The Economist: Second thoughts about the Promised Land
Jews all around the world are gradually ceasing to regard Israel as a focal point. As a result, many are re-examining what it means to be Jewish.
Jan 11th 2007
JERUSALEM, LONDON AND NEW YORK

“THE choice for our people, Mr President, is between statehood and extermination.” Thus wrote Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organisation, to Harry Truman, president of America, on April 9th 1948. Five weeks later Weizmann was elected president of the newly declared Jewish state. Truman granted recognition within hours.

Weizmann's words were only partly true. European Jewry faced extinction at the hands of the Nazis, but Jews who had fled eastern Europe's pogroms for America two generations earlier already felt safe and established there. Still, even for them, Israel became the centre of the Jewish world—not merely as a place to run to if things got bad, but as part of what they were. If their grandparents' Judaism was about religion, learning and community, theirs meant something else: being a nation that had lost a third of its people but gained a homeland. the rest