Eretz Yisroel is not the Jewish national homeland (Part 2)

Eretz Yisroel is not the Jewish national homeland.

Jews are a religion, not a nation. Therefore Jews, as Jews, do not possess a “national homeland” in the political sense.

A homeland is the place where a nation is born (moledes in modern Hebrew). The Jewish people were born at Mount Sinai, in the desert—not in Eretz Yisroel. Zionism claims the opposite: that the Jewish people were born in Eretz Yisroel. But Jews did not become a people because G-d promised land to Abraham, nor did the land itself give birth to the Jews. The Jews became a people when—and only because—they accepted the Torah. Nothing more and nothing less, nothing other and nothing in addition to the Torah, is what makes Jews Jews.

This Zionist transformation of a religious holy land into a political homeland follows a familiar pattern seen in other movements, such as Hindutva, which converted Hinduism’s holy land into a political homeland and then claimed that this newly synthesized homeland was inherent to Hindu identity. So too do Zionists claim—astoundingly—that Eretz Yisroel is what made Jews Jews.

Because the land is a holy land, it is—by definition—the closest place to G-d on this planet. Judaism therefore refers to it as “G-d’s palace.” Serving G-d in His home is a higher level of service, and as a reward for Abraham’s devotion, G-d promised that his descendants would be able to serve Him in His own home.

That—and only that—is the value of the Holy Land to the Jewish people, and that is the sole reason G-d promised it to Abraham. As the Bible states:

“He gave them the lands of nations … in order that they might observe His statutes and cherish His teachings” (Psalms 105:44).

G-d did not promise the land to Abraham as a homeland, but as a tool for better serving Him.

Accordingly, the land was given conditionally—dependent on its proper spiritual use. As the Bible warns: “Take heed to yourselves, lest your heart be deceived, and you turn away and serve other gods and worship them… and the anger of the L-rd be kindled against you… and you will be removed quickly from the good land which the L-rd gives you” (Deuteronomy 11).

This is precisely what happened. Jews sinned, and G-d sent us into exile. As we state plainly in our holiday prayers: “Because of our sins we were exiled from our land.”

What a grotesque travesty, then, that Zionism—whose project is to Hindutva-ize Judaism by turning a religion into a political nation and a holy land into a political homeland—claims to speak in Judaism’s name. The very goal of Zionism was to strip our people, our religion, our land, and our Torah of sanctity and reduce them to political and material instruments of a fabricated nationhood. "Not for nothing did David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, when asked when the Zionist project would have fulfilled its mission, answer with an image of urban normalcy:

'When Jewish policemen would spend a night’s work arresting Jewish prostitutes.'"
(Joachim Schlör, Tel Aviv: From Dream to City, p. 148)

Likewise, Nachum Sokolow said he would know his dream of Jewish statehood had been achieved when “we have thieves and prostitutes speaking Hebrew.”
(cited in The American Zionist, vols. 64–65, p. 3)

This is the fundamental difference between Zionism and Judaism. For Zionism, the goal is to speak the national language in the national land, even if you are unholy.

For Judaism, the goal is to be a holy people—especially in the Holy Land.