Intent to Kill

>> Wouldn't work. Israel is where it is, because that's where it is.<<

That is a circular argument:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/begquest.html

>> That's the spot that the Romans kicked us out of. <<

This much is true, or at least strongly plausible based on available historic records. It does not follow that this particular place 'is' Israel. It's land. Land isn't a nation. It isn't a culture. It isn't a people. It can be the home of a people, historically or presently. It certainly influences culture, whether one wants it to or not. It can be dearly beloved, which is a good thing if it leads people to care gently for the land and treat it as the foundation of a healthy society, or a bad thing if it whips them into a berserk destructive territorial frenzy or causes them to think they've got a right to abuse it indefinitely without consequences.

But Israel isn't a place, and the Jews proved that when they survived as a people after losing their homeland -- a very rare accomplishment. A nation is an idea, an identity, not merely a location. People can migrate and carry their culture with them, if they love it enough. The Jews did that successfully for centuries. In Jewish writing, the portrayal of Israel ranged from the historic place to a kind of core ideal of Jewish nation-ness.

Then they had a chance to get a homeland again, and they were so desperately, totally fixated on that ... they lost sight of the fact that they were already carrying Israel around with them and just needed a place to set it down. A lot of Jews wanted their old homeland back, because of its history; not all of them did, preferring a fresh start elsewhere; but the ones who did won the argument. And they discovered that it wasn't as they had left it; it was a fragging mess, and a substantial number of decisions (theirs and other people's) since then have fragged it into even more of a mess. Meanwhile, most of the Jews in Israel plonked their nation in the sand like a great big flag, and sort of left it there. They had their goal, so they didn't always feel compelled to pour as much energy into maintaining the culture and its homeland-ideal as they did before they had a land to put it on. Sometimes, having is not so satisfying a thing as wanting -- particularly if the reality does not live up to the ideal, which in any regard is probably impossible for an ideal held by thousands of different people.

A subtle division began to grow between Israeli Jews and those who still lived elsewhere, because some of the latter were still carrying around that ideal of Israel in their heads. When that started to crop up in Jewish literature, it generated a lot of snarling from both sides. The core of it is, a lot of energy has gone into getting a homeland, and having a homeland, and maybe not enough has gone into creating the kind of cultural density that sustains a people as their society grows forward. So then folks argued over how much energy was required just to survive ... and well, getting Israel doesn't seem to have lowered the level of desperate scrabbling required to keep their noses above water. That's not what a lot of people expected, and they've been unhappy about that. If you don't fight at all, you die; but if all you do is fight, you're not really living.

Every once in a while, you see a science fiction story in which the Jews pack up and leave Earth to establish a colony somewhere else, and the name Israel is almost always in there somewhere. Because to some people, Israel isn't a building or a plot of sand; it's a portable altar they can set up anywhere, because that's what they were doing for hundreds of years.

"What is Israel?" and "Where is Israel?" as specific questions are perhaps best left to the Jewish people to debate. But inasmuch as Israel is a nation, not just an ideal, it touches on the principle that a nation is a space that some people have drawn on a map and paced out on the ground and water; sometimes those lines move, and the sociopolitical cohesion behind them is more real than the divisions on the ground, even if one builds walls along them. Because underneath all the hairless-ape chest-beating, the land is one, the Earth is one, and most of it has been fought over and lost and reclaimed more times than anyone can count since our ur-ancestors hauled their front limbs off the ground to pick up a club.

In my observation, the results are usually better when people focus on people rather than places or possessions.