When Jews face violence, we’re told to move to Israel. Does that really make us stronger?

Tel Aviv, Israel on Oct. 13. Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images

My grandfather, Reuven Helman, was born in Palestine in 1927. He fought for Israel’s independence in 1948, and competed in the international Maccabiah Olympics. He and my grandmother, Leah, raised their children, including my mother, in the town of Kfar Chabad outside Tel Aviv. I have visited Israel many times. I studied at a rabbinical school in Jerusalem. Zionism is a deeply meaningful part of my story.

But I was born in the United States, live in the United States, and will always claim it as home. Which is why I’m so dismayed to see ardent Zionists insisting that all Jews belong in Israel — unconsciously echoing a call that’s becoming increasingly popular among antisemites, too.

Antisemites intend the statement that Jews belong in Israel as a threat. Zionists intend it as a calling. Either way, they deny the central truth that Jews built lives across a dispersed world, and that dispersal helped us survive.

Influencers like tech marketer and Israel advocate Hillel Fuld have repeatedly urged American Jews to migrate to Israel, arguing that there are “millions of people around the world who want to see a Holocaust 2.0,” making security in the diaspora precarious. After the recent Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said that Jews in Western countries should immigrate to Israel.

But Judaism did not endure because we concentrated in one place. We endured because our identity, values, and Torah are portable. Because we dispersed, no single empire could target every Jew at once. No single campaign could end us. Diaspora didn’t just happen to us. It preserved us.

After the Holocaust, some survivors rebuilt in Israel, but many others chose instead to make new lives in the U.S., and in other democratic countries that opened their doors. Their choice reflected the reality that Jews need multiple safe havens — one of the lessons of the Shoah itself. (Think of the many Jewish Holocaust refugees rejected by every country to which they turned, in desperation, for aid.) As a people, we thrive when we are members of societies that protect minorities.

Antisemites would have our American society, instead, treat minorities as permanent outsiders. After his recent friendly interview with the right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, the white nationalist Nick Fuentes said Jews who don’t accept his “America First” vision should “get the f*** out of America and go to Israel.” His message: You don’t belong here.

What’s the reason for this odd alignment in rhetoric? Why would some impassioned advocates for Israel and open antagonists of Jews appear, when it comes to this one point, to agree?

The reality is, of course, that they don’t.

The Zionist voices in this equation are telling Jews to retreat, rather than work toward helping their countries — whether the U.S., Australia, or any of the other nations to experience contemporary upswings in antisemitism — to restore values of pluralism and equality. And the antisemitic voices are saying, simply, that they want fewer Jews in their countries.

I refuse to accept either proposal. I cannot speak for all diaspora Jews. But I don’t want to retreat. Instead, I want my country, the U.S., to enforce its own ideals and protect minorities, because that is what a free country does.

The Torah warns that Jews may be scattered “among the nations,” yet it insists that even “in the land of their enemies” God will not cast the Israelites away. Jeremiah tells Jews exiled to Babylon not to flee, but rather to build homes, plant, raise families and “seek the peace of the city,” because our welfare intertwines with its welfare. Joseph sustains his family and feeds nations from inside Egypt, and Esther saves Jews inside Persia.

These many biblical endorsements of a diasporic Jewry don’t deny the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Instead, they refute the idea that the only answer to antisemitism is for Jews to disappear when it crops up.

We survive by carrying Torah into the world, speaking truth where we stand, and spreading light precisely where darkness tries to push us out. And the surest way to do that is to build Jewish traditions sturdy enough to outlast any moment and thrive in any place. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs said it best: “To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend a civilisation, you need schools.”

After all, while Israel offers Jews dignity and sovereignty, it does not function as a simple refuge from antisemitism. Palestinian terrorists murdered my cousin, Meir Tamari, two years ago, leaving his wife a widow and his two small children fatherless. Just this weekend, two Jews in Israel were murdered in a car ramming terrorist attack. In our current reality, Jews face real danger in Israel precisely because it sits at the center of conflict and terror. That isn’t an argument against Israel, but it shows that moving there does not automatically solve Jewish vulnerability.

So I hold two commitments at once. I support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. I also support Jews returning to their ancestral homeland so long as that choice is driven by meaning and longing. But I reject the idea that Jews should leave the U.S. in fear of growing antisemitism at home. Our country needs Jews who stay visible, who speak truth and who bring light into public life, and above all, Jews who teach their children that belonging is not something you beg for. It is something you live.