Israel prepares for a ‘mass immigration event’
No recent news story better encapsulates the febrile nature of these times than the November exercise in which representatives of Israeli government ministries, welfare agencies and core service providers gamed out various responses to what they termed a “mass immigration event.”
Ben Cohen
Israel has, as is well known, a wealth of experience in dealing with such events. The state was barely a year old when it airlifted nearly 50,000 Yemeni Jews to a new life in the Jewish state. It more than doubled that number shortly afterwards, flying more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel. Similar operations were executed decades later in Ethiopia, with three airlifts transporting the African nation’s beleaguered Jews in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. And it absorbed more than 1 million Jews from the Soviet Union following the collapse of the communist bloc.
Throughout its existence, Israel has made good on its historic pledge to provide a haven to any Jew seeking one.
Yet that experience may be of limited value in the present context, as Israeli officials prepare for a not-inevitable-but-distinctly-possible mass influx of Jews fleeing a major upsurge of antisemitism.
The exercise held at the Israeli College of National Resilience in Ramle was an opportunity to test a playbook developed by the Immigration and Absorption Ministry to deal with large-scale aliyah triggered by a mass terror attack, antisemitic rioting or a more general upheaval that targets Jews. “We are imagining events in a country with a difficult economic situation, where the government won’t be able to protect its citizens,” Avichai Kahana, the director-general of the Immigration and Absorption Ministry, told The Times of Israel. “There are concrete large-scale threats to the Jewish community in numerous countries, and hardly a week goes by that a large-scale incident isn’t thwarted by security forces.”
But these countries are not Yemen or Ethiopia in the throes of famine or Russia in a rare moment of freedom in the aftermath of communist rule. Instead, these are affluent democracies where, since the Holocaust, Jews have lived, studied, worked, built their communities and enriched the wider society without seriously believing that events would conspire to drive them out.
We’re talking about countries like Australia and France, Canada and Britain, and maybe even the United States. These are places where Jews have visibly impacted nearly every aspect of commercial, cultural and political life in conditions where they enjoyed—and technically speaking, continue to enjoy—full civic and social equality.
Historically, antisemitism has been a top-down phenomenon, seized upon by autocrats and dictators, and implemented through legislation and state-sponsored persecution to the point of outright genocide in the case of Nazi Germany. Over the last half-century, however, it has behaved more as a horizontal phenomenon, spreading to different but overlapping branches—the media, the universities, local governments, professional associations, activist organisations and so forth.
Jews are now facing a form of hybrid warfare, where a tangible physical threat to their security is blended with psychological pressure, social ostracism and repeated denunciations on social-media platforms. The trend has been steadily building, perhaps more than many people realize, for most of this century. In that sense, the wave of antisemitism that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led pogrom in Israel was not a sudden explosion, but rather a dramatic escalation.
It doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to envisage the kinds of attacks that could result in mass immigration to Israel. A full-scale riot at a synagogue is a distinct possibility, based on what has happened recently in Manchester, England; New York City and Los Angeles (the jury is out on whether the police would respond with appropriate force). Now Sydney. So are gun and bomb attacks on Jewish community centres and schools. Growing sections of our cities, particularly those heavily populated by Muslims, have become no-go areas for Jews, just as many university campuses went the same way a good while ago.
I don’t know a single Jewish individual who hasn’t thought twice about whether to display visibly religious symbols in public, with most people who find themselves in this situation erring on the side of caution. And when we see Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) embracing Code Pink, and former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson embracing the likes of Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the so-called Occupied Palestine Territories, many see the writing on the wall at the same time.
How much of a tragedy would it be if Western countries were to be emptied of their Jewish populations? I see no reason not to offer an answer to this question with complete candor. If we accept that there is a difference between how we think and how we feel, between how we interpret events and how we experience them, then—at the level of pure feeling—I don’t buy the notion that it would be a tragedy.
A tragedy for whom? For the Jews?
Many of us are thoroughly sick of living in societies where the barely literate are catapulted to the top in a competition as to who can say the most hateful things about us. Many of us look down upon (yes, look down upon) a society that demands we take a rodent like the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes seriously. Many of us resent the fact that we are—still!—made to feel grateful for permission to live among non-Jews whose lives we have so greatly enhanced, knowing that they would never have scaled these heights without our contributions to science, literature, law, journalism and more. Many of us are disappointed in our non-Jewish neighbours and friends, who have largely failed to rise to our defence and who have passively accepted the normalisation of antisemitism. Many of us dream of waking up each morning in Israel, freed from having to breathe the same air as these people.
It is reassuring to know that Israel is preparing for a “mass immigration event” because only a fool would discount the possibility.
Still, one wonders what the response of the broader population might be. Will our departure be welcome? Will we face legal and bureaucratic hurdles in moving our families and property with us? Will pro-Hamas demonstrators try to block our way to the airport to prevent more “white adjacent” Jews from “colonizing” the homeland of the Palestinians they fetishize?
Will anyone step up to take the necessary legal and political actions that might convince us to stay?
Perhaps. Otherwise, next year in Jerusalem.
