Mr. Speaker, the 55th anniversary of the State of Israel should be seen as a cause for celebration and for hope.
For Israel is not just a CNN clip or what passes for the Internet image of the day. Rather, Israel has to be seen and understood as a first nation of humankind; the reconstitution of an ancient people in their ancestral homeland; the juridical embodiment of the Jewish people as an aboriginal people, partaking of an aboriginal Abrahamic religion together with Christianity and Islam, and living in the aboriginal land of Israel, shared with another indigenous people, the Palestinian people.
In a word, the Jewish people are among the only peoples in the world today who still inhabit the same land; embrace the same religion; study the same bible; speak the same aboriginal language, Hebrew; bear the same name, Israel; and dream of the same peace, as they did 3,500 years ago.
While anti-Semitism has been an enduring hatred, almost as old as the Jewish people itself, the Jewish people have been an enduring aboriginal people. That is a cause for hope as well as celebration and for the enduring peace for which Israel still dreams.