Bibi To Europe’s Jews: Sucks To Be You

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There’s been a chorus of derision and criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for a mass exodus of Europe’s Jews to Israel in response to a wave of recent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in Western Europe. One comes from Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director of the European Jewish Association, who expressed regret that “after every anti-Semitic attack in Europe, the Israeli government issues the same statements about the importance of aliyah [immigration to Israel], rather than employ every diplomatic and informational means at its disposal to strengthen the safety of Jewish life in Europe. Every such Israeli campaign severely weakens and damages the Jewish communities that have the right to live securely wherever they are.”

Another comes from Rabbi Michael Melchior, Israel’s most prominent Danish Jew and a former politician, whose family traces its roots in Denmark back 350 years. “I don’t like when this is the automatic reaction from Israeli politicians,” he told Haaretz. “I think it is not an appropriate reaction. We have a prime minister who says Israel is about to come under an attack of terrible dimensions, and at the same time says that everyone should run away from there to come here. I don’t even want to go into this way of thinking. I think that the answer to terror is to fight it wherever it is.”

This is a complex matter for Israel and Zionism because aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) is central to the state’s existence and a, perhaps the cornerstone of Zionist ideology: to be a refuge for Jews and that all Jews should immigrate to Israel in any case. But like everything else with Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his hands things become more cravenly political, ill-timed and opportunistic.

As Margolin notes, the reality is that most European Jews do not want to emigrate to Israel. Israel’s notional raison d’etre is also in part to be a source of strength to Jews in the diaspora, even ones that have no intention to make what Jews immigrate to Israel. Jewish communities abroad are also of great strategic importance to Israel – certainly in the United States, but in Europe too.

Netanyahu’s bombast, steeped in the air of crisis he is attempting to foment to secure his reelection, very much has the air of: Sucks to be you. I’d immigrate to Israel if I wanted to be safe.

As I said, this is not novel in the history of Zionism: hundreds of thousands of Jews left Arab and Muslim countries in the late 40s and early 50s in the response to the rising tide of anti-Semitism and state sponsored harassment in those countries. It continued into the 60s and 70s and even continues as a trickle today. But France in 2015 is not Iraq in 1955 or 1968.

Nor is this pushback coming solely from Diaspora Jews or the center and left of the political spectrum in Israel. Natan Sharansky is the one-time Soviet refusenik who eventually went on to become a prominent politician in Israel. He’s now head of the Jewish Agency, the primary organization charged with encouraging Jewish immigration to Israel. Of late – or at least before the Charlie Hebdo attacks – he’s been cheering the growing number of French Jews seeking information about emigration to Israel. But in the aftermath of those attacks he noted the importance of not allowing the push for Jewish immigration to move into a tacit alliance with anti-Semitism abroad. “I really believe that anti-Semitism is not our ally, and we do not have to act as if it is.”

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