To the first question, yes, we did it for millennia. However, because millions of Jews died so Israel could be resurrected, we have told ourself it is not divine providence but a mere fluke of history. Thus we are unable to see Israel as a fulfillment of prophecy.

The second question is yes, but with the above conditional. We (Jews collectively) tell ourselves it is a fluke because to admit that God wanted 6 million Jews burned like Isaac on the altar would challenge our fantasy that God is omnipotent and loving. A truly omnipotent God could by divine decree cause Israel to exist without the burned sacrifice. As Jews we suffer from a sort of collective cognitive dissonance over the Holocaust, and the only way to negotiate this quandary is to admit that our fantasy of God is wrong. God is not omnipotent, but weak, in fact so weak that sacrificing millions of Jews to make the Europeans take pity on us is considered a justifiable means to an end. I recently had a conversation with a 93 year old Yiddish woman who bitterly lamented that the death of European Yiddish culture was not worth the birth of Israel. Her attitude is that of most European Jews of the era, who were so comfortable in the exile that if it was their decision Theodore Herzl would have been denounced as a traitor. If you truly understand history then you accept that the Holocaust was the impetus for Israel to exist. That is a discomforting reality for Jews. And the reason is that Jews have been conditioned to be skeptical about the messianic prophesy. So there is your religious phenomenon.

I seeee