Politics & Power Quote by David Ben-Gurion

A state made out of people, not land: Ben-Gurion is offering a founding myth that doubles as a recruitment strategy. The line shrinks geography and inflates biography. Israel, in this framing, is less a patch of mapped territory than an answer to a recurring historical pattern: Jews treated as perpetual outsiders, shuffled across borders at the mercy of whoever controls the stamps.

“The Jews will come from everywhere” works because it’s both prophetic and programmatic. The roll call of places is doing political work: France and America evoke modern citizenship and assimilation; Russia hints at pogroms and revolutionary upheaval; Yemen signals Jews from outside Europe, widening the imagined nation beyond Ashkenazi suffering and making “ingathering” sound global rather than parochial. It’s an argument against seeing Israel as merely a European refugee project, even as the postwar context and the Holocaust’s shadow hang over every word.

“Their faith is their passport” is the sharpest turn, and the most loaded. On one level it’s practical: immigration is defined not by existing citizenship but by Jewish identity, a moral workaround for a world that repeatedly closed its doors. On another level it’s deliberately audacious, asserting a transnational legitimacy that rivals the nation-state system: belonging is anchored in peoplehood and memory, not paperwork. The subtext is both consoling and defiant: if states can deny entry, this state will reverse the logic and turn identity itself into a document.