Ben-Gurion didn’t recognize Israel as the nation state of the entire Jewish people
By Chemi Shalev | Jan. 8, 2014
| Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/.premium-1.567665
But here’s the thing: I don’t know what Netanyahu’s demand is doing for Abbas, but it is making me increasingly uneasy. The more I think of the demand to recognize Israel as the “nation state of the Jewish people," whatever that is, the less I like it. In my eyes, Muslims and Christians who were born in Israel and live there are Israelis; Jews who live in Tulsa or Tashkent are not. Jews around the world may worship Israel but that does not make it theirs.
My position is this: “The name Israel differentiates between the sovereign Jewish people in its homeland, called by the name of Israel, and the Jewish people in the world, in all the generations and in all the land, who are called the “Jewish people” or the “people of Israel." That’s what David Ben-Gurion wrote to Brandeis historian and philosopher Simon Rawidowicz in 1954.
Rawidowicz – a towering Jewish intellectual whose memory has faded to the extent that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry in English to his name – was a champion of the “equal status” of Israel and Diaspora Jewry, which he described as “Jerusalem and Babylon”. He objected to the name Israel that Ben-Gurion had chosen for the state because it excluded Diaspora Jews, and, in essence, relegated them to a second-tier status.
While denying charges of “negation of the Diaspora," as it was known then, Ben-Gurion, in effect, agreed with Rawidowicz: Diaspora Jews can worship Israel and can very well call themselves “the people of Israel” if they wish, but they are not Israelis, and Israel is not their country unless and until they choose to live there.