Sublime

The word Zionism comes from one of the seventy biblical words used to describe Jerusalem—Zion. In fact, Jerusalem is the city’s first name; Zion is her second.

story was the vehicle for our values: family, universal morality, social justice, and loyalty to our land. Half of humanity believed in the one God we introduced to the world nearly four thousand years ago and refused to relinquish, even under unspeakable tortures. God owed us an explanation for the Holocaust, I insisted. But Zionism offered a way

However, because all Arab states unanimously objected to working with Israel, Israel was left out of the region where it is, well, located. This was, of course, part of the Arab nations’ systematic attempts to delegitimize Israel as a state.

THE BEGIN YEARS HAD not been easy ones for Israel, but they had been important. Israel had made peace with its once most potent enemy, Egypt. It had made clear that it would not tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of its sworn enemies. It had shown that it would go to war—even a war that many Israelis eventually opposed—to protect the