Ma tovu ohalecha ya’akov meeshkenotecha yisrael (How good thy tents are, O Jacob, thy dwelling places, O Israel) — the first verse of the prayer that opens every synagogue service in the morning was originally uttered not by the Hebrews but by Balaam, the “heathen” prophet hired by the Moabite king to curse the Israelites.

Soon after the first Zionist Congress at Basel (1897) called for a homeland in Palestine/EretzIsrael for the Jews, many came to envision a “land without people for a people without a land” (just the way it was for America, with all the implied irony). When Theodore Herzl asked Max Nordau to describe the Zionist goal in one sentence, Nordau came up with a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel, secured through international legitimacy — that is, the idea of the Jews as a nation, a state for the Jews (and not for everybody), in the ancient land of Israel, but without implying the whole of it, and guaranteed by international legitimacy.

The declaration of Israel’s independence on May 14, 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, was a victory of life over death. But Israel, at 60, continues to live under an international curse and has not yet managed to make its declared enemies and many others utter a blessing in its favour. (This year, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, about 100 British anti-Zionist Jews published a statement in The Guardian stating their case against Israel, most prominent among them being Harold Pinter.)

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