One of the oldest and most dishonest arguments used to deny Jewish rights in the Land of Israel is the claim that Jews are not a people-only a religion. This falsehood resurfaces whenever Israel asserts itself as a Jewish state and whenever Jews insist on their right to national self-determination.
It reemerged loudly in December 2019, after President Trump signed an executive order aimed at combating antisemitism on American college campuses. Almost immediately, critics claimed that Jews were merely adherents of a faith and therefore not entitled to the legal protections afforded to national or ethnic groups.
This was not an academic disagreement.
It was ideological warfare.
The argument that Jews are “not a people" is not an innocent error. It is a calculated strategy. Its goal is singular: to delegitimize Jewish nationhood and invalidate the Jewish state. Strip Jews of peoplehood, and Zionism becomes colonialism. Strip Jews of history, and Israel becomes theft. This argument has been recycled for generations-and it has never been honest.
International Law Settled This Long Ago
International law has never been confused on this question.
Professor George Scelle, one of the most influential international jurists of the twentieth century and a member of the UN International Law Commission, defined a “people" as any collective bound by conscious solidarity, as determined by its own members. By that standard, he concluded unambiguously that the Jewish people constitute a nation.
Scelle acknowledged that Jews were dispersed and lacked territorial continuity. But instead of weakening Jewish peoplehood, dispersion reinforced it. Jews retained their identity precisely because they refused to dissolve into surrounding societies. Their shared traditions, historical memory, religious practices, and-above all-the persecutions they endured forged a cohesion stronger than that of many territorially concentrated peoples.
Paul Fauchille, another leading French jurist, reached the same conclusion. Writing after World War I, he stated plainly that the war brought “official recognition of the nationhood of yet another persecuted people: namely the Jewish people."
This recognition was not symbolic.
On July 24, 1922, the League of Nations formally recognized the Jewish people and their historic and religious connection to the Land of Israel through the Palestine Mandate. The Mandate explicitly affirmed Jewish national rights and recognized the Zionist Organization as the representative body of the Jewish people.
This was not charity. It was law.
Even the Nazis Knew Jews Were a People
After World War II, the Nuremberg Tribunals (1945-1949) reaffirmed this reality. The judges ruled that “atrocities against the Jewish people were committed." Throughout their judgments, they referred repeatedly to the murder of “the Jews" across Europe.
Professor Nathan Feinberg, former dean of The Hebrew University Law School and a leading authority on international law, explained that the tribunal used the term “Jewish people" in an ethnic-not religious-sense. Jews were murdered not for what they believed, but for who they were. Converts were murdered alongside observant Jews.
The Nazis understood Jewish peoplehood clearly-even if today’s deniers pretend otherwise.
Jewish Nationalism Is Not Colonialism
From 1517 until World War I, the Ottoman Empire ruled the Land of Israel. Ottoman sovereignty collapsed with the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), transferring authority to the Allied Powers. This enabled the implementation of Jewish national rights that long predated modern international law.
Britain did not “give" the land to the Jews. As former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold explained, the Mandate constituted de jure recognition of a historical and legal reality-not an act of imperial generosity. Jewish attachment to the land was continuous, documented, and unmatched by any competing national claim.
The British hoped Arabs and Jews could live together and that Arab society would benefit from Jewish development. But even British officials recognized an overriding fact: the Jewish claim was unique-sui generis. No other people returned to its land after two millennia with its language, laws, religious observances, and national consciousness intact.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, noted that more than 3,000 years before the Mayflower sailed to the New World, Jews fled Egypt. Every year, Jews commemorate that liberation at the Passover seder, concluding with the words:
“This year we are here; next year in the Land of Israel."
Ben-Gurion observed that he knew of no other people exiled from its land, scattered among the nations, hated, persecuted, expelled, and slaughtered-yet refusing to vanish from history, refusing to assimilate, yearning for two thousand years to return, and ultimately restoring its independence.
Former Israeli Ambassador Yaacov Herzog articulated this bluntly in his famous debate with historian Arnold Toynbee. The Jews, Herzog said, are the only people who insisted they could not live without their land-even after 2,000 years of exile. The normal laws of history do not apply here.
“If the world agrees that there is something unique about the Jews in the history of mankind," Herzog argued, “it cannot deny the right of the Jews to this land."
That uniqueness was recognized thousands of years earlier. The prophet Balaam described Israel as “a people that dwells alone." Whether this reality inspires moral responsibility or provokes resentment is the central tension of Jewish history.
The Double Standard
Those who attack Israel’s Jewish character conveniently ignore a basic and damning fact: many modern states-Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and numerous Eastern European countries-were created in the twentieth century with artificial borders, invented identities, and no prior history of sovereign nationhood. Their legitimacy is rarely questioned.
The Jewish people, by contrast, existed as a nation thousands of years before the rise of modern nationalism. Jewish nationhood did not begin in 1948. It was restored in 1948.
-To deny Jewish peoplehood is not critical inquiry.
-It is historical falsification.
-It is ideological erasure.
-And it is the intellectual foundation of anti-Zionism-and increasingly, of modern antisemitism.
The question, therefore, is not whether there is a Jewish people. The question is why so many persist in denying what history, law, and even Jewish enemies have always known.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and serves on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He holds an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem