On Sunday, at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog welcomed a family from New York.
Jeffrey and Atara Douglas and their three children arrived in Jerusalem earlier this month. The youngest, Emilia, is six and starts first grade this year. She is the 100,000th North American immigrant brought here by Nefesh B’Nefesh since 2002.
That is a remarkable number, and I want to say so before anything else.
Now look at who stood in that room. The president. The aliyah and integration minister. The two men who founded the organization.
What the room lacked was an elected representative of the community those 100,000 people belong to. Because nobody thought to invite one. There isn’t one.
Why do Anglo Olim have no representation in the Knesset?
On Monday, Likud holds the primary that sets the list of the party that has governed Israel for most of this century. Somewhere on that list, at number 43, sits a slot reserved for a new immigrant. Likud is polling at 23 or 24 seats.
I have read plenty of columns that treat that number as an insult. I understand the impulse. But I think they stop one question too early.
Slot 43 is not really about Israelis looking down on olim from the West. What it points to is harder to fix.
Every immigrant community that took power here arrived angry.
Political power in this country has only ever been built by people who came running from something.
Jews from Morocco, Iraq, and Yemen arrived in the 1950s, were sprayed with DDT, sent to transit camps, and told their culture was an embarrassment. Thirty years later, that humiliation became Shas, which now decides who gets to form a government.
A million Jews left a collapsing Soviet Union in the 1990s. They found their degrees worthless and their Jewishness questioned by the rabbinate. Within four years, they had a party of their own, seven seats, and a grip on the Interior Ministry. They did not ask anyone for representation. They took a hostage.
Now look at us. Roughly 204,000 people have come since 1948 from the US, Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Financially established, educated, and all over the officer corps, medicine, hi-tech, and every advocacy organization this country runs.
In 78 years, we have not produced a party, a faction, a bloc, or a minister.
It is not a numbers problem. French aliyah is 40% of the Anglo total and punches well above us. Religious Zionism’s slate this year has a French aliyah operator on it.
The Moroccans, the Russians, and now the French have all shown up with an account that Israel has to settle. We showed up having already been paid.
You cannot organize a grateful person.
The most successful failure in Jewish history
Nefesh B’Nefesh exists to make aliyah frictionless, and it is superb at it. It meets you at the airport with your identity card. It handles the bureaucracy, the paperwork, the sal klita (absorption basket). I am glad it exists.
But look at what an organization like that does politically. It takes what would otherwise become anger and turns it into a solved problem, one family at a time, before any of it can pile up into something a politician has to answer for.
Nobody met the Soviet olim at the airport. That is exactly why they went and built a party instead.
Twenty-four years and 100,000 people later, I think we can say which approach ends up with seats.
Israel gives us jobs. It does not give us seats
We have built a whole professional class of Anglo olim whose job is to explain Israel to everyone else. Ambassadors, spokespeople, English-language editors, think-tank fellows, advisers hired mainly because they can go on CNN without sounding foreign.
It is one of our better export industries, staffed largely by people who were not born here. I should know. I run part of it.
Every one of those jobs is an appointment. Not one of them is a seat.
Michael Oren is the case study, though not for the reason people usually give. He came from New Jersey, served as a paratrooper, wrote the definitive history of the Six-Day War, and gave up his American citizenship to become ambassador in Washington, which he later said was the hardest part of the job.
He entered the Knesset in 2015 at number four on Kulanu’s list, decided top to bottom by one man. In 2019, the same man told him there would be no realistic slot, and that was the end of it.
Voters never rejected Oren. They were never asked. There was nothing underneath him, and no way for someone who lands here at 19 to build it.
Look at what the law asks, too. Israel will take your son as a lone soldier, take your money and your advocacy, and let you keep your foreign passport through all of it. Ask for a vote in the room, and you have to give the passport up.
Apparently, divided loyalty is fine right until the moment it comes with power attached.
Before anyone says there is simply no room on a crowded list, look at what Likud has done with this one. As my colleague Herb Keinon reported this week, between his personal picks and the guaranteed places he demanded for Israel Katz, Gideon Sa’ar, and Haim Katz, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu will control 11 of the party’s top 29 slots. His first pick was a hi-tech entrepreneur with years in Silicon Valley, brought in to give the list economic heft.
So the room is there. This year, Likud decided its list needed Silicon Valley. It has never once decided the list needed an immigrant from the West in a seat that actually gets filled.
That is not a constraint anyone is working under. It is a preference, and someone wrote it down as a number.
This is about to change, and nobody is ready
For 78 years, Anglo aliyah has been the aliyah of choice. That is ending in front of us.
The people getting on planes now are leaving campuses where their children were told to hide their Judaism, as well as congregations that have hired armed guards. For the first time, Anglo olim are arriving with an account to settle.
This means Israeli politics is about to have an Anglo constituency with a grievance, the only thing our politics has ever really known how to hear.
The problem is that there is nobody to lead it. Dan Illouz has resigned from Likud. Sharren Haskel had to leave and found her own party to get a slot. Dov Lipman, the first American-born MK in 30 years, lost his seat in 2015 and now works from outside the system. The Knesset lobby for aliyah from the West, founded in 2008, has produced 18 years of nothing.
One question, before the lists close
I put it to one party leader this week. Interviewing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who picks two names on his slate himself, I asked how many immigrants from Western countries would be in his realistic top 20.
Now, the same question will be put to the rest of them before September 9. If the answer is none, say it out loud and we will print it.
And to the Anglos reading this in Ra’anana, Modi’in, and Beit Shemesh, something harder. Nobody is keeping us out. We were handed every advantage this country gives an immigrant, and we spent all of it on being useful.
Being useful is not power. The Russians worked that out in four years. We have had 78.
Emilia Douglas starts first grade in a few weeks. By the time she can vote, there will have been four more elections, and judging by the record, none of them will put a candidate in front of her who understands where her parents came from.
She will not notice. By then she will just be Israeli, which is the happy ending we all say we want. It is also how a community vanishes without anyone deciding to end it.
