Ahangama – An Israeli Paradise

Ahangama is a town that most people have never even heard of unless they belong to the surfing community.

Situated within the Principality of Ruhuna in South-West Sri Lanka, it boasts the first printing press brought to the country by the Dutch.

However, most of Ahangama’s visitors don’t go there to see this historical relic, but rather to enjoy its magnificent beaches, the surfing and the ceaseless crash of breakers along its palm-lined shores.

Tales of the Tropics describes Ahangama as a town that “a few years ago … only had a couple of nice hotels and a few shacks on the beach. Since then, it’s experienced a local gold rush with many surf schools, bohemian apartments, hipster restaurants, and fun parties being set up by all kinds of people”.

What has all of this to do with Israel, and why devote a Times of Israel blog to a small, third-world, largely unknown town in Sri Lanka? The answer is simple.

Like so many other spots around the world, Ahangama has become a refuge for many Israelis, both young and middle-aged, who have gone there to escape the trauma and the turmoil of the country in which they lived and in whose army many of them served.

They are relaxing with their families on the beach, learning surfing, and filling its restaurants and cafes. They have even established a so-called “International School” to which they send their children. Although they are required only to speak English there, the mother tongue of most of them is Hebrew!

People are leaving Israel for all kinds of reasons. It is not only the high cost of living. (You can eat out for a third of what it would cost you back home.) More importantly, it is because of what is happening to our country.

We are caught up in an endless war that our government refuses for all kinds of reasons to bring to a halt. Israelis are traumatized. They hear every day of how long it has lasted, and how many hostages, both alive and dead, are still being held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Even though there are far fewer missile attacks these days, from time to time our children still have to leave their beds or their classrooms to rush to bomb shelters and saferooms. (The cast-iron shutter covering my saferoom window is still firmly shut.) Who wants to raise children like that?

For many, the political agenda of Israel’s present government, which has already legislated a racist, undemocratic Nation-State Bill, is seeking to undermine the power of the Supreme Court, replace the Attorney-General and dismiss Israel’s Shin Bet security chief, is seen as reflecting a strategy to overthrow the country’s democracy and replace it with an autocratic dictatorship like that in Turkey.

A book published last year entitled Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, written by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and historian, Anne Applebaum, describes the dismantling of democracies by politicians no longer interested in the will of the people.

Ninety years ago, the American author, Sinclair Lewis, wrote the book It Can’t Happen Here warning of the fragility of democracy.

Some among those who comprise Israel’s global travelers do not relate to the notion of a Jewish nation-state established to protect the Jewish People after the Holocaust and defend them from the scourge of antisemitism.

Israel has turned out to be not such a safe place, and there are serious challenges that threaten our world today, which for many seem far more important and relevant to their and their families’ future than risking their lives and that of their children to defend a Jewish State.

Israel Defense reports that between October 2023 and July 2024, more than 8,300 employees from the tech sector moved overseas for at least a year, averaging approximately 900 departures per month.

If all of that were not enough, there is the growing number of unemployed haredim in Israel’s population and most of them refuse to serve in Israel’s defense forces, or even undertake some other form of national service. Reserve soldiers, who are called up repeatedly for military service, are feeling the strain.

Many brave and idealistic Israelis take to the streets every week to protest at what is happening to our country. However, gone are the days when an estimated 400,000 people gathered in 1982 following hearing of the massacres in Sabra and Shatila, thereby forcing the government of the day to set up the Kahan Commission, whose report led to the resignation of the then Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon.

Eighteen months after Hamas invaded Israeli territory on October 7, 2023 brutally killing at least 1,139 men, women and children, and taking more than 200 hostages, many of whom are still being held in horrifying conditions, in spite of all the protests, a government commission has yet to be established to investigate what happened.

Back to Ahangama. Given all that has happened and is happening, it is not surprising that many Israelis have reached the conclusion that they need to seek a home elsewhere. Some will see them as rats who are fleeing what they perceive as a sinking ship; others will criticize them for being disloyal, leaving others to save our country; some believe that their foreboding is exaggerated; while they themselves believe that they are simply seeing the writing on the wall and have set their priorities elsewhere.

Ahangama cannot be the answer for the Jewish People. But others may wonder whether Israel can still be the homeland of which Theodore Herzl dreamed and whether it can still be of relevance to us in a changing world.