I appreciate the time taken by a Case Western Reserve University alumnus and retired schoolteacher Thomas Kim Hill to engage with my letter to the editor of The Observer (“An appeal to reconsider how we think about Jews, Arabs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” May 13, 2024). However, Hill’s letter to the editor is full of factual mistakes and tendentious claims. Among them:

He claims that the “majority of Jews who founded Israel … immigrated after the Holocaust.” He is wrong. The vast majority of Jews living in Israel at the time of independence had lived there before the Holocaust. Only one of the 37 signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence arrived in the land after the Holocaust. Not a single member of Israel’s first governing cabinet arrived after the Holocaust.

Hill recommends scholarship that endorses the Khazar thesis, which claims that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are actually the descendants of Turkic peoples from the Caucasus Mountains. That thesis is a fringe theory that has almost no support among the mainstream scholarly community, but it finds support among conspiracy theorists and antisemites of various political leanings who seek to deny contemporary Jews’ connection to the Land of Israel or Palestine.

Hill claims that the Israeli state “violates a core value of democracy” by having a religious identity. In fact, there is no universal definition of democratic values. Moreover, countries such as Costa Rica, Denmark, England, Iceland and Norway have state churches or national churches, and no one seriously questions their democratic bona fides on that basis. The democratic constitutions of Argentina, Bulgaria, Finland, Georgia and Greece, among others, expressly privilege Christianity. Israel guarantees freedom of religion to all its citizens while defining itself officially as a Jewish and democratic state. The relationship between those two attributes remains a topic of debate in Israel’s vibrant public sphere, as it does in the public sphere of other democracies with national churches.

As I wrote in my initial letter to the editor, we need to stop thinking about Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish and Arab societies and histories on American, Western and Christian terms and start thinking about them on their own terms.