Who made Netanyahu the leader of the Jewish people?

"... Well, no: the Palestinian struggle, as the US president Barack Obama made clear in Cairo last year, is rooted in the fact that Israel's creation resulted in their displacement and dispossession in 1948, and in an occupation that began in 1967. Israelis appeal to western sensitivity by couching any assertion of the rights of Palestinian refugees as a threat to their security. But the Palestinians driven out in 1948 were not the authors of centuries of Jewish suffering, and their rights as human beings cannot be negated on the basis that their very existence in their original homes threatened the Jewish nationalist project in Palestine.

But Mr Oren's demand for recognition of "Jews as a people, indigenous to the region and endowed with the right to self-government" is problematic, not only for Palestinians, but also for many Jews. Israeli Jews may have constituted themselves as a nation with the right to security and self-determination, but the majority of the world's Jews have not claimed a right to self-determination as Jews. On the contrary, we're very happy that anti-Semitism in the West has been marginalised to the point that we can freely integrate ourselves into the democratic societies in which we've chosen to live.

Growing up as a Jewish anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, I was often told by white racists to "go back to Israel". The idea that Jews don't belong among non-Jews is the traditional language of anti-Semitism - and also of the modern ideology of Zionism that emerged in the late 19th century. Zionism's founder, Theodore Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism of the sort I encountered was inevitable and even "natural" whenever Jews lived among gentiles. He effectively concurred with the anti-Semites' remedy: that I should "go back to Israel". Apartheid, by the way, denied black people the rights of citizenship on the basis that their "national homelands" were in Bantustans such as Transkei and Kwazulu - bogus "states" in which they supposedly would exercise their right to self-determination.

Jews have certainly suffered for the right to live in security and safety, but the majority have chosen to exercise that right not in a separate Jewish nation state, but instead as Americans, Argentines, British or French. When Mr Netanyahu proclaims himself not just the prime minister of Israel, but also the "leader of the Jewish people", that's an expression of an ideology that holds that we're a separate nation. I don't believe that the majority of diaspora Jews are comfortable with the idea that they're not really Americans or other nationalities, but are instead part of a separate people whose "national home" is Israel. While their grandparents' experience may have been one of Jewish persecution and impermanence, most young Jews in the West today are not assuming that their gentile neighbours are going to turn on them.......

By insisting that the Palestinians declare Israel "the national home of the Jewish people", Mr Netanyahu is, in effect, asking Mahmoud Abbas to recognise a claim against which more than half of the world's Jews have voted with their feet.

As a Jew, I'll decide where to make my national home - it's not a matter that either Mr Abbas or Mr Netanyahu has any business discussing."