There is something the world will never fully understand about us.
For two thousand years, we prayed three times a day toward a city we could not enter.
We ended every Pesach Seder with four words — Next year in Jerusalem — knowing we would not be there next year, or the year after,
We said it anyway, for two thousand years.
We said it in basements in Toledo while the Inquisition burned our books in the plaza outside.
We said it in shtetls in Poland while Cossacks rode through the streets.
We said it in Yemen, in Morocco, in Iraq, in Iran, in lands where being Jewish meant paying the jizya and walking with our heads down.
We said it in Auschwitz. Next year in Jerusalem.
And then, one day, the impossible happened.
A people that had been called a corpse by every historian came back to life.
A language that had been declared dead returned to ordinary conversation.
A city that had been forbidden to us became our capital again.
Not by anyone's permission.
We came home because we had never stopped being from here.
The bones of our prophets are in this ground.
The names of our cities are in this ground.
The verbs of our prayers describe this ground.
When a farmer in the Galilee turns the soil today, he is turning the same soil Yeshayahu walked on.
When a child in Yerushalayim learns the alef-bet, she is learning the same letters David sang.
When a soldier in the Negev raises a flag, he is raising it over the desert where Avraham buried Sarah.
And the world cannot stand it.
They cannot stand that we are still here.
They cannot stand that we built a country in seventy-seven years
while they spent seventy-seven years complaining about it.
They cannot stand that the children of survivors became fighter pilots.
That the children of refugees became surgeons.
That a language whispered in attics became the operating system of universities, hospitals, courts.
They came as the Crusaders.
They came as the Cossacks.
They came as the slogans on Western campuses.
Every generation has its version.
Every generation has its excuse.
Every generation thinks this time they will finish what the last one started.
And every generation has been wrong.
Because what they do not understand — what they have never understood — is that we are not here by luck.
We are here because three thousand three hundred years ago,
at the foot of a mountain in the desert, a people said yes to a covenant and that covenant has not expired.
Not when the Temple fell.
Not when Spain expelled us.
Not when Europe gassed us.
Not when the entire world voted against us in 1947 and then went to lunch.
So when you see the Israeli flag, look closer.
It is not a flag of conquest.
It is not a flag of supremacy.
It is the flag of a people who waited two thousand years to raise it
and who will not lower it again
Not for the lies told in our name.
We have survived louder enemies.
We have survived crueler enemies.
We have survived enemies whose empires now exist only in textbooks.
We will survive these too.
Because we are not just a country, we are a promise kept. And promises kept by HaShem
do not bend to the noise of those who never understood them in the first place.
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