Sabine Sterk: Israel and the World’s Unhealthy Fixation
Israel is one of the smallest countries on earth. Roughly the size of New Jersey. Fewer than ten million citizens. No oil wealth, no imperial ambitions, no desire to rule others. And yet no other nation attracts the same level of fixation, outrage, moral lecturing, resolutions, protests, boycotts, and obsessive scrutiny.
Why does Israel dominate global attention in a way no other country does?
Why Israel and not Syria, where hundreds of thousands were slaughtered while the world largely looked away?
Why Israel and not Iran, where women are beaten to death for refusing to obey dress codes and gay people are executed by the state?
Why Israel and not Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, or China?
The answer is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Israel is not attacked because of what it does. Israel is attacked because of what it is. The restored homeland of the Jewish people in a region where Jewish sovereignty was never meant, by its conquerors, to return.
The modern debate deliberately distorts one key concept: indigeneity. Indigenous status is not about politics, borders, or population size. It is about origin. According to historians, anthropologists, and international definitions, an indigenous people originates in a specific land, develops its culture, language, and religion there, maintains a continuous connection to it, and is later displaced or colonized by outside forces.
By that definition, Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Arabs are indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula.
This is not ideology. It is history.
Arabic language, Arab tribal identity, and Arab culture all originated in the Arabian Peninsula in regions such as the Hijaz, Najd, and Yemen. Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions date back more than two thousand years in Arabia. Arab tribes such as Quraysh and Himyar existed there long before Islam. Arab identity was formed there, not in the Levant, not in Egypt, and not in North Africa.
Arab presence across the Middle East and North Africa expanded outward during the Islamic conquests of the seventh century. This is when Arabization reached Syria, Judea, Egypt, and the Maghreb. That expansion created the modern Arab world. Expansion, however, does not equal indigeneity.
The Jewish people originate in Judea and Samaria, a fact embedded in the land’s very name. Judea comes from Yehuda, Judah. Samaria comes from Shomron, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. These names predate Islam by more than fifteen hundred years.
Archaeology confirms this beyond dispute. The Merneptah Stele, dated to around 1208 BCE, mentions Israel in the land. Excavations in Jerusalem’s City of David reveal a continuous Jewish presence. Hebrew inscriptions, seals, coins, ritual baths, and Second Temple remains have been found throughout Judea and Samaria.
There is no equivalent archaeological record of an ancient Palestinian Arab nation from that period. Arab Muslim rule reached the land only in the seventh century CE. The Arab population that later lived there largely descended from settlers and from local populations that were gradually Arabized over centuries.
This historical reality does not deny anyone’s modern identity, rights, or citizenship. It simply states an undeniable fact. Origin matters, and the origin of the Jewish people is the Land of Israel.
Even after exile and conquest by the Babylonians and later the Romans, Jews never disappeared from the land. The Romans attempted to erase Jewish identity by renaming Judea “Syria Palaestina,” but the effort failed. Jewish communities remained continuously in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias for nearly two thousand years.
The Jewish return to sovereignty was not colonialism. There was no foreign empire, no mother country, no extraction economy. Jews returned to their ancestral homeland, revived an ancient language, restored self rule, and built a modern democratic state through labor, innovation, and sacrifice.
That reality was recognized internationally long before today’s slogans emerged. The League of Nations Mandate of 1922 explicitly acknowledged the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land. This was not controversial at the time. It only became controversial once Jewish sovereignty became real and permanent.
There are more than twenty Arab states in the world today. Most were formed through conquest and Arabization after the seventh century. Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan were not originally Arab lands. Indigenous cultures existed there long before Arab rule, and many still do.
Yet the legitimacy of those states is never questioned.
Only the Jewish state is treated as illegitimate.
The obsession with Israel is not about borders. It is about refusal. Refusal to accept Jewish self-determination. Refusal to accept that Jews are a people, not merely a religious group. Refusal to accept that Jews are no longer powerless.
Israel has paid an unbearable price in blood. Hostages were taken. Families shattered. Entire communities traumatized. Now, as the last hostage has been buried, Israel faces a choice. To apologize endlessly to a world that will never be satisfied, or to rebuild with clarity and strength.
Israel does not need permission to exist, defend itself, or thrive.
Its future lies in independence, resilience, and strategic self-reliance. Staying as far as possible from narcissistic leaders and foreign manipulation. Trusting Israeli innovation, intelligence, and moral resolve. Israelis have turned desert into farmland, built world-leading medical and technological industries, defended democracy under constant threat, and preserved life in a region that often glorifies death.
Empires rise and fall. Israel endures.
Not because it worships destruction, but because it chooses life.
Not because it conquers, but because it survives.
Not because it is perfect, but because it is necessary.
History is not unclear. It is crystal clear.
The obsession will only end when the world accepts one simple truth: the Jewish people are home.
Am Yisrael Chai.
