Israel prepares for a massive aliyah as anti-Semitism explodes

The emotion and solidarity with Israel that the massacre provoked barely lasted a breath. The immediate response of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), under the slogan of eradicating and destroying Hamas, turned that initial, supposed sympathy for Israel into a growing condemnation of its massive attacks on terrorist safe havens. The multiple evidence collected by Israeli soldiers, showing how Hamas terrorists had no qualms about using schools, hospitals and other public facilities to set up mobile bases and ramps for launching missiles and drones, previously supplied by their Iranian mentors, seemed to count for nothing. At the same time, Hamas's own daily tally of Palestinian casualties (over 45,000 dead and nearly 110,000 wounded by the end of 2024) tended to obscure and obscure responsibility for the unleashing of this war, soon to be joined by other Iranian-supported and directed terrorist organisations such as Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen.

The ensuing explosion of anti-Semitism was not long in coming. Yossi Lempkowicz, editor-in-chief of the Brussels-based European Jewish Press, reports that an anti-Semitic incident occurs every fifteen minutes in Europe, composing ‘a dark curtain of record levels of anti-Jewish hatred’. So much so that ‘if governments across Europe don't tackle the problem we are going to start seeing a mass exodus of Jews’. The straw that has broken the camel's back so far is the recent pogrom in Amsterdam, in which Israeli fans who went to watch a football match were chased and attacked in the streets of the Dutch city.

The aforementioned Yossi Lempkowicz argues that the explosion of anti-Semitism has not come out of nowhere but from ‘the normalisation of Jew-hatred’. He supports his claim that it has been a gradual process, first with the appearance of ever more swastikas at demonstrations, then with defamatory accusations of genocide, then with the denial of the right to exist of the only Jewish state in the world, punctuated by slogans amplified even by government officials (Spanish Vice-President Yolanda Díaz, for example), such as ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’ and far from innocent graffiti such as ‘Kill a Jew’. All this, with increasing harassment of Jews on university campuses, where calls for a ‘global intifada’ have grown exponentially.

For the European Jewish Association ‘anti-Semitism in Europe is the worst since World War II, to the point of urging the EU as a whole and its member states to “declare a six-month emergency period” to combat anti-Semitism.

The EJNA calls for special measures to ensure the protection of Jewish communities across Europe, having established that ‘fundamental values - tolerance, mutual respect, freedom to identify, to be and to live - can no longer be taken for granted by Europe's Jews. 

The perceived seriousness of the problem has led Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Saar, who is also the leader of the New Hope Party, to urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prepare Israel for a significant increase in mass Jewish immigration, known as aliya.

For Saar, ‘the wave of global anti-Semitism requires a comprehensive national plan that includes the best possible absorption of such a massive wave of immigration’. The minister singled out the UK and France in particular as the main countries from which Jewish citizens are leaving, but warned that the phenomenon is also spreading to other EU countries. London last November saw the largest protest demonstration since 1936 against the growing hatred of Jews. And in France, numerous officials called for a collective EU response to what they described as ‘one of the worst explosions of anti-Semitism in recent history’.

In the same month of November, a report by Israel's Ministry of Diaspora concluded that, since the massacre of 7 November 2023, more than 98% of Jews living in Europe reported having experienced anti-Semitic incidents in their daily lives.

Should this mass aliyah be confirmed and take place, the Israeli government will have to take numerous actions, the most important of which is to provide housing for such immigration, which may trigger new controversies over such settlements.