Conclusion - Is Israel irreducibly singular?
Résumé
"I shall never believe that I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities, where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say." So wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his hymn to natural religion, the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar." For Rousseau, so highly sensitive to the primary demand for freedom, the Jews' situation as a minority inevitably distorted relations with their neighbors. With rare perspicacity, he anticipated that only their collective emancipation in a sovereign state would free them as a people and place them on equal footing with the nations of the world. This aspiration was precisely the goal of political Zionism. The extent to which it was realized with the creation of the State of Israel is the topic discussed in these closing pages.