Educate. Empower. Choose.
If you came here because you need to explain Israel to a student, a parent, or a neighbor without a chant standing in for the record, you are in the right place. The National American Citizen Association educates the next generation about the threat to Western civilization and the importance of Israel. Free people cannot choose what they have not been taught. Here is who Israel is, what the United States decided on the day Israel was born, and what Hamas wrote in its own covenant — documents you can open yourself.
Who Israel is
Israel’s founding text does not begin with 1948. It begins with a people and a land:
ERETZ-ISRAEL (the Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
Source: Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
The same document says that after exile the people “remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return.” That is the Jewish people’s own account of who they are. It is not a slogan written last week.
Then comes the political claim, in language an American can recognize:
This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.
A nation-state. A people. A law. The Declaration also promised freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture, and equality of rights “irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Read that paragraph. It is the Israeli answer to the charge that the Jewish state is a theocracy.
The American inheritance runs through the same root. The Declaration of Independence says rights come from the Creator, not from Congress. That teaching did not start in 1776. If Jerusalem is part of what free people inherited, then the war on the Jewish state is not a faraway quarrel. It is a test of whether this generation still knows its own story.
What the United States decided
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. The United States recognized it the same day. President Truman’s statement:
This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.
Sources: Truman Library, May 14, 1948; National Archives
The United States was the first major power to recognize Israel on the day it was proclaimed (de facto). Full de jure recognition followed on January 31, 1949. His own State Department was angry that he did it without them. He did it anyway.
That was an American decision: this Republic recognized a sister nation-state on the day it was born.
The alliance that followed is not charity. It is American security. It includes intelligence sharing, military cooperation, and a commitment written into U.S. law. In 2008, Congress required that any U.S. arms sale to a Middle Eastern country other than Israel include a determination that the sale will not harm Israel’s qualitative military edge: the ability to defeat a credible conventional threat from a state, a coalition, or non-state actors.
Source: Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008, 22 U.S.C. § 2776(h)
A strong Israel is not a substitute for American sovereignty. It is a nation-state that still believes in being a nation-state, standing against movements that do not.
What Hamas wrote
Do not take anyone’s word for what Hamas is. Read Hamas.
The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, August 18, 1988, is on the public record at Yale: avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
Hamas issued a separate political document in 2017. It did not repeal this Covenant. The quotations below are from the 1988 founding charter, which remains on the public record.
It opens with Hassan al-Banna:
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.
Article Seven treats a hadith as program:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
Article Eight, the slogan:
Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.
Article Eleven: the land of Palestine is an Islamic *waqf* “consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day.” No king, president, or organization has the right to give any part of it up. That is not a border dispute. It is a claim that Jewish sovereignty is itself illegitimate.
Article Thirteen:
There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.
Hamas wrote, in 1988, that negotiation is a waste of time.
Article Two says the movement is “one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.” Article Five says its extent is “anywhere that there are Moslems who embrace Islam as their way of life everywhere in the globe.” This is not a municipal zoning fight. It is a transnational ideology.
Article Thirty-Two cites the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, a proven Tsarist forgery, as if it were a map of Jewish plans. A movement that builds policy on a forgery is not a national-liberation committee. It is a conspiracy on paper, armed.
Quote the Covenant. Do not sand it down so the room stays comfortable. The document is the lesson.
People are not a covenant. Hamas is the Covenant. Lasting peace with people is possible. Peace with that paper is not.
October 7 made the paper visible
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists murdered about 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 hostages. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
Sources: Israeli Foreign Ministry, November 2023; Associated Press
That was Article Seven, carried out.
The second half of the lesson is here at home. In the weeks after October 7, American campuses and streets filled with people who could not, or would not, condemn the massacre of Jews. A country that will not say Israel has a right to exist has already begun to forget why it has a right to exist.
Slogans are not a substitute for a map. “From the river to the sea”: name the river, name the sea, and say what Jewish state remains if the sentence is achieved. If none remains, the sentence is the Covenant in English.
What to do with this
Educate. Read the Israeli Declaration, Truman’s recognition, and the Hamas Covenant. Original documents, not a feed.
Empower. A citizen who can quote those papers cannot be bullied by a chant.
Choose. Choose the nation-state under law. Choose the ally the United States recognized on day one. Choose not to treat a forgery, or a massacre, as a peace plan.
Israel matters because the Jewish people are native to that land in their own founding text, because the United States recognized that state as an act of this Republic, and because the movement that wants Israel gone wrote down that it wants the rest of the free world next.
Sources
- Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. Yale Avalon. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp
- Statement by the President Announcing Recognition of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. Harry S. Truman Library. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/100/statement-president-announcing-recognition-state-israel
- Press Release Announcing U.S. Recognition of Israel (1948). U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/press-release-announcing-us-recognition-of-israel
- The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), August 18, 1988. Yale Avalon. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
- Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008, 22 U.S.C. § 2776(h). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-122/html/STATUTE-122-Pg4842.htm
- Israeli Foreign Ministry, November 2023, official October 7 toll of about 1,200.
- Associated Press, 251 hostages taken on October 7, 2023.
Civic education and political commentary. Quotations are from the public documents linked above.
