Between a burning Temple and a declaration read aloud in Tel Aviv, nearly two millennia of Jewish life often disappears from the story we tell.
In this one, Rome destroys Jerusalem, the Jews go into exile, and then, after the Holocaust, Israel appears. A civilization becomes a catastrophe, followed by a country.
That version is easy to remember and disastrous to defend. It leaves Jews absent from their own homeland for centuries and casts their return as an emergency arrangement made by outsiders. We then spend the rest of the conversation explaining why the arrangement should be allowed to continue.
The missing centuries are the key to writing a better story.
The Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel reaches back more than 3,000 years, long before Christianity or Islam. It runs unbroken from biblical Israel and Judah through antiquity, exile, return and the modern state. Conquest interrupted sovereignty; it did not extinguish Jewish presence or belonging.
Jewish life in the land did not end when Jewish sovereignty was lost. In the Galilee, Rabbi Judah HaNasi compiled the Mishnah around the beginning of the third century, more than 400 years before the Arab Muslim conquest of the region. Jewish life and scholarship in the Land continued under successive empires and into the modern era.
Beyond its shores, exile acquired a geography of its own, but Jerusalem remained its point of orientation. In medieval Spain, Judah Halevi wrote poetry longing for Zion. In the 16th century, Joseph Karo settled in Safed and produced the Shulchan Aruch, a code of Jewish law that still shapes Jewish practice. The homeland existed in the imagination of distant communities and in the daily lives of Jews who inhabited it.
These were centuries of change, hardship and renewal. They cannot be reduced to an uninterrupted idyll. But neither can they be treated as an empty interval between the Bible and a British Mandate passport.
The significance lies in the relationship between those who remained, those who returned and those who carried the country in their prayers. A people dispersed across continents continued to recognize a common home.
Political power had been taken from them. The capacity to remember who they were had not.
By the late nineteenth century, that attachment was taking new institutional form. Jews arriving from Yemen and Europe in the early 1880s joined existing communities and helped build new ones. The First Zionist Congress met in Basel in 1897. Modern Zionists organized a political movement around an inheritance much older than any of its delegates.
Modern Zionism was not identical to the religious longing that preceded it. It brought new political ideas, organization and urgency. But changing the means of return does not sever the connection that made return meaningful.
Zionist leader Theodor Herzl did not invent Jerusalem’s place in Jewish life. He sought a political future for a people whose past was already bound to it. Centuries in Europe did not make Jews a European invention. Exile did not turn their ancestral homeland into foreign soil.
The Jews also confronted a practical question: How does a people move from longing for national independence to possessing the institutions that make it possible?
Answering this question required years of work. Hebrew became a language of classrooms, newspapers and public affairs. The growing Jewish community developed representative bodies and an economy. The Hebrew University opened in Jerusalem in 1925, 23 years before independence. A truly indigenous people were preparing to govern themselves before they could know whether the world would permit them to do so.
This is the history that disappears when we make the Holocaust the starting point of modern Israel. The Holocaust revealed the murderous consequences of Jewish powerlessness. It did not invent Jewish peoplehood, supply its homeland or launch its national movement.
The same chronology obscures the British Mandate—a period often compressed into a name and a date when it should be central to understanding how the modern state emerged.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 expressed British support for a Jewish national home. The League of Nations Mandate, approved in 1922, placed that undertaking within an international framework of administration and obligations.
The distinction matters. A government’s declaration of policy and the instrument governing its administration of a territory are different kinds of documents.
A people’s freedom cannot be conditioned on the perfection of every leader it elects.
The Mandate recognized the Jewish people’s historical connection to the country and the grounds for “reconstituting their national home.”
“Reconstituting.” The language itself acknowledged a prior relationship. Jewish belonging was recognized, not conjured up by British officials.
The Mandate’s provisions gave that recognition practical form. Article 2 made Britain responsible for securing conditions for the national home and developing self-governing institutions. Article 4 provided for a recognized Jewish agency. Article 6 required facilitating Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and encouraging settlement, while protecting the rights of other inhabitants.
These provisions did not settle every future border or confer advance approval on every future government. They did establish that Jewish national development belonged within the international order of the time. Anyone presenting it as an improvised response to the Holocaust must first explain away documents written before the Nazis took power.
Yet recognition was no guarantee of rescue. In 1939, Britain’s White Paper limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, subject to conditions, as European Jews faced escalating Nazi persecution. The power administering the national home also controlled entry to it. Jews could possess international recognition of their national aspirations and still lack the authority to open their own door.
That is why the Mandate belongs in the moral story as well as the diplomatic one. It exposes the distance between having an acknowledged claim and having the power to save a life.
As a former IDF paratrooper, I find that distinction impossible to treat as an abstraction. Sovereignty means assuming responsibility for decisions that otherwise remain in someone else’s hands, including the decision to admit a family seeking refuge.
The United Nations recommended partition in 1947. Israel declared independence in 1948. Neither act created the Jewish people or assembled their society overnight. Independence gave sovereign form to a national life that already existed.
Understanding that sequence also helps us separate three arguments too often thrown together: what history establishes, what law recognizes and what morality demands.
An ancient synagogue is evidence of Jewish life. It cannot, by itself, determine whether a modern military operation is lawful. A judgment about that operation cannot make the synagogue disappear. The historical fact and the legal question remain distinct, however passionately someone tries to exchange one for the other.
Likewise, the Mandate is evidence of internationally recognized commitments and obligations. It deserves to be read as a legal instrument, with attention to its language, scope and limitations. Treating it as a universal answer to every subsequent dispute weakens the very argument its actual provisions support.
The moral case asks why Jews should be denied the national freedom that others claim as a right. It asks whether a people must remain dependent on the tolerance of others, even when experience has demonstrated how abruptly that tolerance can end.
Those questions cannot be answered by counting Israeli inventions or approving of the current Israeli prime minister.
History explains the connection; law records and regulates rights and obligations; and moral reasoning addresses their justification and exercise. They inform one another, but none relieves us of the work required by the others.
Confusing them makes a familiar sleight of hand possible: a controversy over a government becomes a verdict on a nation. A disputed policy becomes proof that Jewish independence was illegitimate from the beginning.
The accusation changes, but the demanded remedy remains the surrender of Jewish sovereignty.
We should reject that maneuver without claiming immunity from scrutiny. Statehood carries obligations. Governments can violate them and must answer for doing so.
However, a people’s freedom cannot be conditioned on the perfection of every leader it elects. Jewish rights are not a renewable license issued to whichever government wins international approval.
This is what a serious defense of Israel should give its audience: enough history to recognize continuity, enough legal precision to distinguish recognition from invention and enough moral confidence to defend Jewish freedom without making it a reward for good behavior.
We cannot teach Israel entirely through the accusations made against it. That leaves each generation of Jews inheriting a rebuttal where a history should be.
The story is larger than the charge sheet. It runs through the study houses of the Galilee, the poetry of exile, the streets of Safed and the institutions built before independence. It contains documents worth reading closely and choices that cannot be understood through slogans. Above all, it contains Jews acting in history, preserving a people and rebuilding its ability to determine its own future.
The destruction of the Temple was not the end of that history. The declaration of independence in Tel Aviv was not its beginning.
The years between them belong to us, too. We should stop leaving them out.
