Stop asking me when I’m making aliyah

Every morning a message lands on my phone with a link to the latest news out of Britain. One day it is a former bodyguard of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, granted asylum and then citizenship here, who allegedly helped plot a foiled attack on Jews in Europe. Another day it is a plan to reopen a refugee resettlement scheme. Underneath, the same note every time: “Are you thinking of leaving the UK? When are you making aliyah?”

I understand the instinct. I made aliyah from America during the second intifada, and later settled in Britain. Along the way I have made Israel’s case as a CNN correspondent and an Israeli tech investor, and after 7 October alongside the hostage families. That is why I think the question is wrong. Aliyah driven by fear is thinning out the Jewish communities abroad that Israel is about to need most.

Start with the fear, because the numbers do not support it. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 742 people made aliyah from the UK in 2025, the highest figure since the mid-1980s. Yet the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found the rate has held at about two in every thousand British Jews a year for two decades, and concluded there is no exodus, at least not yet. Traffic runs both ways. The 2021 census counted 22,546 Israeli-born residents in England and Wales, close to double the 2001 figure.

Britain is also safer than the headlines suggest. The ADL’s most recent global index ranked the UK ninth lowest of 103 countries for antisemitic attitudes. London’s homicide rate last year, 1.1 per 100,000, was the lowest since comparable records began in 1997 and well below New York, Paris or Berlin. Antisemitism here is real. The Community Security Trust recorded the three highest annual totals in its history in 2023, 2024 and 2025. That calls for a government willing to name what is actually driving it and tackle the root causes. Packing up a whole community solves none of it.

And where exactly would we run? Every destination has its own headlines, and there is no country where nobody hates us. Jews have lasted this long by staying organised and useful wherever we live.

What leaving does cost is the people who hold a community together. In Israel’s early decades, urging Jews to come home made sense. The country needed people, and many diaspora communities were in real danger. Today it is mostly the committed who make aliyah. Rabbis and educators go, and the wealthy often go with them. Each one leaves a classroom or a pulpit for someone else to fill.

Communal leadership suffers too. Speaking for British Jews in public takes years of campaigning and turning up. Some of our most articulate pro-Israel voices have gone. Rabbi Daniel Rowe spent 25 years at Aish UK, becoming one of the community’s best-known defenders of Israel, before leaving for Jerusalem in 2024. Melanie Phillips, one of Britain’s most outspoken pro-Israel journalists, has moved the centre of her life there too. Many who remain have little appetite for committee rooms, and the field is left to groups such as Yachad here and J Street in America. Then Israel asks why diaspora leaders criticise it in public, having emptied the room of its own supporters.

The smaller Jewish communities of Europe show where this leads. Jews still live there and get on with their lives, but the communities are thinner and quieter, with fewer teachers and donors and fewer people willing to stand up in public. Their governments are among those now lining up against Israel, and there are too few Jewish voices in the room to answer back.

Israel is going to need its diaspora very soon. On 8 September Britain sanctioned five settlers and announced a ban on importing settlement goods, and 11 other countries signed a joint statement promising similar restrictions. On 25 September the UN added 61 companies to its settlement database, among them Tnuva, Israel’s biggest dairy producer. The list has no legal force, but banks and investors read it. Some have already acted. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, has already excluded five Israeli banking groups for financing settlement construction.

This is how sanctions spread. Once a large company becomes a compliance risk, everyone who trades with it inherits the problem. A British bank asked to fund an Israeli business finds a supplier with a settlement link and decides the account is more trouble than it is worth. Nobody announces a boycott. The phone simply stops ringing. As Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies puts it, “If governments are defining the target, the market is defining the blast radius.”

Dubowitz helped design the sanctions on Iran. In an article this month he warned that parts of the financial warfare machine the United States spent two decades building against Tehran are now being assembled against Israel by some of Washington’s closest allies. We have already seen how fast it works. When Washington sanctioned violent settlers in 2024, Israeli financial institutions began restricting the listed accounts within 72 hours, and the Bank of Israel refused to back down, warning that ignoring US sanctions could cost Israeli banks their access to the international financial system. Dubowitz also warns that a US president hostile to Israel, taking office in January 2029, could revive and widen those measures.

None of this means ignoring the danger at home. If it becomes truly dangerous here, I will say so. But diaspora Jewry has been written off many times since 1948. Jews should not simply go where they feel safest. We should go where we are most needed, and for many of us that place is right here. Support your local Jewish schools and build institutions that will outlast us. Back Jewish advocacy, so that we have a strong voice in the rooms where decisions about Israel are made. And to Jews elsewhere who are looking for somewhere to go, I would say come to Britain. Many communities abroad face far bigger problems than ours. Every family that settles here makes British Jewry bigger and its voice louder. That is how we help Israel now.

Leah Stern is CEO of Stern Power Strategies and a former CNN war correspondent and venture capitalist. She supported Israel’s communications in the UK after 7 October and worked with hostage families.