British Jews moving to Israel should do so out of love, not fear

Another day, another conversation about leaving Britain. This time with a media executive, seemingly well-adjusted, successful, networked into the core of British society. He’s thinking of moving to Israel, uprooting an entire life in this country, not so much because he’s suffered violence or harassment, but because it no longer feels entirely like home. 

This is now the great question of Jewish life in Britain. Should we stay or should we go? Actual departures remain reasonably rare, but the thought now is very common. Generally, I have found that when Jews actually leave this country (as opposed to talking about), one typically finds several motivations beyond just discomfort: desire to be closer to family, a financial incentive, a long-cherished retirement plan. But in this case, with the person I met recently, it was a decision he would never have considered until 7 October, when the responses and sentiments of the people around him, even friends of long standing, fundamentally changed the way he relates to his own country.

What to make of this desire to leave Britain? People who have read my work over the years will not be surprised to hear that I do not share it. It’s not remotely my business to tell anyone else where to live or how to feel, but I personally find the idea of leaving Britain and moving to Israel on safety grounds fairly unappealing.

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Why? I could make the obvious point that Israel is, by orders of magnitude, a much less safe place to be a Jew than the UK. In London, we have pro-Palestine marches where protesters sing problematic chants. In Israel, they have Hamas. Over here we have the occasional fat jihadi psychiatric patient wielding a kitchen knife, in Israel they have ballistic missiles coming over from Tehran. In Britain, we Jews occasionally have to put on a stab vest and stand on security outside our synagogues. In Israel, teenagers give two or three years of their life up to put on a uniform and carry an assault rifle. Needless to say, not all of them come home.

I don’t mean to downplay the threat to Jewish safety in Britain. Not at all. It is very serious and the situation has deteriorated markedly in the past three years. I will never forget the names of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, modern Britain’s first Jewish martyrs, may their memories be a blessing. But it’s worth taking a brief reality check before booking a one-way ticket to Ben Gurion.

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Others sometimes talk of going to America or Australia or Canada, the new world. But to that suggestion the obvious response is Pittsburgh, Bondi, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker, attacks on synagogues from Ontario to Melbourne to Michigan. There are no safe havens now, because what we are witnessing is a partial reversion to pre-Second World War hostility towards Jews globally. It’s happening everywhere all at once.

Of course, safety is also about state of mind, not just physical protection. What many Jews who are heading to Israel will tell you is that they would rather face Hezbollah rockets living side by side with their fellow Jews, than feel judged and isolated and alone in a changing Britain.

What we’re mostly talking about here in the UK is psychic discomfort rather than physical danger, though clearly both are present and the latter increasingly so. It is an entirely understandable sentiment, though again I would argue that moving to a country trapped in not one but several semi-permanent and vicious tribal conflicts brings its own anxiety and stress. If you think British politics is becoming increasingly sectarian, I’m not sure living somewhere whose politics is dominated by Bibi “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves” Netanyahu is likely to calm you down.

What many Jews who are heading to Israel will tell you is that they would rather face Hezbollah rockets living side by side with their fellow Jews, than feel judged and isolated and alone in a changing Britain

Beyond these quotidian and practical observations, I suppose what I really resist in this discourse is an increasingly morbid fatalism towards Jewish life in Britain, or indeed Jewish life anywhere in the diaspora.

In 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was issued, the Jewish anti-Zionist intellectual Lucien Wolf expressed concern that Jews in Britain had now become merely “temporary sojourners” in this country, their political status “artificial” because of the second nationality which had been ascribed to them. Wolf was wrong on many levels – we are still here over a century later. But he was right that, for British Jews, having a secondary national affiliation does affect their primary national affiliation, namely that of being British.

It is not so much that, as Wolfe feared, ill-intentioned outsiders can hurl unfounded accusations of disloyalty at us. That can be borne because it is not true. The more apparent danger is that, in our own hearts, we are quicker to give up on our homes than we otherwise might have been. At the first or second sight of danger, we can leave.

This of course was part of Israel’s raison d’etre, somewhere strong to go when gentile communities turn against us, as they always have previously and perhaps always will. But to my mind this particular form of aliyah should be an act of last resort, not immediate recoil.

There is a remorseless but frustrating logic to this situation which is squeezing diaspora Jews: Israel’s wars make life for Jews less comfortable in London or Liverpool, so those Jews then start packing their bags for Israel. It creates a sense of inevitability, inexorability even.

I reject this logic. If people want to move to Israel there are many perfectly good reasons to do so, the lifestyle, the economy, the sense of Jewish fulfilment. My hope is that despair about Britain is not one of them though, not yet at least.

There is a remorseless but frustrating logic to this situation which is squeezing diaspora Jews: Israel’s wars make life for Jews less comfortable in London or Liverpool, so those Jews then start packing their bags for Israel

In this article I’ve mostly made a negative case for why I do not wish to move to Israel, a country I love to visit and have a deep if somewhat tortured relationship with. But what about the positive case for Britain?

What about centuries of relative peace and quiet rarely found in the annals of Jewish history? In this country, the majority of people remain broadly benevolent towards Jewish life, which has long been unusually compatible with this ancient and liberal democracy. Should we give up on that so fast?

For me personally, if you’ll excuse a moment of mawkishness, Britain is home in the kind of deep-souled way that cannot easily be replicated. It is home because of Test match cricket and pubs and Manchester United, of George Eliot and George Orwell, of Anthony Trollope and Private Eye and The Sunday Times and Hampstead Heath and Ullswater and Oban harbour and the Yorkshire dales and on and on. It is the place where my family has lived and flourished for well over a century after fleeing pogrom and persecution. It produced the English language in all its multitude and magnificence, which is the enduring feature of my every passing day. Nazism failed here. Judaism succeeded.

Is that story ending? I don’t think so. Not if we stay here and keep telling it.

• Josh Glancy is associate editor of the Sunday Times