The story we carry: A letter to the Jewish People

“Without the United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel.”
—Donald Trump, June 3, 2026

There are moments in the life of a people when they are called upon to remember who they are.

Mr. President, thank you for asking a question you never intended to ask.

The people of Israel owe you our sincere gratitude for your friendship and support. History will remember your recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the relocation of the American embassy, the Abraham Accords, your efforts to bring our hostages home, your willingness to confront the threat posed by Iran, and your support during some of Israel’s darkest hours. Friends matter. Nations should never take friendship for granted, and the Jewish people have never forgotten those who stood beside us in times of danger.

But gratitude doesn’t negate honesty.

No friend, however loyal. No ally, however powerful. No president, however consequential, can be the author of Israel’s existence. That is not a criticism of America or of Donald Trump. It is simply a reminder of who we are.

The State of Israel is less than a century old. The Jewish people is more than three thousand years old.

Long before America existed, long before there were presidents, constitutions, or international alliances, there was already a people teaching its children that every human being is created in the image of one God. Long before the language of universal human dignity entered constitutions and declarations, the prophet Nathan stood before King David and condemned him for murder. Elijah confronted Ahab. Amos, a shepherd from Tekoa, dared to accuse the powerful of selling “the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” Isaiah declared that ritual without justice was an offense against God. In a world where kings claimed absolute power, the prophets of Israel proclaimed something astonishing: that even kings stand beneath the judgment of a moral law.

This is not a statement of religious triumph. It is a statement of historical fact.

The Jewish story gave history one of its most revolutionary ideas: that morality is not the invention of rulers, that power itself is accountable, and that history has direction because human life has meaning.

When the Roman legions burned Jerusalem, they believed they had destroyed a nation. They did not understand that our greatest sanctuary had never been stone. It was memory.

For centuries, we possessed no land, no army, no sovereignty. Yet a father in medieval Spain still whispered the Shema into his son’s ear before sleep. A mother in Poland lit Sabbath candles, knowing hatred might one day extinguish her life, yet praying it would never extinguish her children’s identity. Ethiopian Jews walked across deserts, carrying little more than prayer books and the dream of Jerusalem. Soviet Jews risked imprisonment to teach Hebrew in secret. Scribes copied Torah scrolls, letter by letter. Books outlasted kingdoms. Hope outlasted exile. Hebrew returned from the pages of ancient texts to the laughter of children in schoolyards.

History did not preserve us. We preserved history.

That inheritance belongs not only to those who pray. It belongs equally to the secular Israeli who speaks Hebrew without pausing to consider its miracle, to the scientist who unlocks nature’s secrets, to the artist, the soldier, the teacher, the physician, the entrepreneur, the skeptic, and the believer. Whether we embrace that inheritance joyfully or wrestle with it, it remains ours.

We have watched the chariots of Egypt disappear beneath the sea. We outlasted Assyria and Babylon. We buried the gods of Greece and the Caesars of Rome. We survived crusades, expulsions, inquisitions, pogroms, and the crematoria of Europe. Again and again, those who proclaimed the end of the Jewish people became chapters in history books, while the people they sought to erase still gather on Friday evenings around candles, blessing the same wine, speaking many of the same ancient words, and ending the Passover Seder with the same hope:

Next year in Jerusalem.

For nearly two thousand years, those words were not a prediction but an act of faith. Hope became a way of being long before it became a reality.

This is not a story of superiority. It is a story of continuity.

If the Jewish people have been chosen for anything, it has never been for privilege. It has been for responsibility: the responsibility to insist that justice matters more than power, that life is sacred, that memory is a moral obligation, and that each generation inherits unfinished work from those who came before.

We have often failed that calling. We continue to fail it.

Like every nation, we are flawed. We argue with one another endlessly. Perhaps that, too, is part of our inheritance. Abraham argued with God. Moses argued with God. The prophets argued with kings. The sages argued across generations. We have never believed that loving our tradition required silence. Our greatness has never been perfection. It has been our willingness to measure ourselves against ideals higher than ourselves.

Perhaps that explains something remarkable. After two thousand years without sovereignty, we rebuilt a nation. We revived a language scholars had declared dead—not in universities, but on playgrounds, where children once again argued, laughed, dreamed, and fell in love in the language of Isaiah. We planted forests where others saw deserts. We built universities, laboratories, orchestras, hospitals, and homes.

Jews arrived from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Ethiopia, Russia, Argentina, France, and a hundred other places, carrying different languages, melodies, recipes, and memories. Slowly, they discovered that beneath every accent, they were telling the same story.

The world calls us the Startup Nation. Our greatest innovation was not technological. It was civilizational.

We refused to let exile define us. We proved that a people can lose its land without losing its soul, can wander across continents without surrendering its memory, and can return home carrying books more carefully than swords.

That is why Israel’s existence can never be explained by any single leader, government, military victory, or generation. We welcome friends. We cherish allies. We never forget those who stand with us in dangerous times. But the story of Israel neither begins nor ends with them.

It began thousands of years before us. It will continue long after us.

Our task is to claim that story as our own, to write our chapter with wisdom and courage, and to leave it stronger than we found it.

History has already rendered its judgment on those who came before us. One day, it will render its judgment on us as well.

Will our children inherit only a stronger army, or also a stronger moral vision? Will they inherit a more prosperous nation, or a deeper understanding of why this nation exists? Will they remember that the purpose of Jewish power was never power itself, but the opportunity to build a society more faithful to justice, compassion, learning, and hope?

These are the questions that define a generation. The measure of our generation will not be whether we inherited this story, but whether those who come after us are grateful that we carried it well.

If, generations from now, Jewish parents still whisper the Shema into the ears of their children before sleep; if families still gather around the Passover table and end the evening with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem”; if Hebrew continues to be spoken by children who laugh, argue, dream, and build; if Israel remains a nation that strives—not always successfully, but always sincerely—to wed strength to conscience and power to moral purpose, then we will have been faithful to those who carried this story before us.

And that – not any president, any army, or any empire – is why Israel and the Jewish people endure.