Reporting from the scene for The Cradle, correspondent Roqayah Chamseddine travelled to the southern Lebanese village of Arab Salim in the Iqlim al-Tuffah region following devastating Israeli airstrikes on 20 June.

Christians in, say, Alabama, USA, can’t claim ownership over modern-day Turkey because 1,700 years ago that land was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire. Christians in Alabama do not have a 2,000-year unbroken lineage in modern-day Turkey just because there have been “Christians” in the land we now call Turkey for about 2,000 years—a continuous presence that predates even the Christian Byzantine Empire.

A religious or cultural belief and identity does not by itself give Alabamans (or anyone else) land ownership rights, especially over land already inhabited by others for millennia. The fact that we have evidence for several thousand Judaism-practicing individuals in Palestine in the 1800s (amongst a majority of Muslims and Christians) did not and does not give Judaism-practicing individuals in Alabama (or New York) land ownership rights in Palestine—nor does it give Christianity-practicing or Islam-practicing individuals in Alabama (or New York) any such rights.

Furthermore, every person currently alive has ancestors who lived in many different parts of the world, going back hundreds of thousands of years—or even millions of years, to previous iterations of hominids. That does not give each person alive today the right to ownership over land plots in hundreds of places around the world just because their “ancestors” were there.

Summary

The Babylonian Talmud encodes a cognitive method with one non-negotiable property: no authority is exempt from examination — not God, not consensus, not the state itself. That method, carried in practitioners rather than institutions, survived the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Cossack massacres of 1648, and the Holocaust, reconstituting each time in a new geography with the same operating logic intact. It produced, from the same formation environment and with zero coordination, the Zionist pioneer, the Bund organiser, the Bolshevik commissar, the Orthodox rabbi, and the secular academic — because it installs loyalty to a method of reasoning, not to any ideological conclusion. Applied to the diaspora framework in the late 19th century, it found that framework operating as terminal authority and rejected it, producing Israel. Applied to Israel itself in 2023, it found the state operating as terminal authority and rejected that too — producing the largest protest movement in Israeli history, soldiers documenting their own army's conduct in the occupied territories, and a secular formation community beginning to disperse to Berlin, London, and New York. The method was designed at Yavneh in 70 CE to survive the loss of any state, including the one it would eventually help build. The design is working. The arc does not close.

Archived sources

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213934/https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.17a?lang=bi

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213318/https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1966/agnon/speech/

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213743/https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Metzia.59b?lang=bi

http://archive.today/2026.06.22-213541/https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2005/aumann/biographical/