Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 9th May / 22nd Iyar 5786
- May 15
- 7 min read
The Myth That Israel Is Unsafe
With your permission, today I would like to try to dismantle one of the most irritating — and in
some cases worst-faith — clichés currently circulating. It goes something like this:
“Israel is the most dangerous place on earth to be Jewish.”
Or, in a slightly more sophisticated version:
“If British Jews are afraid here, where exactly do they think they are going to go? Israel? Surely
Israel is even less safe.”
Now, of course, there are real dangers in Israel. Nobody who loves Israel should ever deny that.
Israelis live with war, terrorism, rockets, sirens, trauma, reserve duty, and the memory of 7
October. To pretend otherwise would be childish. But that is precisely why this cliché is so dishonest. It takes one kind of danger, the danger faced by a sovereign people under attack, and compares it with a completely different kind of danger: the danger faced by a minority community living by the goodwill, protection, and political stability of others.
And those are not the same thing.
Before the attack in Golders Green, there were voices on social media accusing Jewish leaders in
Britain of frightening the community unnecessarily, of behaving like the false prophets
stigmatised by Jeremiah. Perhaps those voices might wish to take their learned arguments to the
Prime Minister, who on 30 April reminded the country that the stabbing in Golders Green was not
an isolated event. On the same day, the national threat level in the United Kingdom was raised to severe, meaning that a terrorist attack was considered highly likely. If only the Prime Minister had read his Jeremiah, innit?
So let us be very careful before we tell frightened Jews that they are merely panicking.
Let us now dismantle the cliché itself. Almost half of the Jews in the world live in Israel. According to recent Israeli official figures, the world Jewish population is around 15.8 million, of whom about 7.2 million — roughly 45% — live in Israel. Obviously, when Israel is attacked, a very large number of the victims will be Jews. That is not because Israel is uniquely or metaphysically “the most dangerous place to be Jewish.” It is because Israel is the place where the largest concentration of Jews in the world lives, and because the enemies of Israel attack the Jewish state precisely where Jews have rebuilt collective life.
And when we look beyond war and terrorism, the picture becomes even more complicated.
According to the OECD, life expectancy in Israel is 83.8 years, 2.7 years above the OECD
average. Preventable mortality and treatable mortality are both lower than the OECD average.
That is not the profile of a place where Jewish life is, in any general sense, unliveable, doomed, or
structurally more dangerous than everywhere else.
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But the most important point is not statistical. It is theological.
Those who say, “Living in the Diaspora is safer than living in Israel,” are often comparing two
radically different conditions. They compare the existence of a tolerated minority, asking the
majority to intervene on its behalf, something which, thank God, still happens in this country,
but which Jewish history does not allow us to take for granted forever, with the existence of a
sovereign people which has the responsibility, and the burden, of deciding how to defend
itself.
In the Diaspora, Jews may sometimes be safer. But our safety is delegated. It depends on the
police, on the law, on the government, on the decency of our neighbours and on the health of
civil society.
There is something deeply troubling, almost grotesque, in seeing some people applaud the
Government’s adviser on anti-terrorism legislation when he speaks of “undue caution” in
applying the law as it currently stands to protect the Jewish community. Instead of celebrating
this as though it were a sign of wisdom, we should be asking a simple and serious question:
what are the reasons for this caution, and why should such caution result in Jews being unable
to exercise the most elementary right to religious freedom?
Behind the slogan “Israel is not safe for Jews” there is often another argument, sometimes
spoken and sometimes unspoken: if only Jews would detach themselves from Israel, if only we
would become a purely religious minority, if only we would stop behaving like a people, then
perhaps we would be safer.
That is the real problem. It is not merely an argument about security. It is an argument about
what Judaism is. Are we a faith, or are we a people? Are we individuals who happen to hold
certain religious beliefs, or are we part of Am Yisrael?
Is Judaism merely believing, or is it also, and perhaps first of all, belonging?
And here our parashah is remarkably clear. At Leviticus 25:35, the Torah says:
בּוֹ
ו ְ הֶחֱזַק ְ תּ ָ ﬠ ִ מּ ָ יָדוֹ
וּמ ָ ט ָ ה
א ָ ח ִ י
ו ְ כ ִ י־יָמוּ
“If your brother becomes poor, and his hand falters beside you, you shall strengthen him.”
And then:
ﬠ ִ מּ ָ א ָ ח ִ י
וָחַי
“Let your brother live with you.”
Notice what the Torah does not say. It does not say: “When another human being is in
difficulty, first check whether he has the correct opinions.” It does not say: “When your brother
is faltering, first establish whether he shares your political values, uses the right vocabulary,
and belongs to the morally approved category.” It does not say: “If everything corresponds,
then perhaps you may help him not to fall.”
No. The Torah says:
.your brother — א ָ ח ִ י
The language is not abstract. It is not “humanity” in general. It is not a universal slogan
floating above history. It is your brother: the concrete person bound to you by covenant,
memory, kinship, and responsibility.
The parashah continues with words that are equally clear about the bond between people and
land.
For example, at Leviticus 25:2, the Torah says:
א ֶ ל־הָא ָ ר ֶ ץ
ת ָ בֹאוּ
כּ ִ י
“When you come into the land…”
And this is already meaningful. The Torah does not imagine Jewish life as a collection of
private religious opinions floating in the air. It imagines a people entering a land.
And let us look at the Midrash. Vayikra Rabbah, commenting on the phrase “when you come
into the land,” makes a beautiful and striking comparison. Just as God, at the beginning of
creation, “planted a garden in Eden,” so too Israel, when entering the land, is commanded first
of all to plant.
That is an extraordinary image. Because to plant is to believe that the future is possible.
The attempt to reduce Judaism to a set of private religious beliefs, detached from land,
peoplehood, history, and collective responsibility, simply has no foundation in the Jewish
tradition.
So, when people say, “Why do Jews need Israel? Why not just be a religious minority
somewhere else?” they are not asking a neutral question. They are asking us to forget
something that the Torah itself refuses to forget.
Of course, this does not mean that Jewish life in the Diaspora is meaningless. God forbid.
Jewish life in the Diaspora has produced immense Torah, courage, creativity, scholarship,
prayer, kindness, and sanctity. We live here; we serve here; we build communities here; we are
grateful for the protection and freedoms we enjoy here.
But gratitude is not the same as amnesia.
Therefore, we also need to say something very clearly.
When people make statements such as, “Israel is the least safe place in the world to be Jewish,”
they are not only making a questionable political argument. They are also, whether they realise
it or not, insulting the Jews who choose to make Aliyah.
They are treating them as foolish, naïve, irrational, as if these Jews had somehow failed to
understand their own lives, their own fears, their own history, and their own hopes. There is
something deeply patronising in that attitude.
And the numbers are not insignificant.
In 2025, according to figures reported from the Jewish Agency and Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah
and Integration, around 840 people made Aliyah from the United Kingdom, an increase of
about 19% from the previous year. JPR, using data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics,
gives a slightly lower figure — 742 — but still describes it as the highest annual count from the
UK for over forty years.
The French figure is even more striking. In 2025, around 3,300 Jews made Aliyah from France,
an increase of approximately 45% compared with 2024. Across Western Europe as a whole, the
number was just over 5,100 — more than double the 2023 figure, according to summaries of
Jewish Agency data. The worldwide total for 2025 was about 21,900 new immigrants to Israel.
These are real Jews, real families, real lives, making real decisions.
And surely it means something that the largest number from Western Europe comes from
France, from a community whose recent history includes many Jews who came from North
Africa, including Algeria, after decolonisation, violence, instability, and the collapse of the
world in which their families had lived.
There is a bitter irony here. Some of the same ideological circles that romanticise
“decolonisation” as an uncomplicated model of liberation are often unable, or unwilling, to
remember what decolonisation meant for many Jews in the Arab and Muslim world: rupture,
fear, exile, and the end of ancient communities.
So, when Jews, many of them children and grandchildren of that history, decide that their
Jewish future may be in Israel, it is not our place to sneer at them. It is not our place to lecture
them from the comfort of the Diaspora. And it is certainly not our place to say, “How foolish of
you to go to the most dangerous place on earth to be Jewish.”
Perhaps those darker-skinned Jews from Mediterranean and North African backgrounds know
something about Jewish vulnerability.
Perhaps those of us with thick accents, who have too often been silenced with racist insults by
people who consider themselves enlightened, know something about Jewish history too.
Perhaps they know that safety is not only a question of where there are fewer rockets, but also
of where Jewish existence is not conditional on the tolerance of others.
And perhaps, above all, they understand something that our parashah insists upon: that Jewish
life is not only private belief.
It is memory, responsibility, future. It is peoplehood, covenant, land.
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