Israel is not something we visit, it is something we belong to

I flew to Israel on Christmas Day for my brother’s wedding. It was the first time my wife and children have been back since 7 October 2023, and that was no accident.

I’ve been here a number of times myself over the past two and a half years, but my children are 8, 10 and 12, and for as long as I could, I wanted to preserve their perfect memories, their perfect impression of our country.

Not because I wanted to shield them from the truth, they know Israel has been under attack from all sides, but because they’ve already lived through more than children should. Seeing and indeed experiencing first-hand the antisemitism and hate at home. I wanted their next visit to Israel to be filled with music and movement, not sirens; with laughter, not fear.

I can’t protect them like that forever. I know that. I think even they know that.
But I wanted them, just a little longer, to feel something essential, that Israel is our Eden, fragile, yes; fought over, undoubtedly; wounded, perhaps, but always beloved, always enduring.

A place that absorbs pain, carries grief, and still insists on life. A place we are forever reaching for, returning to, and shaped by, even as it bears the scars of history.

There is a quiet truth I’ve come to accept over these past few years. I feel more at home here and indeed safer, than I do in the country my children call “home”. And that is not because Israel is perfect, it is anything but.

This is a country riven with division, left and right, religious and secular. A loud, combustible melting pot of cultures, languages, faiths and backgrounds. A nation that often feels like it shouldn’t work, sometimes doesn’t, and like every democracy, has made terrible mistakes.

All of this in a country that has existed for less than eighty years. We think of other nations as young at two or three centuries old. Measured against history, Israel is barely a moment.

And yet, for all its flaws and arguments, it offers something increasingly rare, certainty. Here, Jewish life does not need to negotiate its right to exist. Belonging is assumed, not managed.

So why don’t I move here?

Because I’m not ready to make that decision on behalf of my children, not yet. Not yet, even though I have little doubt that the clock is ticking on British Jewry’s halcyon days in the UK, little doubt that my children will choose one day to raise their own children elsewhere.

My life, for now, is still rooted in the UK, family, work, responsibility, history. There are people I love, businesses I’ve built and emotional ties that don’t loosen easily or quickly.

But I also know this, a place I once loved to visit and one day imagined living in quietly in retirement, has changed for me. It is now a place I ache when leaving. A place I long to return to and perhaps that future I once parked safely at “someday” is closer than I thought.

This is because our relationship with this land is not abstract. It is not ideological. It is not theoretical.

We have lost family members and friends here over the years, more than I care to remember, some while serving in the IDF, others in terror attacks, killed while simply going about their daily lives in the place they called home.

This land is generational for us. It is soaked in blood. It is in the bones of our ancestors buried here. But make no mistake, more than anything else, it is in the music, the joy, the laughter and the love we share every time we return.

My sister and I were married here. My brother had his bar mitzvah here. My mother, my grandfather and my grandmother are buried here, the same grandparents who met during the siege of Jerusalem in 1948.

Israel is not something we visit, it is something we belong to.

Later today, I will take my children to my mother’s grave. She passed away nine years ago and this will be the first time they have stood where she rests. A moment of remembrance, of grounding, of understanding where they come from.

And this evening, we will stand together again, this time as witnesses to continuity, as my brother is married.

A grave in the morning. A wedding at night.

Remembrance and renewal. Loss and love.

The perfect circle.

All of it unfolding in the land that has been our home since biblical times. The land that holds our dead, celebrates our living and, above all else, carries our future.

This country is far from perfect, but it is ours. A place we are shaped by before we understand it and spend a lifetime finding our way back to.

So here, not despite everything, but because of everything, we choose joy and for just a moment longer, Eden is still perfect to my children.