Merry Christmas to all you many billions of Newsbleat readers throughout the galaxy. Eat too much, open lots of presents, get drunk, get laid, all that great stuff.
On the coming anniversary of the birth of a Jewish/Christian religious figure, being celebrated on a date other than his actual birth date, but that’s okay, I’d like to point out that the Jews maintained strong connections to their ancient religion even though they had no nation for nearly 2000 years and I would argue that having a nation may not be necessary or a good thing.
It’s constantly under attack. Jews, in their Diaspora, established communities in almost every nation on Earth and by most of them coming back together in one place, in Israel, they’ve made themselves vulnerable to being wiped out en masse. There’s still a lot of Jews in other places, there’s a large population in the USA, but of the roughly 20 million of them worldwide, nearly 8 million are in Israel, surrounded on all sides by bitter enemies and involved in endless local conflicts. I understand their attachment to their ancient homeland. Sometimes it’s a good thing to just let go of the past.