Of all people, Jews know what it is to live in somebody elseâ??s country, without rights, subject to their laws, subject to their prejudices. The Hebrew Bible itself is a record of the experience and psychological consequences of exile â?? of being the forced labour of Pharaohâ??s megalomaniacal building programmes, of weeping by the rivers of Babylon. And when the story of the Bible finishes and the Jerusalem temple is destroyed by the Romans, a new period of extended exile begins, shaping the collective memory with centuries of religious persecution, collective punishments and eventually mass murder.
It is not difficult to see why security is extra precious for the Jewish people and why the very idea of a Jewish homeland has a meaning and significance far in excess of that envisioned by the modern democratic nation state.
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