Another Bore from LeBor

Here's my letter sent in response to a NYTimes op-ed:-

Adam LeBor asks "Why tamper with a beautiful, stirring hymn?" in proposing that words of Israel's national anthem, "The Hope", be altered from "Jewish soul" to "Israeli soul" (June 18). Indeed, why?

The answer is twofold. In the first instance, Israel is defined in its proclamation of establishment as the Jewish state. That is also how the United Nations Partition resolution refers to it: the Jewish state. That's how, too, how Herzl conceived it as did the Jews throughout our 2000 years of exilic striving. Israel's raison d'etre is its Jewishness, not any cosmopolitan humanistic amorphous delineation.

Second, the state of Israel could only have been created by the Jews, vision-driven by the Jewish people for whom it was – and continues to be - "the hope". It can only continue to exist, moreover, if it is specifically the Jewish state and only as a Jewish state can it ever hope to be democratic in the Middle East.

Arabs can do with twenty-three states and those Arabs that refer to themselves as Palestinians seem now to be able to do with two, one in Gaza and one in the area of Judea and Samaria. Jews need only one, but it must be Jewish.