There is a particular audacity to the statistics being waved around right now. J Street commissions a poll. Haaretz runs the headline. Peter Beinart writes the bestseller. The conclusion is always the same: young American Jews are detaching from Israel, and Israel has nobody to blame but itself.

It is a remarkable argument. And it is exactly backwards.

The answer tells you nothing about Israel. It tells you everything about what was already lost before the question was asked.

Show me a Jew who feels genuinely Jewish in their gut, with the weight of something irreplaceable, who doesn’t care about Israel. Show me a Jew in love with his Judaism whose heart doesn’t beat for our homeland. They do not exist.

Because the emotional connection to Jewish peoplehood and the emotional connection to the land of Israel are not two separate things, they are the same bond. A bond older than the Torah itself. The land was promised before the commandments were given, woven into the very identity of a people still being formed. You cannot love what you are and be........

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