Abstract
The Old Testament people of Israel entered the political reality of ancient Palestine as a spiritual community held together by worshipping Yahweh in ‘the God-given land’. When it became a state with a king this spiritual character was threatened or lost. The capital was always the holy city of Jerusalem, as the spiritual—not political—centre o f Yahweh's people, and it survived all political catastrophes, even after the homeland was lost. The people of Israel survived not as a nation but rather as a religious community (Judaism). Only as such can today's Jews legitimately reclaim Eretz Yisrael. Certain claims made by the modern secular Jewish nation-state—for example, that Jerusalem always was and always will be the capital of the Jewish people—are not only problematic, but have no foundation, either in the Bible or in Jewish history: they are fabricated modern myths.
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