306	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

b“This is the crime, and, once again, it is vital for us to bunderstand its inevitable roots, its original sin. When Herzl bwrote his classical work, he named it Der Judenstaat. Not for bnothing has it been translated into Hebrew here to read bMedinat HaYehudim, The State of the Jews. It could easily have bbeen translated as HaMedina HaYehudit, The Jewish State, but bit was not. Know, all ye Jews, that there is a vast difference bbetween a ‘State of Jews’ and a ‘Jewish State.’ The first bpostulates a state with a majority of Jews, with Jewish bsovereignty, a state that belongs to Jews. It says nothing babout what kind of state the state that belongs to Jews will be. bIt says nothing about any particular, unique quality to this bstate. Indeed, it is possible for the State of the Jews to be bexactly similar in its character and culture to the State of the bEnglish, or of the Greeks, of the Americans, or of the Hot- btentots. It can be a Hebrew-speaking America or Paris or bCasablanca. It can be one more of the myriad of petty, little bsimilar ethnocentric republics that play a meaningless game bof sovereignty.

b“Not so a ‘Jewish State.’ This implies more than a collec- btion of circumcised carbon copies of Times Square or the bLatin Quarter or Picadilly. A Jewish State means, to be sure, bJewish sovereignty and a Jewish majority and a state that bbelongs to the Jewish people, but there is more, much more, bbasically more. A Jewish state is Jewish; it itself is Jewish. It acts bJewishly, it reacts Jewishly. Its foreign policy is Jewish, its bdomestic policy is Jewish. It sets for itself goals and means bthat conform to Judaism. It looks upon itself, not as an end, bbut as a means toward an end, as a vessel to hold the Jewish bpeople and to serve them. It is the place where the Jew can breach holiness, uniqueness, and the heights of his Jewish bobligation, and the state is his servant in those goals.

b“That is a Jewish State. It bows to Judaism; it does not bcontradict it. It conforms to Jewish values and Jewish com- bmands and Jewish imperatives. It conforms to them even bthough they contradict the international norms of diplo- bmacy, even though they are at opposite poles to the accepted band normal Western, modern, democratic way of life, even bwhen they threaten its interests, even when they threaten to bisolate it from the ‘civilized’ and ‘cultured’ gentiles.