There’s a popular slogan in Israel that appears on car stickers, jewelry and suchlike: Ein Li Eretz Acheret, “I have no other country.” The phrase comes from the title of an iconic and extremely moving song written by Ehud Manor, with music composed by Corinne Allal, and originally recorded in 1986 by Gali Atari; we will mention those names again later. Its opening lines and chorus are Ain li eretz acharet, gam im admati bo’eret, “I have no other country, even if my land is burning.”
A neighbor of mine, who was experiencing considerable war anxiety about the land burning, told me that he didn’t relate to it at all. He said, “But I do have another country. I can go back to Teaneck!” And he said that if things got worse, he would seriously consider doing so.
At the beginning of the war, I was wondering the same thing. I do have another country – two, actually. I have UK citizenship and my wife has U.S. citizenship, and our children have both. Maybe we should go back to live somewhere safer? One of the commentators on the previous post was talking about Lakewood as being a safe and excellent place to live with a rich Jewish life.
Now I could continue by talking about how special and beneficial it is to live in Israel, about how it’s both the Promised Land and our historic homeland, about how it’s the only country with Jewish sovereignty. Which would all be true. But there’s a different point that I want to discuss in this post.
Yes, I do have another country that I could go to (though it wouldn’t be at all straightforward, especially for my children). So do lots of people in Ramat Beit Shemesh and the rest of Israel.
But there’s also lots and lots and lots of people who don’t.
There are millions of Jews in Israel who just don’t have anywhere else to go. There are those who simply don’t have the money for it and would find it too difficult to find employment in a country where they don’t even speak the language. There are those who are too old or ill or who have young children that would suffer from a move. There are those who have crucial responsibilities here. There are those who are just too deeply embedded here.
Even more to the point, there are also millions of Jews who literally don’t have any passport other than their Israeli one. What other country will let them in? The Jews who came from Iran and Egypt and Syria and Yemen are certainly not able to go back to those countries! Nor are Russia and many European countries a safe place for Jews. And even countries which are relatively safe and allow some immigration are not going to accept millions of Jews (and if they did, those countries would likely quickly become not very safe for Jews).
In fact, that’s one of the main reasons why Israel came to exist in the first place. As antisemitism grew in Europe, many Jews realized that they needed to get out, but simply had nowhere to go. Twenty years before the Holocaust, at least 100,000 Jews were massacred in pogroms in the Ukraine, which also created 600,000 Jewish international refugees and millions more who were displaced and threatened.
At this point, many people realized that an even greater catastrophe might happen. But the countries to which the largest numbers of Jewish refugees were fleeing all revised their immigration policies to prevent further Jewish immigration. This included not only Poland and Germany (which obviously wouldn’t have been a good long-term solution anyway), but also the United States, Argentina, and British Palestine. In the U.S., Henry Ford’s newspaper published pamphlets about the Jewish problem, claiming that the national debt was Jewish-inspired to enslave Americans and other such hateful slurs to keep Jews out.
Then things got even worse in Europe, with the rise of Hitler. Some people managed to get out. The parents of Ehud Manor, writer of Ain Li Eretz Acheret, fled Belarus and managed to get into Palestine.
Yet still no country was willing to take in millions of Jews. The U.S. convened the Évian conference, bringing together 32 countries to find a home for Jewish refugees. But aside from the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, no country, including the U.S., was willing to accept Jewish refugees in any remotely significant number. Consequently, millions of Jews were killed in Europe.
And even after the horrors of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors still had nowhere to go! Some of them went back to their home towns in Poland and were killed in a pogrom. Others languished in Displaced Persons camps for years, some of which were actually in concentration camps. My late mother-in-law spent the first years of her life in a DP camp; her parents were lucky enough to have a relative in the U.S. who eventually managed to bring them over, but most Jews did not have such an option.
Many Jews, very understandably, realized that a Jewish homeland was needed. It wasn’t about it necessarily being the safest place for a Jew to live. Everyone always knew that Palestine was in a hostile and dangerous part of the world, and that there would be a challenge with the resident Arabs (though it was generally assumed that some sort of compromise would be worked out; there was no broad plan to drive them out). And on the eve of the War of Independence, it was assessed that there was only a 50-50 chance of survival!
Israel has not yet been, and still is not, the safest place in the world for Jews. But not everyone has the option to live in the safest place in the world – many people just need somewhere that is safer than where they currently live. And in any case, having a homeland is not about attaining the greatest safety – it is about having a home, a place that Jews historically belong, a place that Jews can always come to when they fear persecution or experience discrimination, where we can take responsibility for our own safety, and where we can put being Jewish into action and expression.
While Israel won the War of Independence – at a cost of 1% of its population – this created a crisis for nearly a million Jews in Muslim countries, who were persecuted and had to make immediate use of Israel as a refuge. The parents of Gali Atari, singer of Ain Li Eretz Acheret, fled Yemen for Israel, while composer Corinne Allal’s family fled from Tunisia. But it should be born in mind that even if Israel had not come into existence, the existence of Jews in Muslim lands was difficult and very precarious.
And so we reach the situation that we are in today. Israel is home to over seven million Jews. Most of them do not have another country to go to, even if they wanted to (which they don’t). Ain lahem eretz acheret.
(As Haviv Rettig Gur notes, this is the fundamental mistake made by many Palestinians and their supporters, who believe that they can rid of the Jews with violence just as the Algerians successfully used violence to get the French colonialists to go back to France. They don’t grasp that most Jews just don’t have a country to go back to, and thus violence won’t achieve anything and will even be counter–productive.)
Now, there are some Jews who only look at things in terms of their own personal interests. “Where is a safe place for me to live? What is a spiritually safe environment for my children?” And if, as a result, others are less safe physically and spiritually and have to take on an even larger cost to their families and jobs and religious life, then that’s just too bad.
But others feel a sense of responsibility to the rest of our people. It’s not “me” and “them” – it’s us. The correct formulation is not ain li eretz acharet or ain lahem eretz acharet. It’s ain lanu eretz acheret.
Millions of Jews need Israel. And Israel needs a strong army and a strong economy to finance it and a flourishing national Jewish life. Each and every one of us has a responsibility to help with that.
