Last week I attended, in Washington, a conference sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in honor of its centennial celebration. Although I was not on the opening night panel, I was present when one of its participants, the well-known Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, “set a cat among the pigeons,” as the Israeli daily Haaretz put it, by declaring “that only Israel, and not Judaism, could ensure the survival of the Jewish people.” Unless Jews lived in Israel and “took part in the daily decisions” of life in a Jewish state, Haaretz cited Yehoshua as saying, “they did not have a Jewish identity of any significance.”

Needless to say, this did not go down terribly well with the audience, most of it AJC members from all over America. To quote Haaretz again:

“Many at the conference called Yehoshua’s speech ‘impertinent,’ ‘foolish,’ ‘tasteless,’ and ‘impolite.’ A delegate from Los Angeles said, ‘I don’t care so much about Yehoshua, but tell me, is that what Israelis think?'”

Well, I’m only one Israeli, and an American-born-and-raised one at that, but I’ve known A.B. Yehoshua for many years (I’ve actually translated five of his novels into English) and found myself agreeing with him on many issues, so I’ll try to answer our Los Angeles delegate in my own name.

Were A.B. Yehoshua’s remarks “tasteless” and “impolite”? I suppose they were. He was, like me, at the conference as a guest of a leading organization of American Jewry, and he was, like me, being paid well for it; a tactful person doesn’t tell his hosts on such an occasion that the identity they think they have is “of no significance.” (As I recall, those weren’t his exact words, but they’re not an unfair representation of what he was saying.) If expressing his opinions about American Jews meant hurting their feelings, he should have picked another time and place for it.

Were his remarks “foolish?” I suppose they were that, too. Many American Jews take their Jewish identity seriously and put a great deal of effort into maintaining and strengthening it. This is not something that is of “no significance.”

Indeed, despite the great inroads made by assimilation – in some ways, as a reaction to them – the hard nucleus of the American Jewish community, which numbers somewhere between one and two million people, is, Jewishly speaking, better organized, better educated, more committed, and more culturally and religiously creative than it has ever been before. And the more committed they are, the more American Jews tend to care about Israel too, and to give it their political and financial backing. This is hardly of “no significance,” either. These Jews deserve an Israeli’s respect and gratitude, not his disdain.

And yet the following evening, when it was my turn to be on a panel, the (unintentionally comic, so it struck me) subject of which was “What Should Jews Worry About Next?” (as if we didn’t already have enough worries to last us until the year 3000!), I found myself offending some of the audience, too. It happened when, drawing on the biblical account of how Jacob, before his fateful meeting with his brother Esau, divides his large family into “two camps,” so that, if Esau attacks one of them, the other may escape unharmed, somebody asked me from the floor:

“In light of all the dangers to Israel that we have been talking about, don’t you think it’s a good idea that the Jews of the world, too, are divided into two camps, one of which is in the Diaspora?”

To which I replied without thinking:

“You know, if, God forbid, Israel should some day be destroyed or go under, I couldn’t care less about the Jews of the Diaspora or what happened to them.”

Afterwards, several AJC members approached me privately and said they were deeply upset by that. “Were you trying to tell us that you agreed with Yehoshua?” they asked.

Was I? Not exactly. I don’t think an American Jew is necessarily any less of a Jew than an Israeli Jew, and many American Jews whom I know spend much more of their time consciously engaged in Jewish activities than do I or my friends in Israel. Living in Israel doesn’t make me a better Jew.

But it does, in my opinion, make me a Jew living in a better place for Jews. It’s not that Jewish life in the Diaspora has no significance, it’s that Jewish life in Israel has more. Israel represents such an enormous Jewish adventure – the only adventure in which the Jewish encounter with modernity is complete and all-embracing – that it’s hard for me to understand how any Jew who really cares about being Jewish would want to be anywhere else. Why would anyone want to sit out such an adventure on the sidelines?

What I was trying to say at the AJC conference last week was that if this adventure should turn out to have been only ephemeral, there will be nothing to replace it with. Although there is no need to sneer at the Diaspora, Israel would lose none of its Jewish value if the Diaspora were to disappear; the Diaspora would retain little of its Jewish value if Israel were to disappear. That is the difference.

It’s possible to strike out in history no less than in a ballgame. The loss of the First Temple was the Jewish people’s first strike. The loss of the Second Temple was its second. One more and – as far as I’m concerned – it’s out. If the Jewish people cannot maintain the state of Israel, it does not deserve to survive even one more day. If that, bad manners aside, is what A.B. Yehoshua really had in mind, I agree with him this time, too.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.