If ever there was a time to make Aliyah, that time is NOW

Some would call it a miracle. On 3 November 2023, Arutz 7 - Israel National News published “Jewish communities around the world call for Jews to settle Gaza,” that reports on how “heads of Jewish communities and organisations from around the world are calling for Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip.” Gaza, the supposed springboard from which Israel would be wiped off the map and the Jewish people annihilated, has become the most powerful call for Diaspora Jews not only to make Aliyah, but to settle Gaza. It is as if each minaret in Gaza is now calling the Jews to come stand behind it to be safe from the Muslims. That would be the sweetest of all karmas: Gaza going from 0 Jews to almost 100% Jewish within a few months. The Muslims will not ignore such an obvious sign from Allah.

The Diaspora Jews now making ready to make Aliyah have understood what their counterparts a century age could not, or perhaps would not: those who hate Jews will not let them disappear into the background. Muslims hate Jews most of all and Palestinians are the tip of that spear. Only as an Israeli can a Jew, irrespective of his or her station, directly affect the course of their troubled history, specifically by maximising the boundaries of the Jewish state, in this case, by close settlement of the land in Gaza.

Their urging Jews to settle the Gaza Strip in particular suggests a major boost to the Zionist population and some welcome relief for the long-beleaguered Jews of Judea and Samaria. They imply an increasing counterweight to an Israeli establishment in slavish deference to US priorities. One unintended consequence of the Simchat Torah Massacre, therefore, is a shift in the balance of forces in the low-key post-Yom-Kippur civil war between the Zionists, centred on Judea and Samaria, and the anti-Zionists, centred on the Tel Aviv conurbation.

Would the US and the anti-Zionist Jews dare accuse these olim planning to move into Gaza of taking "land intended for a Palestinian state”, or making the "two-state solution” impossible, or wrecking the "chances of peace"? The anti-Zionists' beloved Palestinians have cut the ground from under their own feet as well as those of their Jewish sympathisers in more senses than one, and may just have done Zionism at least two enormous favours: showing misguided Jews the error of their ways, albeit at an insane cost; and lending a huge boost to the explosion in domestic determination to restore Gush Katif. These aspiring olim, moved by events to make targeted Aliyah, realise that by settling Gaza, they can obliterate any possibility of another attempted Holocaust from that quarter, thereby vindicating what the Jews of Judea and Samaria have been trying to build all along, hamstrung, hampered and harassed every step of the way by the Left and elements of Likud.

Many Diaspora Jews who have been saying that Israel is not safe, now see that neither is New York, or London, or Paris or countless other Western cities. It is finally dawning on them that outside of Israel, they are defenceless unless they beg others to defend them, while in Israel, they need no favours from anyone in defending themselves. Not only that, they can actually shape events, and they intend to.

Yet there is more. 3 November 2023 was the eve of the centenary of the publication of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s two-part essay The Iron Wall and The Ethics of the Iron Wall, on 4 and 11 November 1923, respectively. If there is no such thing as an "Iron Wall Week," now would be an appropriate time to inaugurate such an acknowledgement of the great, but much marginalised and maligned thinker, writer, and strategist. The horrific experience of 7 October, and the deep soul-searching that the massacre opened up, cry out for the rehabilitation of this selfless man, who indeed, quite literally worked himself to death to prevent exactly an event such as this, foreshadowed as it was in the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 that set Jabotinsky on his Zionist career.

If we’re asking, where did we go wrong, then studying The Iron Wall would not be a bad place to start searching for answers. Let this first centenary of The Iron Wall not go to waste. Let the week 4-11 November each year be a week of popular studying and debating the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Jewish State, a week of reaffirming robust Hebrewness, and sharpening our guard against deadly idealism and delusions. The time to rehabilitate Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and to restore him to his rightful place in the Jewish firmament, is now, this week.

If ever there was a time to rethink the criteria for automatic Aliyah, that time, too, is now. If those Jews, both inside Israel and in the Diaspora, who have gone to such extreme lengths in their determination to destroy the Jewish homeland, and made common cause with Jew-killers, had to apply to make Aliyah today, should they qualify for automatic Aliyah like all other Jews? Conversely, should all the Gentiles who, at risk to their livelihoods, reputations and even lives, stand by, speak up for and support Israel and the Jewish people, and warn them of the perils they do not see, not, at least have their way to making Aliyah eased?

I cannot answer these questions, but they present themselves as highly pertinent to the great revision that Zionism will have to undergo after this current trial, a trial that is nothing less—nothing less—than an attempt to precipitate another Holocaust. From this point forward, the State of Israel is going to have to have amongst her institutional defenders a special unit that knows Islam from the inside, former Muslims who dedicate themselves to the permanent security of Israel and the thriving of the Jewish people. Yet, none of this can begin without brutal honesty.

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