The Illusion of Comfort is Over
A British emcee stopped a young couple at the Western Wall (Kotel) and asked how long they had been in Israel. Two weeks, they said, pushing a stroller, beaming in the November sun. He asked what it felt like. Their answer was simple. For the first time in a long time, they felt safe walking around. The interviewer called it surreal. Safe in a place that headlines still label a war zone. I do not find it surreal at all. I find it clarifying. Safety is not a GPS coordinate. It is the sum of mindset, community, vigilance, and the hard lessons of history.
That clarity is starting to shape policy. Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration was told to prepare for a large wave of immigration. Not a whiteboard drill. A real planning cycle with exercises, schedules, and responsibilities. At the end of November, the ministry ran a comprehensive drill with the National Emergency Management Authority. The scenario modeled tens of thousands of immigrants arriving in a short span, hundreds a day. The team walked line by line through reception at the airport, temporary housing, absorption centers, medical care, food provision, social support, and interagency coordination. Senior officials did not call it hypothetical. They called it realistic. The trigger they had in mind was rising antisemitism and instability in countries with large Jewish communities. The plan drew on lessons from past waves and a visible uptick in global interest in Aliyah.
On Sunday, December 10, the minister, Ofir Sofer, summarized the drill at the President’s Residence during a ceremony honoring new immigrants who have made outsized contributions to the country. An hour later, two terrorists opened fire at a Chanukah ceremony on Bondi Beach. Fifteen Jews murdered. Dozens wounded. It happened in the place that many of us still reflexively describe as far away and safe. That reflex is now dangerously out of date.
Australia ranks low for Aliyah in absolute terms. Recent tallies put it around 14th for new immigrants to Israel, below countries that most people would not expect to outrank it. Russia, a country at war and crisis, sent roughly nineteen thousand new immigrants in the same period. Australia’s numbers barely moved the needle. Whether the Bondi Massacre will change this is anyone’s guess. I am skeptical, because 2000 years of diaspora experience point to a consistent pattern. We leave when the exit doors are already jammed. We whisper that things will calm down, that the government will protect us, that this time is different. In my line of work I have learned that hoping for different outcomes without changing inputs is not strategy. It is magical thinking.
Hagai Segal, a conservative Israeli pundit, put it with painful precision. The enemy wants a Palestine without Zionists, from the river to the sea, and a world without Jews. What crime did ten-year-old Matilda commit besides being born Jewish. Why shoot Alex Kleitman, a Holocaust survivor who rebuilt his life in Australia. Why target Reuven Morrison, who slipped through the opening gates of the Soviet Union and chose a new life by the Pacific. There was no logic in the selection. There was only hatred. It was enough that they were Jewish and that the killers could reach them. Morrison said in a television interview, a year and a day before he was murdered, that he and his family had always looked over their shoulders in the Soviet Union. Australia felt like the safest country in the world. Even then, after a synagogue was torched in Melbourne, he and other interviewees did not hint at leaving. They demanded better protection from a government that leaned toward their adversaries. That demand is understandable. It is also insufficient. Protective details and patrol cars are necessary, but they are not a long term solution to a problem that is cultural, ideological, and metastasizing.
I read the social media defiance. “We are not going anywhere”. The likes pour in. I understand the pride in standing one’s ground. But the ground matters. Where you choose to stand matters. Jews abroad often hold onto the idea, and many Israelis quietly agree, that if host governments crack down on incitement, assign more patrols, and vote less reflexively against Israel in international forums, the status quo can continue. We are here. They are there. The bond is strong. Everything is fine. But everything is not fine. The threats have changed velocity. They have switched platforms. They operate in networks rather than hierarchies, from the right and the left. They are faster than bureaucracies and more committed than pundit panels.
The shock in Israel after the Australian massacre carried a familiar tone. It mixed grief, solidarity, and our perennial guilt about the fate of Jews overseas. Some framed it as a reminder to accept the permanence of massive diaspora communities. They support, they pray, they donate, they sometimes love us more than we love ourselves. Others emphasized the political leverage that American Jews provide. What would we do without them? How would we pressure the White House in a crisis if those voters moved to Israel? These are understandable questions. They are also an inversion of the order of things. The point of Aliyah is not to maximize Israel’s lobbying power. The point is to bring Jews home. The politics can adjust. Our safety cannot be outsourced.
Here is my argument, as an engineer who has spent a career turning risk into margin. The era of “we are here and they are there” has run out of slack. No government on earth can guarantee the safety of Jews if the surrounding culture rewards those who erase them. Communities can buy cameras and contract guards. They can form neighborhood patrols. Those measures buy time but they do not buy permanence. If you want permanence, you need a community that sees your presence not as a favor but as a mission. You need neighbors who treat your survival as their own. You need institutions that have learned, sometimes the hard way, to respond in minutes and rebuild in days. That is Israel’s muscle memory. It is imperfect. It is human. It is battle tested.
Aliyah is not a slogan. It is logistics. It is Hebrew classes, housing, daycare, jobs, accreditation, and integration. The recent ministry drill was about exactly that, and it matters because it shows that the system is thinking ahead rather than waiting for events to dictate the tempo. If you are a Jew in in Sydney or Manhattan or Paris and you feel your gut tightening when you walk your children to school, do not swallow that feeling. Translate it into a plan. Call the agencies. Open a file. Get your documents in order. Talk to friends who have done it. Ask practical questions. Where will we live. How will we work. What support exists for our children. There are answers. There are programs. There is help.
Some will say that Israel is still at war, that rockets and sirens and uncertainty make a mockery of the word “safe”. I do not dismiss that. I live it. I also know that resilience is not the absence of danger. It is the presence of meaning and the practice of preparedness. In Israel, you will be surrounded by people who know why they are here. You will be a full participant in the story rather than a distant donor to it. You will discover that the distance between fear and purpose is narrower than you think.
The comfort illusion is over. It is time to be honest with ourselves and with our brothers and sisters abroad. Come home. Not “someday”. Not after the next election. Not after the next wave of arrests. Now. The country is ready to receive you. Your extended family is ready to stand with you. Your presence will make us stronger, and our presence will make you safer. That is not surreal. That is real, and it is right here waiting.
