The Kingdom of Israel is an oddity in today's world. It is one of the few absolute monarchies still remaining in the world. And what sets it apart from most monarchies is the cult of personality of its royal family, rivaled only by North Korea.
The birth of Israel itself was strange. What started out as a project to settle Eastern European Jews fleeing increasingly restrictive laws in the early 19th century turned into a divinely-inspired movement to carve out a third Jewish kingdom, bring on the Messianic age, and rebuild the Third Temple. Such an outpouring of religious fanaticism as the one that was seen with the establishment of Israel was unprecedented and has never been repeated.
In its 153 years of existence, the Kingdom of Israel, or third Jewish commonwealth, has repulsed foreign colonizers and tried to forge an empire of its own, caused an unprecedented outpouring of religious fanaticism, and became host to a once-prosperous nation which inhabited every corner of the globe, and whose beliefs and customs are now largely a mystery to the outside world which they left so many years ago to pursue a dream of return to their promised land.
Excerpt from Israel: A Look Inside the Hermit Kingdom, by Professor Martin Tyler, 2011.
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"They say that King Shabtai I, who is known to Israelis as their Messiah, created the country through divine will. The truth is far different. The truth is, Israel was born before his parents were. Israel was never intended to be a country. It was intended to be a refuge for increasingly oppressed Eastern European Jews who had few alternative places to go. Yet what started as a humanitarian project turned into an obsession with fulfilling the dream of the end of Jewish statelessness and the coming of the Messianic age, of the Biblically-promised ingathering of the exiles, and of revolution against Palestine's Ottoman rulers.
Shortly before the Kingdom of Israel's birth in 1858, a prominent European rabbi cautioned the Jewish people against giving in to blind euphoria and committing a great historical folly. His words of wisdom, ignored then, seem prophetic today".
- Noam Yarkoni, Israeli defector living in New York City, 2008.