws and Supreme Court precedent.
But no one, other than the Jewish people, has the collective national claim to redefine the state’s national character – for example, to abolish its Jewish character, or to make it a single binational state, or to change the name to Palestine, or to change its official languages or state holidays.
In other words, the nation-state law simply puts into words what has always been true in practice: Israel is the only country in the world where Yom Kippur and Passover are national holidays, where Jewish history is front and center of the curriculum, where Shabbat is the day of rest. And no one gets to take that away.
THAT is what Zionism is about. THAT is what Israel is about.
Not “self-determination at someone else’s expense.”
Not “trampling Palestinians.”
Not “having more rights and resisting equality.”
But if we want the Jewish state up to its promise, we need to stop being afraid of conversations that ask hard questions. If we believe in the Jewish story, if we believe in the Jewish people’s resilience, then we should also believe we can have these debates without fear of collapse.
Because the “right to exist” conversation is rarely about philosophy. It’s about power. Who has it, who deserves it, how it’s best wielded. That’s a conversation worth having. But it must be grounded in reality. And the reality is that the Jewish state of Israel exists. That’s the starting point, not the endgame. And the sooner we retire this “right to exist” trope and start talking about how Israel exists, the brighter the future will be.
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Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your pods. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Adi Elbaz, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for listening, see you next week!