For 3600 years, being Jewish at its core meant being accepted by a Jewish community. Not descent from a special family. Not lip service to a particular dogma.
When Jewish society existed in Israel, many immigrants from Africa, Asia, and even Europe were accepted as full citizens. When Jewish society was forced to reconstitute in exile and dispersion, immigrants continued to join Jewish communities, still as full members, adopting whatever laws they observed and values they held.
Not ethnicity, not myth, not even land defined who is and who isn’t Jewish.
The communal embrace (or rejection) has always settled that question.
When someone says America should be for the American people, that elicits no remark. Even with distinct laws and historical attitudes, America is a cosmopolitan nation comprised of many people with many beliefs.
When someone says Israel should be for the Israelite people, that raises many eyebrows in the room. Despite millenia of post-ethnic, post-racial, post-dogmatic cosmopolitan communitarianism, constructing a society in which membership is nonbinary and accommodating of retained difference and otherness, Jewish identity is still reduced by many people to an ethno-religious caricature.
“THESE people should get their own country?”
Brazen antisemitism aside, the fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation of who “these people” are, is noxiously obvious to anyone who has given the Jewish question any serious thought.
That it should unfortunately be promoted by many unsophisticated Jews who, in the grip of generational trauma and fear, have internalized the outsider’s gaze, is an absurd tragedy for the Jewish people living here in the land of Israel.
The civilization of our heritage is founded on embracing the stranger. As Zionists, we would do well to remember that and restore it to the center of our project.