ABSTRACT
According to Scripture, God commanded Abraham to leave his homeland and promised that his descendants would inherit the land of Israel. This land is referred to as the ‘Promised Land’. From ancient times, Jews have lived there continuously, and they continue to regard the land of Israel as their God-given possession.
The question arises of whether today such a belief should be sustained and, indeed, what constitutes the right of any people to ‘this land’: contrast the celebrations by Jews of the creation of Israel with the Palestinian remembrance of the Nakba (catastrophe). Ben-Gurion presented Israel in 1948 as a state with equality of rights within, though it was a Jewish state in that only Jews possessed the strangely-termed ‘right of return’.
The ‘Basic Law’ of 2018 gave the Israeli Jewish people ‘exclusive right to national self-determination’; it is surprising, then, that ‘antisemitic’ is applied to Jews and non-Jews who point out that the state is racist, in that it discriminates on grounds of ethnicity. It is not, though, unusual for countries, including liberal democracies, to determine entrance mainly by ancestry.
The notion of a group identity is raised and related to that of a person’s identity through time.
