By: Rohana R. Wasala

Sri Lanka and Israel are facing similar existential threats. The two comparatively small sovereign states have the most ancient roots in the history of human civilization, principally due to their maritime connection to other countries. Both states are today parliamentary democracies with multiethnic and multicultural populations, each benignly dominated by a founding race or ethnic community organically linked to one historic sociocultural fabric, enriched with long established religious traditions based on shared spiritual values. In the case of Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese Buddhists compose this ethnoreligious community, who account for 75% of the Lankan population. Judaism is the spiritual foundation of the Jewish culture of Israel, where 73.5% to 75.8% of the country’s population comprise Jews. 

While scouring the internet, mainly the social media, saturated with plausible media accounts amidst a plethora of false narratives, though, I tend to feel that Israeli Jews are being threatened with physical elimination for being what they are; the majority community of Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese Buddhists, seem to be facing a form of relentless cultural genocide. Instances of the subtle erosive damage that the pushers for regime change have been doing since 2015 with state patronage to Buddhism, the Sangha establishment, Sri Lanka’s archaeological heritage, key historic national festivals like the Sinhala Aluth Avurudda, the Vesak and Poson ceremonies, etc., to neutralise the alleged cultural hegemony of the Sinhalese Buddhists are increasingly in evidence.

Though the attacks that Israeli Jews and Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority are separately facing may be seen as endangering their survival, they take different forms between them. Israel is engulfed in armed conflict with its enemies, and it commands formidable military might. Sri Lanka militarily defeated the separatists in 2009; but they did not pose a threat of total physical destruction or cultural elimination of the Sinhalese. The separatist war was an extension of internal politics. The cultural subversion menace that Sri Lanka’s majority community is currently faced with does not call for a warlike response. It is only an intercommunal issue, though with international ramifications, that should be democratically and peacefully resolved within the country’s constitutional framework. The lessons that Sri Lanka can learn from Israel’s experiences are only of a moral and political nature. 

Israel’s openness to the Mediterranean Sea made it vulnerable to seaborne invasions in the past, most notably from Philistines in the 12th century BCE and Crusaders in Medieval times (1095-1291); it should be mentioned, however, that the present-day  Palestinians of Gaza are not the genetic or cultural descendants of the ancient Philistines. Modern Israel utilizes its seaboard as an indispensable strategic asset, having transformed it into a critical frontier for its economy, its military defence, and its political leverage in order to ensure its future survival and constant development as an independent sovereign state. Before its rebirth in 1948, Israel had disappeared from the map of the world, its native inhabitants the Jews having been scattered among other countries in the world, particularly in Europe, fleeing from repeated invasions, racial discrimination and antisemitic persecution over many centuries. 

Compared to the Jews of Israel in this respect, the indigenous inhabitants of the island of Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese, who built the enduring island civilization (currently, making up 75% of the country’s population), have fared considerably better in that they didn’t have to leave their ancestral homeland to settle elsewhere. The surrounding sea made it vulnerable to foreign invasions in the past just as much as it has always provided a natural highway for trade and a crucial medium for diplomacy with other countries beginning in pre-Christian times. The Sinhalese resisted many invasions from what is called South India today and survived nearly five centuries of European occupation and domination (1505-1948).. 

The Sinhalese, the majority ethnic community, have a recorded history of two and a half millennia. The existing bibliographical and epigraphical sources are reinforced by extensive archaeological evidence scattered throughout the length and breadth of the country. Sinhala is a vibrant, perfectly developed native tongue that is peculiar to the island with its own unique vocal sound system, vocabulary, distinct grammar, and orthography, all of which are not found anywhere else in the world. Sri Lanka also has an enduring religious cultural tradition (Theravada Buddhism) of over 2300 years that upholds profound spiritual wisdom coupled with universal compassion over all sentient beings in the universe.  

Opening his address to the second annual session of the Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS) International Policy Summit at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Jerusalem on June 21, 2026 Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu said:

In the United States, they say that President Trump does everything that I ask him to do.

And in Israel, they say that I do everything he wants me to do. Well, neither is true. We’re leaders of independent and proud countries. We stand for our interests. I stand for the interests of Israel and for its security. And often we see eye to eye, sometimes we don’t, but we respect each other’s sovereignty and leadership and commitment to our people…..”

Israel’s current (2026) population is 10.2 million to America’s 344 million, that is, hardly 3% of that of the latter. But in the civilised world, the geographic or population size of a country doesn’t count as much as its self-respect, sovereignty, independence and security, and its people’s wellbeing, happiness and its exclusive national interests, which cannot be surrendered to any other nation, however big, benign or bullying it may be (needless to say, contrary to what is happening in Sri Lanka at this hour).

Something highly admirable in Netanyahu’s seemingly casual, but loosely scripted, talk was that he made explicit his (or the Israeli) government’s responsible rejection of the discouraging counsel of naysayers: We did everything that our critics wanted us not to do…….  entered Rafa, attacked Hizballah, took the Philadelphia Corridor, took on Iran, marched into Gaza (where the Hamas jihadists capitulated to our incomparably heroic soldiers (of the Israel Defence Forces, IDF) and rescued every last hostage (taken captive on October 7, 2023) and brought them home. We defied our critics’ warning not to challenge Iran whose terror regime wants to annihilate Israel, by flying over that country and bombing its nuclear sites and destroying its capability to build a nuclear weapon and decapitating its leadership in order to create conditions for the oppressed innocent ordinary Iranian citizens to rid themselves of the stranglehold of the ‘the terror regime’ in Tehran”. Netanyahu said that his government did these things not only in the interest of  his own genocidally threatened Jewish people, but also in the interest of all other people in the world who are potential victims of death dealing Jihadist terror. His efforts, he believes, will generate peace in the Middle-East, and ultimately contribute to promoting peace in the whole world.

During his 20-minute speech at the JNS International Policy Summit, Prime Minister Netanyahu paid a tribute to his older brother, the late Yonatan Netanyahu, whose 50th death anniversary falls on July 4th this year. The then 30 year old Yonatan was commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit (of the IDF) that conducted the celebrated Entebbe anti-terrorist rescue mission of 1976. The young Yonatan led the Israeli commando assault that neutralised a group of Palestinian and German militants holding hostage 102 Israelis (separated from the rest of the passengers) aboard an Air France plane diverted to the Entebbe airport in Uganda, and rescued all the hostages unharmed. Yonatan Netanyahu was the only Israeli casualty in that operation. He was hit in the chest by a bullet fired by a Ugandan or German soldier shooting from outside.

Prime Minister Netanyahu also recalled the day that his late father (renowned historian Benzion Netanyahu) was felicitated by the Benzion Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History (obviously named in his honour) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on his 100th birth anniversary in 2010. Netanyahu fondly remembered that his centurion father walked to the stage without support. Professor Benzion Netanyahu had served as a history professor at Cornell University in Pennsylvania, USA. His research fields were the history of antisemitism and origins of Zionism. While teaching at Cornell he provided intellectual support for the establishment of the Jewish State. Benjamin Netanyahu learned from his father how the Jews were faced with waves of antisemitism and vilifications against the Jewish people that come and go in a predictable cycle”, and how they … were massacred and pushed from one country to another, and from that to another, and the same thing happened over and over and over again”.  However, his father emphasized, the true change came with the creation of the State of Israel and its army: The change, Prime Minister Netanyahu explained, is that when they come to slaughter us, we fight back. We don’t let them do that. We fight back and we roll them back exactly as we have done now in the last three years. I pledge to you that we will also fight this battle (against) antisemitism around the world; we will fight on the eighth front as well (as) against our delegitimization, against the calumny that is directed against the Jewish people”.

Finally, Prime Minister Netanyahu appealed to his compatriots outside Israel to stand up for the country::

I ask you, Jews of America and the Jews of the Diaspora to do one thing. Stand up. Don’t cower. Don’t be afraid. Fight back. Because people will only respect us if we respect ourselves. And when they level lies at us, throw back the truth, and do it standing up. Stand up for the truth. Stand up for Israel. Stand up for the Jewish people. Stand up for the Jewish future.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu made special mention of his family for the support they gave him, while also acknowledging the support he received from the patriotic Israeli public.

To be continued