The room fell silent before anyone realised why.

My professor at Reichman University had asked what should have been one of the easiest questions of the semester.

“What does it mean to be Israeli?”

Around me sat students who had been born in Israel, educated in Israel, and shaped by Israeli society from childhood. Their answers were thoughtful. Some spoke about democracy. Others spoke about military service, Hebrew, innovation, resilience, or Israeli culture. Every answer captured something recognizably Israeli. Yet as I listened, I became increasingly uneasy.

Every answer described Israel. None seemed to explain why Israel exists.

I left that classroom carrying an unexpected question.

I had grown up in Sydney. I had never attended an Israeli school, never served in the Israel Defense Forces, never spoken Hebrew with friends or lived inside the daily rhythms of Israeli life. My childhood was shaped by Shabbat dinners, Jewish schools, Hebrew prayers, Jewish history, and stories of Jerusalem.

I expected to spend months learning how to belong. Instead, I found myself experiencing the opposite. Israel felt strangely familiar, as though I had stepped into a place I already knew.

How could someone raised on the opposite side of the world feel so certain that she belonged here, while a room full of Israelis struggled to explain what being Israeli meant?

That question stayed with me for months. Gradually, I began to suspect that we had started with the wrong question.

Every nation tells a story about itself. Some tell the story of a revolution. Others remember an empire, a constitution, a language, or a struggle for independence. These stories do more than explain the past. They answer a deeper question that every political community must eventually confront.

Why do we exist together at all?

Modern democracies have become remarkably sophisticated at answering a different question. They debate constitutions, elections, courts, rights, and the separation of powers with extraordinary precision. These institutions determine how political power should be exercised. They are indispensable to a free society. Yet they cannot answer the question that comes before all the others.

Why does this nation exist?

That question cannot be settled by an election or decided by a court. It belongs to history, memory, and identity. It belongs to the stories a people tells about itself and the inheritance it passes from one generation to the next.

Before asking what it means to be Israeli, perhaps we must first ask a much older one.

What does it mean to belong to the Jewish people?

The English language describes Judaism as a religion. The more I reflected on that word, the more convinced I became that it was too small. Judaism is certainly a religion. But it is also a civilization. It is a people. A language. A moral and legal tradition. A collective memory. An inheritance carried across generations.

Long before there was a State of Israel, there was the Jewish people. Long........

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