Kol od balevav p'nimah              In the Jewish heart
    Nefesh Yehudi homiyah              A Jewish spirit still sings,
    Ulfa'atey mizrach kadimah         And the eyes look east
    Ayin l'tzion tzofiyah                    Toward Zion
    Od lo avdah tikvatenu                Our hope is not lost,
    Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim        Our hope of two thousand years,
    L'hiyot am chofshi b'artzenu       To be a free nation in our land,
    Eretz Tzion v'Yerushalayim         In the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

The secret of our people’s persistence is—as I have tried to show elsewhere—that at a very early period the Prophets taught it to respect only the power of the spirit and not to worship material power.  Therefore, unlike the other nations of antiquity, the Jewish people never reached the point of losing its self-respect in the face of more powerful enemies.  As long as we remain faithful to this principle, our existence has a secure basis, and we shall not lose our self-respect, for we are not spiritually inferior to any nation.

But a political ideal which is not grounded in our national culture is apt to seduce us from loyalty to our own inner spirit and to beget in us a tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion, thus breaking the thread that unites us with the past and undermining our historical foundation.  Needless to say, if the political ideal is not attained, it will have disastrous consequences, because we shall have lost the old basis without finding a new one. 

But even if it is attained under present conditions, when we are a scattered people not only in the physical but also in the spiritual sense—even then, Judaism will be in great danger.  Almost all our great men—those, that is, whose education and social position have prepared them to be at the head of a Jewish State—are spiritually far removed from Judaism and have no true conception of its nature and its value. 

Such men, however loyal to their State and devoted to its interests, will necessarily envisage those interests by the standards of the foreign culture which they themselves have imbibed; and they will endeavor, by moral persuasion or even by force, to implant that culture in the Jewish State, so that in the end, the Jewish State will be a State of Germans or Frenchmen of the Jewish race.  We have even now a small example of this process in Palestine.
 
Hertzberg, Arthur. The Zionist Idea. JPS 1976.

A word:

What is the difference between a State of Jews and a Jewish State?

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