Picture shows Ethiopian Jews on a plane being airlifted to Israel during Operation Moses.
Israel is a ‘haven for the oppressed’ among the world’s Jews and it is referred to as such in the prayer for Israel in Britain’s Liberal Judaism movement. Israel has absorbed, mostly successfully, Jews from Ethiopia, the Middle East and from across the world and is likely to become the home for the ancient Indian Jewish community many of whom are going to be leaving India for Israel in the next decade. Israel is not only the ancestral homeland of the Jews but is also a backstop, a place to flee to when things become intolerable for Jews because of widespread Jew hatred.
Jew hatred, of the left wing, right wing and Islamic varieties, is currently having a massive resurgence in the world and it is likely that Jews in hitherto safe countries might have to leave and go to Israel for their own safety and indeed survival. Jews who may previously have lived happily in countries that have relatively suddenly gone bad for Jews are going to be have to brought to Israel and absorbed into Israeli society. This sort of emergency Aliyah or movement to Israel is something that is vexing Israeli politicians and civil society groups.
Because there is now a strong likelihood that the Israeli government is going to have to extract Jews from a collapsing country and bring them to Israel, Israeli inward migration groups and government agencies have been wargaming what to do when this happens. When I read the article in the Jerusalem Post about this wargaming and read the description of a ‘collapsing country’ afflicted with economic disasters, public disorder, dying public services and energy generation and distribution failures I must admit that my first thought was the article was describing Britain as Britain is well on its way to some form of societal collapse and societal collapses too often bring with them the scapegoating of a country’s Jews. However when I read in the article about the numbers of Jews who might needed to be brought to Israel it was clear that they are – not yet – referring to the UK. However things are now getting to the point with the rise of Far Left and Islamic origin Jew hatred that it is not beyond the bounds of credibility that one day this plan to move 45,000 to Israel in an emergency situation might have to be applied, but on a far larger scale because there are more than 45,000 Jews in Britain, to the United Kingdom.
I must admit that reading the Jerusalem Post article about Israeli plans for a mass evacuation of a country’s entire Jewish population and moving them to Israel left me with not just a feeling of profound depression but also a great admiration for what the Israelis can and most likely would achieve. Israel has a great track record for rescuing Jews in terrible situations for example when they airlifted the Ethiopian Jews from that benighted land to Israel.
The Jerusalem Post said:
"A country is collapsing – the economy is in shambles, the security situation has deteriorated due to widespread riots as residents seize what they can, and the 45,000 Jews that reside there are at risk.
The hope for these beleaguered Diaspora Jews is to flee to Israel, but airports will cease operation in 24 to 48 hours as utilities such as electrical grids fail.
This was the scenario facing the assembly of representatives from major government, nonprofit, and national organizations in Ramle on Thursday, planning and simulating the emergency immigration of 800 people a day for one to two months.
This is not a hypothetical to Aliyah Minister Ofir Sofer, who said that emergency mass immigration was something that historically was likely to occur, particularly with global levels of antisemitism rising.
At the Israel National Resilience Institute, the Aliyah and Integration Ministry and National Emergency Authority (NEMA) conducted its Raise the Aliyah Banner exercise in preparation for mass Jewish immigration spurred by serious antisemitic or destabilization incidents."
The Jerusalem Post article went on to say how difficult it would be to get so many people out of a collapsing country when there are no airports and the country in question is descending into violence. The article added that it would be likely in such a scenario that a country’s Jews might have to be moved temporarily to staging posts in a third country in order for Israel to be able to fly out these Jewish refugees.
Once out of the immediate danger zone these Jewish refugees will have to be housed, fed and absorbed into Israel and Israeli society. This will of course be a massive task but it is to be hoped that the planning and wargaming about this issue will make such an emergency Aliyah less problematic than for example what happened when Israelis were internally displaced after the 7th October Pogrom from danger areas in the North of the country and near to the Gaza area. At that time poor data sharing and collection meant that it was unclear to the authorities and to Israeli NGO’s where internally displaced people were actually living. These wargames are intended to find what areas of this emergency Aliyah will be problematic and how to sort out those problems.
Having seen Israeli society as a visitor and spoken to a great many Israelis over the years I have a great deal of confidence that Israel could manage to extract diaspora Jews from a collapsing country and be reasonably successful in absorbing and integrating these Jewish refugees into Israeli society. This confidence comes in part from observing Israeli society but also because I know that Israel has managed such an emergency Aliyah before.
However reading this story from the Jerusalem Post about a potential mass emergency Aliyah from an unspecified collapsing country is making me think about what if this emergency extraction of Jews was required for the UK? It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility what with the rise in jihadism, the Left rediscovering it’s inherent Jew hatred and a possibly impending economic and energy supply crash that Britain would no longer be a place where Jews could be considered as safe. What would such an emergency extraction of British Jews look like? It would certainly be more complex as the numbers involved would be far higher than those of the imaginary country of 45,000 Jews that the Israelis are wargaming about. There are approximately a third of a million Jews in Britain spread across the constituent nations of the UK. Most of these Jews are in major population centres like London, Manchester, Gateshead and Leeds. There are also smaller communities in other towns and cities and some of us are semi-rural Jews living well away from major Jewish population centres.
It’s clear that moving a third of a million people out of the UK to Israel would be a massive undertaking both for the UK Jewish communities and its organisations who would by necessity have to play a major part in such an emergency Aliyah. The situation might be somewhat helped by the likelihood that as Britain becomes less and less friendly to its Jews then a goodly proportion of that one third of a million would have already made Aliyah prior to any major emergency. In 2024 over 600 British Jews made Aliyah to Israel, many citing the rise in Jew hatred as a reason to leave which is double the figure of approximately 300 British Jews who left the UK for Israel in 2023. If things, as they are likely to do, get even worse than they are in Britain at present then that 600 in 2024 might be 1200 in 2026 and 2400 or more in 2027. However, even taking into account that a lot of British Jews would have voluntarily escaped prior to any emergency occurring, Israel is still going to have to move at least a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand people from the UK to Israel, possibly via a third country that is friendly to Israel such as Germany which would be quite easily reachable by ship or via the Channel Tunnel should British airports be unusable. Not all of these people are going to be young or fit or active and there’s going to be a whole lot of vulnerable, sick and elderly people along with children who are going to have to be moved for their own safety and cared for.
Moving so many British Jews to safety and hope in Israel is going to be a massive logistical and security undertaking. Ideally and with a smaller number of Jews there might be the possibility of moving the vast majority of this population out of a nation swiftly and in relative secrecy but that is not going to be possible with the UK Jewish population. It might be impossible to move a quarter of a million people out of Britain swiftly or in secret and it’s highly unlikely that even in the event of a state collapse, that Israeli security experts would be able to be on the ground in the UK to assist the emergency Aliyah or provide security for it. Such an emergency Aliyah might also face resistance from Jew haters on the street and from within what might be left of the British government and its various agencies such as the police. I can certainly see Britain’s Jihadist community kicking off against those Jews waiting to leave and attacking them before they could leave. In this endeavour these Jihadists would almost certainly be assisted by elements of Britain’s Far Left.
Sadly I can foresee something akin to Krystalnacht occurring in the UK should Britain, its economy and its society collapse. Attacks on Jewish communal property and groups by Jihadists or Leftists might make it virtually impossible for those groups to be able to effectively organise or help the Israeli government in an emergency Aliyah situation which is something that those involved in the recent wargaming regarding a mass emergency Aliyah have been banking on. For this reason alone it might be a good idea for those involved in British Jewish communal organisations whether they be Orthodox or non-Orthodox to put together shadow entities that would be focussed almost entirely on getting British Jews out should the worst happen. If the Synagogues and headquarters of Britain’s Jewish communal organisations are burning then what facilities that they once might have had are going to be useless for the purpose of helping extract British Jews from the UK. This is why I believe there’s going to be a need for such a shadow organisation to do what needs to be done to secure the safety of Britain’s Jews and do what they can to get them to Israel.
It is important at this point to say that we are not at the point of needing emergency Aliyah from the United Kingdom – yet. There are still opportunities that could be grasped that would render such an emergency Aliyah unnecessary. We could, for example, enter the 2030’s (or maybe earlier) with a government that is wholly opposed to the hatred expressed and felt for Jews by the Jihadists and the Left, but things could equally go the other way. We could end up with the House of Commons dominated by a misfit coalition of Jew hating Greens, Jew hating socialist cranks and committed Jew hating ‘Gaza Independents’ aka Islamists. I’m afraid that things could go either way over the next decade in Britain. It could be good or it could be terrible.
Every Jew, wherever they are and whatever time in history since an enforced Jewish Diaspora has been a thing, has had to have one question permanently in their minds and that is the question ‘is it still safe to be here?’ Leave too early and you might have made a bad mistake, leave too late and you will get consumed by that society’s Jew hatred. Do you move to country ‘B’ to country ‘A’ for safety only to find that country ‘A’ gets invaded by another nation maybe one imbued with murderous Jew hatred? Too many German Jews in the 1930’s thought they’d found safety in places like the Netherlands, Belgium or France only to find that the monster that they’d fled from has followed them there. For Jews a country may be safe for a while but not forever.
Every Jew in Britain or anywhere else for that matter is going to have to make their own decision to make Aliyah that takes into account their own circumstances. Some Jews in some places in the UK are going to be safer for longer than they would be in other places. Personally I cannot see places like London, Manchester, Leeds and to a lesser extent Gateshead being safe for many more years. Other British Jews maybe in smaller and less leftist and Islamically ‘enriched’ towns and cities along with rural Jews might have a little longer period of safety but the way things are going in Britain the number of places where a Jew could put their hand on their heart and say ‘I’m safe here’ is going to diminish and diminish more rapidly than many of us might consider or want to be the case.
As the Jerusalem Post article stated it’s very likely that there’s going to be some need for an emergency mass Aliyah from one of more collapsing countries and these could be anywhere in the world with the exception of the United States. Whether it is going to be Jews being rescued by Israel from the United Kingdom only time will tell.
Link
Jerusalem Post article on emergency Aliyah