BINYAMIN NETANYAHU, Israel’s prime minister, may suffer many shortcomings, but a deficit of chutzpah is not one of them. Two weeks ago, for example, he told French-speaking supporters of his Likud party that he saw himself as the “representative of the entire Jewish people”. After an anti-semitic attack killed a Jew in Copenhagen, he urged his coreligionists to leave “the soil of Europe” and to go to their real home: Israel.
Many Jews are irked by being told they must respond to terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen by fleeing to Israel. Yet in some ways such appeals are not new. Nor are complex and sometimes contradictory emotions felt by Jews in Israel, a state that was founded to offer them a haven; and by the 8m or so Jews who live outside it.
From its earliest days the country was built on the notion that millions of Jews would make aliyah (the Hebrew word for Jewish immigration meaning “ascent”). The country has absorbed some 3m new Jewish citizens since its foundation in 1948.
Immigration was about more than just building a state; it was also about creating a new sort of Jew. In Israel, the early Zionists argued, Jews would till the fields, defend borders and cast off the sheepishness of the galut (the exile) and its ghetto Jews. When, after the second world war, Jewish survivors made their way from the smoking Nazi death camps to the holy land, they were looked down upon for the passivity they had supposedly shown as they were marched into the gas chambers.
Mr Netanyahu goes further than Israel’s earlier leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, the state’s founding father, with his claim to speak for all Jews and to know their interests. Ben-Gurion drafted a policy that has guided relations between Israel and the Jewish diaspora since the 1950s, saying that “Israel speaks only on behalf of its own citizens” and not Jews elsewhere. Jewish community organisations abroad felt that a corollary of this was that they should avoid criticism of the Israeli government of the day. Both ends of this bargain are being upset, particularly with the emergence of vocal, if still small, Jewish advocacy groups such as J Street in America, which campaign for Israel to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Critics say that in pressing Jews to ditch their passports, Mr Netanyahu is alienating allies and going beyond the founding ideals of Zionism. Many see more than a hint of politicking in Mr Netanyahu’s call, which was made in the build-up to a general election on March 17th. In Israel, the idea of urging the diaspora to come home is generally a vote-winner.
In quieter ways, however, the government is pursuing a different tactic: boosting ties with Jewish communities abroad, without insisting they should flee. It spends about $50m a year bringing Jews to Israel for ten-day trips or year-long scholarships in the hope of building affinity, but not necessarily a pipeline of immigrants.
Behind the rhetoric, there is an understanding in Israel that most diaspora Jews are content where they are. In 2014 26,500 Jews came to Israel, the highest figure for a decade. Despite a doubling of emigration from France, that is still barely 0.3% of the total diaspora. For all the incentives that await incomers, at least half the world’s Jews prefer to be elsewhere.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Come home right now"
