Israel: The Nation and the State

March 12, 2025

by: Dr. Bill Adams, BFP Writer

A wise person once remarked, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be intelligent, but it’s still artificial.”

I tested that when I queried my AI, “When did Israel become a nation?” It confidently responded: “Israel became a nation on May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel.” Upon seeing this answer, I shouted, “Incorrect, you artificial brain!” I had inquired about Israel’s nationhood, not statehood, and AI apparently doesn’t know the difference.

Simply stated, the nation is the people; the state is the polity or an organized political entity. Israel is intensely both, but the founding of the nation of Israel came about long before the people became a polity. Let us consider the past and present of the nation–state, Israel.

The Nation

A nation is a group of people with a common language, history, culture and land. The people of Israel had all this and more centuries before their modern declaration of statehood. We mark the origin of the nation with Abraham 4,000 years ago and the organization of the nation under Moses 500 years later. This people, whom God fashioned for Himself, took possession of their common land, upon which they have sought self-determination in the millennia since

The State

A state is an association of people who have formed a government with laws, territorial boundaries and political independence. We mark the first state of the people of Israel as the Kingdom of Judah under David 3,000 years ago. That polity was shattered and the people scattered in the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions, then regathered and partially reconstituted under Roman domination until the second scattering, which took place in AD 135.

The state was lost, but the nation persisted. Though scattered worldwide for almost 2,000 years, the people retained their language, history, culture and Torah-based faith, which always called them home, always back to their land, always yearning for “Next year in Jerusalem.”

The Declaration

The 1948 Declaration of Israel’s Independence reveals the nation’s miraculous return and the state’s stunning rebirth on its ancestral land: “Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.”

It means the world to the Jews to have their own state, yet the state is incidental to the nation. When we declare that we stand with Israel, we are first and foremost declaring that we stand with the nation, the people, both those regathered within the state and those in the Diaspora (the Jewish population outside Israel). The nation is Jewish, so the state is Jewish. “Jewish” does not mean Judaism, though the two significantly overlap. Saying “Jewish” is like saying “Italian” or “Scandinavian,” thus referring to a historic, lingual and cultural identity that bonds a people in perpetuity.

The Basic Laws

The Jewish state does not have a formal constitution. Instead, its Basic Laws are the bedrock for all law and principle by which the polity is governed. In 2018, Israel’s Knesset (parliament) adopted their fundamental Basic Law: “Israel, The Nation State of the Jewish People.” Though occasioning much controversy, the law simply attests to what has been the state’s reality since its establishment in 1948: “The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish People, in which the State of Israel was established. The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.”

 This legislation affirms Israel’s identity as both a nation and a state, securing it as the only Jewish polity on the planet. Sadly, Israel’s detractors don’t want a uniquely Jewish state, proving that those who oppose the state ultimately oppose the people.

The Commonwealth

In the Bible, the Hebrew word goyim and the Greek word ethne identify the people of the nations. These are the Gentiles, the non-Jews. Scripture consistently addresses Israel as the nation (singular) while Gentiles are the nations (plural), far from the promises—and the burdens—which God assigned to Israel. The apostle Paul exhorts the Gentile believers in Ephesus to “remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh…were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:11a, 12).

Before Jesus (Yeshua), we Gentiles were not only woefully far from God but also excluded from the commonwealth or the national family of Israel. But gloriously, through our Jewish Messiah, we have been brought near to the family. And with family inclusion comes family responsibility, like standing with our Jewish kin through thick and thin.

The Ingrafting

Our Christian forebears largely failed our Jewish family, but our merciful God is giving us a new day of opportunity to get this right. Will we seize the day? While actively supporting the State of Israel, let us remember it is the nation into which we have been grafted. As Paul admonishes the Roman Gentiles: “…you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree…remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you” (Rom. 11:17,18b).

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