Israel

以色列

Israel can refer to two different but related concepts: the modern state of Israel, and the divinely mandated Promised Land of the Jewish people. According to the Hebrew Bible, God promised the Land of Israel to the descendants of Abraham through his son Isaac - the Jewish people. From the tradition’s earliest days, Judaism has maintained a special reverence for Eretz Yisrael (Hebrew for the Land of Israel), always keeping the memory of the Promised Land alive throughout the Diaspora. When the political movement known as Zionism began calling for the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in the nineteenth century, its proponents used the religious idea of the Jews’ Promised Land to rally support for creating such a state in the same region where the biblical Kingdom of Israel had existed. In 1948, the Zionist movement succeeded in creating the state of Israel, the world’s only Jewish-majority country.