Boiling the Frog
Why come to a country that has thousands of missiles pointed at it and is on the verge of another war? Why come to a country where it’s hard to make a living?
Some six or seven years ago, when we were still living in London but planning somehow to leave and come to Israel, there were a couple of ‘incidents’ that fast-forwarded our plans.
I went for a few job interviews at newspapers (I used to be a journalist) – and very quickly, I found myself being drawn into a defense of Israel, apropos of nothing. What made these encounters even more difficult was that on both occasions, I was arguing for Israel’s right to exist, and to defend itself, with Jews.
A few months’ later, after I’d started my own communications business, I had a launch party, replete with bottles of wine and traif nibbles (apart from me, no-one else attending was Jewish).
The former Mayor of London, Ken Livingston, had just been all over the press for making very inappropriate comments to a Jewish journalist. As the wine flowed, and flowed (Brits drink absolutely staggering amounts of alcohol…) a very nice man came over to me, and started attacking Israel, again apropos of nothing other than I was a Jew.
“Israel never learns!” he told me, visibly upset. “They did it to the Romans, and they are doing it again!” Wow. I’d never heard of Israel persecuting Romans before. When Israel rebelled against Roman rule, the war lasted for four years, and resulted in millions of dead Jews and the destruction of our Second Temple.
But my colleague wasn’t interested in facts (does this sound familiar?). If Israel was involved in any confrontation – even one that was 2000 years old, and designed to wipe it off the face of the earth – then it must be Israel’s fault.
I nodded and smiled, nodded and smiled, and felt absolutely awful. Then it got worse. A few of my ‘work friends’ – similarly drunk – started telling me that Ken Livingston was absolutely right about what he’d said about Jews / Israel etc etc. These people all knew I was Jewish – I never hid it, and was always happy to discuss it with anyone who asked me. But it was exactly as our Sages teach, that when wine goes in, the truth comes out.
I came home from my launch party absolutely determined to leave the UK.
That was six years’ ago, and with Hashem’s help, we got here five years’ ago, in August 2005.
Almost exactly a year later, the Second Lebanon war kicked off, and I watched incredulous as the BBC failed to report that Israel was being rocketed for three whole days. The first time they started to cover what was happening here was when Israel started to defend herself.
I can’t tell you the number of people, good Jews all, that I had to ‘defend’ Israel to during that war. The number of times I had to explain to people I’d been going to shul with just a year earlier that what they were being fed about the war was nearly all anti-Israel propaganda, and very far from the truth.
Here, things seemed so clear and obvious. Israel had been attacked, and needed to defend herself, as any other country would do. There, Israel was being portrayed as an aggressive military monster, heartlessly bombing schools, hospitals, orphanages and old age homes.
For as long as it lasted, Jews in the UK got very, very uncomfortable. For a few weeks, even the most assimilated of them started to realize that ‘Israel’ was forcing them to pick a side, often for the first times in their lives, and to state who they really identified with.
But then it died down. The cease-fire was declared, the hoaxes and biased journalism were exposed for the three and a half people interested in the truth, and life went on as normal.
A few more people made the jump to Israel in the meantime, many of whom were pushed to come in the same way we had been. Things were heating up in chutz l’aretz, and the hostility that Esav always feels for Jacob was coming closer and closer to the surface. People who were open to that truth could see it: everyone else stuck their head in the sand, and hoped it would all go away.
When the Gaza war happened last December (2009), the temperature shot up a few more degrees. One of my friends told me how she used to travel into London on the same tube as three Jewish school boys. They all used to wear their kippot on the tube – until the Gaza war. One day, two of the kippot disappeared, and the third was under a baseball hat. It was simply too dangerous to continue being obviously Jewish in public.
That incident made a very strong impression on my friend, who has three small sons; a few months later, she made aliyah.
But in the meantime, the anti-Israel rhetoric, propaganda and coverage continues to get worse and worse, as we see from the whole Marmara flotilla fiasco. Israel is the bad guy. Israel is always the bad guy. And for the Jews that have no real connection to Israel, the ones that don’t come to visit regularly, and who don’t have family or friends here to give them a more accurate picture, it’s getting harder and harder to be ‘pro Israel’.
They listen to news that is ‘anti’. They read articles that are ‘anti’. They are influenced by peers who are ‘anti’. And guess what, more and more of them – even religious Jews – are starting to feel ‘anti’.
If you follow what our Rabbanim say, you’ll have noticed that over the past year, pretty much every ‘big rabbi’ you care to mention is pushing Jews outside of Israel to make aliyah.
For people outside, this can sound ridiculous: what? Come to a country that has thousands of missiles pointed at it? Come to a country that is on the verge of yet another war? Come to a country where it’s so hard to make a living? Where there isn’t enough water? Where I’ll never afford a nice place to live, because prices are shooting through the roof? Where the army bombs poor, innocent Arabs?
But those people simply don’t have any clarity, when it comes to Israel. They can’t see what we see, from our vantage points in Jerusalem, Haifa and Ashdod: yes, there may well be another war in Israel very soon.
But Hashem has always protected His people here; thousands of rockets fall, and hardly anyone is killed. Soldiers are sent into the worst fighting situations imaginable, and nearly all of them make it back alive. Of course, every casualty is a terrible blow. But Hashem is so kind to us – one fatality in place of the thousands you’d expect, if the wars here went according to the laws of nature.
Despite all our differences, there is a strong sense of Jewish unity in Israel. We are all in this together, and Hashem really loves that ‘achdut’. There is a Divine protection for Jews in Israel that simply doesn’t exist on the tube in London, or in Downtown Manhattan.
Whether they recognize it or not, Jews all over the world are being asked to make a choice. The choice is not even so much about whether to move or Israel or not, although anyone who really believes in Daat Torah should already be making their plans to come.
The choice is whether to stand with the Jewish people, regardless of all the lies and ‘anti’ propaganda, or to stand against us.
Many of us who live here have noticed that over the last year, the people we left behind in chutz l’aretz appear to be making the wrong choice. They are choosing to believe that ‘giving back’ Judea and Samaria – the spiritual heart of our land – will solve all the world’s problems; they are choosing to believe that Israel is 
becoming more of a problem than it’s worth, G-d forbid. They are choosing to believe that Israel is some sort of optional extra, when it comes to their Judaism and their relationship with Hashem, and that life will continue on as normal for them, regardless what happens over here.
becoming more of a problem than it’s worth, G-d forbid. They are choosing to believe that Israel is some sort of optional extra, when it comes to their Judaism and their relationship with Hashem, and that life will continue on as normal for them, regardless what happens over here.But they’re wrong. Like the proverbial frog, they have got so used to feeling the ‘heat’ that they don’t realize how close they are to being boiled alive. If and when the next war happens in Israel, G-d forbid, the most dangerous place to be, for a Jew, will be in chutz l’aretz. Don’t wait for then – come home now.
7/13/2010
The wars of Israel There used to be a TV program here in the UK which replayed classic battles from the past. Participants had to make strategic decissions and at the end they explained the historical outcome. One of the military historians who hosted the program, (an Israeli incidentally), was asked why none of the battles featured involved either ancient or modern Israel. He replied that none of these battles had a militarily predictable outcome. Believing Jews would see Yad Hashem.
7/13/2010
There used to be a TV program here in the UK which replayed classic battles from the past. Participants had to make strategic decissions and at the end they explained the historical outcome. One of the military historians who hosted the program, (an Israeli incidentally), was asked why none of the battles featured involved either ancient or modern Israel. He replied that none of these battles had a militarily predictable outcome. Believing Jews would see Yad Hashem.
7/13/2010
aliya How are you so sure that jews can not be “boiled alive like frogs” in israel, god forbid, just like in chutz laaretz?