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By MARION LEV-COHEN

Yehuda Kurtzer poses the question whether Israel has the right to speak for Jews worldwide, and by extension, how that right should be exercised.

Indeed, several considerations argue in favor of such a right. At the heart of Zionist thinking is the notion that Jews are a people entitled to their own sovereign state in their ancestral home. A sovereign state for world Jewry is the ultimate expression of Jewish peoplehood.

Israel, as the Jewish homeland, grants the “Right of Return,” to any Jew who wishes to make aliyah and become a citizen of Israel. Accordingly, while Israel confers rights upon Jews worldwide, Israel assumes both privileges and responsibilities with respect to world Jewry. A prime example of the latter is the obligation to defend Jews wherever they might live, vividly conveyed by General Gabi Ashkenazi’s in his speech at Auschwitz in 2008: “As the commander of the army of the Jewish Nation, in the name of the Israel Defense Forces, I salute the six million Jews who were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. I vow to uphold the responsibility of the IDF — never again to allow Jewish blood to be spilled in vain.”

As Kurtzer states, the existence of a Jewish state prominently projects Jewish values and ideas onto an international platform. When Israeli relief units rescue Nepalese earthquake victims, Jews worldwide derive a sense of pride in seeing tikkun olam being enacted. In contrast, when Israel is accused of human rights violations, Jews who feel a kinship with Israel feel a sense of shame and defensiveness, if not at times the vulnerability of anti-Semitic and/or anti-Israel violence, which can even prove fatal, as in Argentina 20 years ago and France this past year.

Since 1967, Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora have become increasingly polarized over questions related to Israel’s security and its relationship to the individual and group rights of Palestinians. This polarization is not merely about policy but also about fundamental questions of Jewish values and of Jews’ relationship with the world. The multifaceted polarization has made it increasingly difficult for any one person to speak on behalf of the Jewish people.

Had Israeli President Reuven Rivlin or Isaac Herzog, leader of the Knesset Opposition today, spoken in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, as Prime Minister Netanyahu did, undoubtedly each would have offered speeches different from Netanyahu’s. The Prime Minister based his comments on the classic Zionist ideal that Israel is the home of all Jews and a refuge for Jews who are under attack. Others, concerned with maintaining shalom bayit for France’s 600,000 Jewish citizens, might have praised France’s President for urging Jews to stay in France.

Leaders must always make choices between using their prophetic voice – speaking truth to power – as Netanyahu claimed he was doing both in Paris and to the US Congress – and using their priestly voice, speaking in a more consensual and inclusive fashion, measuring how their words affect and represent all of world Jewry. Realistically, given the divisive state of the Jewish community, this delicate task is exceedingly difficult to achieve, yet is required of any Jewish leader – Israeli or otherwise, who lays claim to speaking on behalf of the Jewish people.