Israel Matzav

The painful concessions American Jews should make

I've featured Northwestern Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich on this blog before. In this piece from the Times of Israel, he blasts American Jewish 'leaders' (perhaps the scare quotes should include the word 'Jewish' as well) who call on Israelis to make 'painful sacrifices for peace' while they sit in their ivory towers in the US.

Aliyah would steer away from the iceberg. Adding even 150,000 American Jews would be a major boost to Israel. The creativity and success of American Jews would give a massive boost to the Israeli economy, and their very arrival would inject optimism and momentum into the society. To be sure, American Jews would not radically remake the demographic situation because of their extraordinarily low fertility rate – the lowest of any ethnic group in the U.S. – but this only emphasizes that American Jews are not well-positioned to give demographic advice.

Obviously, one might think such a suggestion is unrealistic. How can one expect 150,000 American Jews to leave their lives behind to come to Israel – even if it is in the name of peace? Sure, aliyah is a wonderful ideal, but for many people, it is just not practical – they have jobs here, kids are in schools, their lives are here. Just not practical.

Yes, moving 150,000 people is not reasonable, realistic, or practical. So American Jewish leaders should not recommend Israelis make the exact kind of “painful concessions” that they themselves are unwilling to make.

Whatever one might think of the need “painful concessions,” or the proper role of the Diaspora in Israeli affairs, on this issue in particular, American Jews have no right to call for Israelis to make painful sacrifices for peace – because they are precisely the kind of sacrifices the former have, by definition, refused to make.

At the very least, one would wonder why signatories of such letters, concerned as they are about Israel’s demographics, do not as actively promote aliyah as they do expulsion.

Read it all. For the record, Professor Kontorovich is making aliya this summer.

Labels: aliya, American Jews

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:22 PM