Zionism of the Founding Fathers: Israel’s creation matches the principles of statesmen who established our republic. (Joseph Prud’homme, June 27, 2024, Modern Age)
[A] significant number of founders held that religion should be integrated into the fabric of law and society, specifically at a regional or local level. They held that the people are entitled to create a religious state, with “religion” understood either in a general sense or as one specific denomination—as long as the substance of that religion was conducive to recognizing and protecting the rights of all, with the state ensuring everyone’s freedom of religious belief and practice.
Such a state must be a politically representative one and exercise authority only over a geographically compact community. These conditions, they believed, would produce a government more responsive to the concerns of all the citizenry.Christianity, of course, was seen as especially conducive to the protection of individual rights, including the right of religious liberty. Thus Christianity was something the state could protect and promote by law without compelling individuals in ways that would violate individual conscience.
The pamphlet Worcestriensis, for example—which was written anonymously in 1776 in Massachusetts and remained influential in New England for decades—supports at once the establishment of a specific faith and the support by law of religious liberty. Even in the presence of extensive denominational diversity, this work suggests, establishment works best in compact areas due to the ease with which citizens can petition government should abuses occur, as well as the reality that living amidst difference tends to form habits that bolster support for the legal protections of religious liberty for all within the community. And indeed, in most New England states the religious establishment was at the town level.
The Constitution expressly sought to avoid any measure that could undermine state-level solicitude toward religion. All ratifiers of the Constitution knew that six states in 1789 had official religious establishments that accorded Christianity, or even a particular denomination, privileged status, often in the form of direct financial support to that faith and no other.
As President Thomas Jefferson—himself in many ways a strict separationist—stated in his second inaugural address, “religious exercises are under the direction and discipline of state or church” (emphasis added). To be sure, Jefferson would have wanted New England states to shed their religious establishments on their own. But many founders saw a state-level affiliation of faith and government as a form of morally acceptable statecraft or as a genuine and positive benefit.
Israel’s founding embodied these points central to many in the founding generation and therefore would likely have won their support.
Of course, this argument favors Palestinian statehood for all the same reasons.