A people, not only a faith
Jewish self-determination begins with a claim that is sometimes forgotten in contemporary debate: the Jewish people are a people. Jews are a nation in the ordinary political sense — sharing language, liturgy, law, literature, lineage, and, for nearly two millennia, a continuous longing to return to a specific land. Historian Anita Shapira, in Israel: A History, traces the continuity of Jewish communal identity from antiquity through the rabbinic period into modern Zionism. Derek Penslar, in Zionism: An Emotional State, situates the movement within the broader family of nineteenth- and twentieth-century national movements while taking its specifically Jewish character seriously. To recognize Jews as a people is not to deny the religious dimension of Jewish life; it is to refuse the reduction of a nation to a confession.
National self-determination is not a boutique right invented for Jews. It is a foundational principle of the post-1945 international order, affirmed in the UN Charter and exercised by dozens of peoples in the twentieth century. What is unusual about the Jewish case is not the principle but the historical pattern that made the principle urgent.
The historical arc
For two thousand years after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jewish communities lived as minorities across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Those communities built extraordinary cultural and intellectual life, but they lived under the sufferance of others. The Crusades, the expulsions from England (1290), France (1394), and Spain (1492), the chmielnicki massacres, the Russian pogroms, the Dreyfus affair, and the Arab-world pogroms of the 1940s were not isolated events. They were a pattern.
That pattern culminated in the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that approximately six million Jews — roughly one-third of the world’s Jewish population — were murdered between 1939 and 1945 by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. European Jewry, the demographic and cultural center of the Jewish people, was destroyed. According to Pew Research Center data on the global Jewish population, there are roughly 15.7 million Jews in the world today, compared to an estimated 16.5 million in 1939. More than eighty years after the Holocaust, the Jewish people has not demographically recovered.
The modern State of Israel is the practical answer to that history. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181(II), partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted; the surrounding Arab states rejected. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel in the Declaration of Independence, which invoked both the “natural and historic right” of the Jewish people to self-determination and the authority of the UN resolution. Within hours, armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded. Subsequent wars — in 1956, 1967, 1973, and beyond — reinforced the basic pattern: Israel’s neighbors repeatedly sought to destroy the state, and Israel repeatedly defended itself.
Why this matters now
The case for Jewish self-determination is not a historical argument about 1948 frozen in amber. It is a live argument about what happens to Jews without a state. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, roughly 850,000 Jews were forced out of Arab and Muslim-majority countries, as documented by scholars including Martin Gilbert and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Soviet Jewry was held hostage to a totalitarian regime until the Exodus movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel in Operations Moses and Solomon. In the years since October 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents in North America and Europe have reached record highs, a pattern documented in the ADL’s Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2023. Jewish students at American universities have faced harassment severe enough to prompt federal civil-rights investigations.
The argument is not that antisemitism is uniquely evil compared to other bigotries. It is that a people who have been systematically unable to rely on host states for protection have both a moral right and a practical necessity to maintain a state of their own. The answer to Jewish vulnerability is not more vulnerability.
Addressing the objections
Serious critiques deserve serious answers. Some religious Jewish anti-Zionists — including segments of Haredi communities — argue that a Jewish state before the messianic age is theologically premature. OZJF respects that tradition as a matter of conscience, but notes that the overwhelming majority of religious Jewish authorities, including most of the modern Orthodox rabbinate and much of the religious Zionist movement, have concluded that the establishment and defense of Israel is consistent with Jewish law and, for many, a positive religious obligation. Religious pluralism inside Judaism is real; it does not translate into a consensus against Jewish statehood.
A second objection holds that Jewish self-determination is illegitimate because the establishment of Israel involved the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. OZJF does not deny that the 1948 war produced Palestinian displacement, which Palestinians call the Nakba. We hold two things at once: that the suffering of Palestinian refugees was and is real, and that the establishment of Israel was legally legitimate under the Partition Plan. The conflict produced a second national claim alongside the Jewish one; it did not delegitimize the first. A two-state resolution remains the only framework that plausibly honors both claims — a point we develop in our Palestinian Governance and War and Civilian Protection pages.
A third objection holds that self-determination is an anachronistic concept in an age of multinational states and global citizenship. That argument is usually applied, with striking selectivity, only to Jews. Dozens of nation-states — including most of Europe, most of the Arab world, and most of Asia — organize themselves around ethnic or religious national identities. Singling out the Jewish one for dissolution is not cosmopolitanism; it is, often, antisemitism under a different name.
What this page is not saying
It is not saying that the Israeli government is immune from criticism. It is not saying that every critic of Israel is antisemitic. It is not saying that Palestinian national aspirations are illegitimate. It is saying that Jewish self-determination — the right of the Jewish people to a state in their historic homeland — is legitimate, grounded in history, and a necessary response to a demonstrated pattern of stateless vulnerability. That claim is the ground on which every other OZJF position stands.