Aliyah Still Matters, Especially from the United States

In his sharply provocative essay, Rafi DeMogge shows that the classic Israeli debate over immigration may now have been overtaken by questions surrounding Israel’s birthrate and demographic composition. DeMogge demonstrates that the pool of new Israelis being born between the river and the sea vastly exceeds plausible aliyah numbers, whatever one thinks about the more precarious situation of the Jewish Diaspora. This means that who comes and goes now simply matters much less compared to who already lives in Israel, how many children they have, and how their children will be educated.

I have no reason to dispute DeMogge’s carefully wrought social science. But I think it is important to emphasize that the question of aliyah still matters a great deal, both at the moral and strategic levels. Let us recall that kibbutz galuyot—the ingathering of the exiles—has been a pillar of Israel’s national identity since before the state’s inception, a critical test of the viability of Zionism as a fateful life-defining choice rather than a mere expression of belief or a political-identity marker for those living in some other country.

In the state’s early years, aliyah was also a national-security issue, as David Ben-Gurion put it. Even as the early state struggled mightily to house and feed those who had recently reached its shores, it suffered from a critical shortage of Jews. While the evidence mustered by DeMogge demonstrates that the relationship between immigration and national security is certainly less direct than it once was, it remains salient.