LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jewish Diaspora: Eretz Israel
built 187 days ago
The Diaspora and Israel represent the two contrasting faces of the Jewish identity. The Diaspora is old, whereas Israel is young. The earliest Diaspora (or dispersal of the Jewish people into the Gentile world) took place with the Assyrian victory over ancient Israel, around 700 BCE. Since that conquest, many other wars and migrations have caused Jews to spread across the globe. The state of Israel was founded in 1948 by refugees from the European Diaspora. Over the last half century, Israel’s population has been repeatedly replenished by immigration from scattered Jewish groups returning to their ancestral home.
Source:
Jewish tradition has it that the Jews were born as a diaspora people, although a central aspect of their birth was identification with the land which became known to them as Eretz Israel -- the Land of Israel. According to the Bible, the first Jew was Abraham, son of Terah, who was born in Ur of the Chaldeans, located in southern Mesopotamia near the Persian Gulf, and migrated with his family to Haran, now in northern Syria. On God's instructions, Abraham migrated to the land of Canaan (now Israel) which he subsequently left briefly because of a famine, but to which he soon returned.
Source:
The place to start is with “diaspora,” a term implying that the Jewish world has a single center. By deemphasizing a bipolar Jewish world—“diaspora,” which connotes powerlessness, and “homeland,” which connotes power—we suggest that power flows in many directions, to and from diverse places. We see Israel as Jacob Blaustein, the former director of the American Jewish Committee, who once debated the first Israeli president, David Ben Gurion, about the relationship between Jews in Israel and Jews in America, once did: as a Jewish home, rather than the Jewish home.
Source:
Between the Roman destruction of Judea and the re-establishment of a Jewish state with the independence of Israel in 1948, all Jews were considered to be living in the Diaspora. Currently, the term refers to Jews living outside of Israel.
Source:
Discussing the growing division between Jewish opinion and the positions taken by major Jewish organizations, /The Economist/ noted that “the big Jewish diaspora institutions have not caught up. Their relationship to Israel is still based mainly around supporting it in times of crisis and defending it from critics...Often these lobbies have ended up representing not Israel but its right-wing political establishment, with American defenders of Israel accusing critics of being ‘anti-Semitic’
Source:
From Israel's perspective, the foreign trade between the two countries served both parts of the Jewish people, that which resided in Zion and that in the diaspora. Conditioning the continuation of the economic ties in general and the military ties in particular on the release of the detainees would not have served the purpose since Israel was not the only or the largest supplier, and its place would have been filled by other suppliers, such as France, for instance.79 Journalist Marcel Zohar, in his unequivocally harsh criticism, claimed that Israel preferred to preserve the friendship over saving Jews. In exchange for this friendship, Israel made a profit of one billion dollars from arms deals over the entire period of the military junta regime.80 Israel claimed that giving up the economic profit would have been folly since this in itself would not have solved the problems of the Jews in Argentina. Furthermore, it would have hurt Israel's economy, causing a financial and economic loss as well as a blow to the country's political and social strength.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Eretz Israel