While Jews criticize Israel, Israel looks after Jews everywhere.
Israel is the collective insurance policy of the Jewish People, and the only one we have ever had. This is not just a heartwarming sentiment; it's a Mossad mandate.
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It’s one of the quiet ironies of modern-day Jewish life: While Jews debate, criticize, and even condemn Israel from the safety of Western democracies, Israel’s intelligence agents are working behind the scenes to keep safe those Jews and others.
As petitions circulate on college campuses accusing Israel of “genocide,” Mossad operatives are intercepting Iranian terror networks plotting attacks against Jewish schools and synagogues in Europe.
As Jewish activists in New York or Toronto draft op-eds scolding the Jewish state for being “too militarized,” Israeli cyber units are tracing Hezbollah cells intent on targeting Jewish community centers abroad.
Yet, wherever Jews live, Israel is watching over them. Not in a political sense, not as a matter of foreign policy or citizenship, but as a matter of survival. The Jewish story did not end at Auschwitz; it continues in modern-day Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, and in a thousand quiet rooms where Israeli intelligence officers have spent their lives making sure Jewish blood will never again be spilled without consequence.
On Sunday, the Mossad revealed that a transnational terror network run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force has been orchestrating attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets across the Western world. The network, allegedly led by senior commander Sardar Ammar and composed of more than 11,000 operatives, has been coordinating efforts to harm diaspora Jews since the October 7th Hamas-led massacre.
These attacks weren’t against Israeli diplomats or soldiers; they were against synagogues, Jewish schools, and community centers. That distinction matters. It shows what Israel has long known and what the world often refuses to admit: that hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews are one and the same.
For decades, Israel’s intelligence services have served as the invisible guardians of Jews everywhere. The Mossad has (usually quietly) shared information with Western agencies to stop planned bombings and shootings at Jewish sites.
In 2022, Israeli intelligence helped European authorities thwart multiple Hezbollah and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked plots targeting Jewish communities in Germany, Greece, and Cyprus. In 2021, Mossad operatives tipped off Moroccan officials about an Iranian plan to assassinate a Jewish businessman in Casablanca.
In 2020, Israel passed along intelligence to Thai authorities that led to the arrest of Iranian agents plotting attacks on Israeli tourists and local Jews in Bangkok. And throughout the past decade, the Mossad has been central in helping dismantle Hezbollah’s global terror networks operating under civilian covers across Africa and Latin America.
Israel’s protective hand reaches back further still. In 1976, after Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France flight carrying more than 100 Israeli and Jewish passengers, Israel launched Operation Entebbe — a rescue mission that stunned the world. Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles to Uganda, stormed the terminal, killed the hijackers, and brought nearly all the hostages home. The only fatality among the commandos was Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Israel’s current prime minister. The message was unmistakable: No Jew would ever be abandoned again.
In the late 1970s, thousands of Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) were trapped in refugee camps in Sudan, having fled famine and persecution in Ethiopia. They dreamed of reaching Israel, but Sudan — a Muslim-majority country with no ties to Israel — was hostile to the Jewish state. The Mossad launched a covert mission to rescue them and bring them to Israel. The operation’s official name was “Operation Brothers.”
To disguise their activities, Mossad agents leased an abandoned seaside hotel on the Red Sea, near the town of Arous, Sudan. They reopened it as a real, functioning diving resort — called the Arous Holiday Village — complete with brochures, scuba equipment, and European tourists.
Israeli agents actually ran the resort for years, welcoming real guests during the day. At night, Mossad agents would secretly meet groups of Ethiopian Jews in the desert, transport them to the coast, and then ferry them across the Red Sea on Israeli Navy boats to safety. Over several years, Israel managed to rescue around 12,000 Ethiopian Jews, mostly through this and related operations. Then, in 1991, Israel airlifted more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in just 36 hours. It was the kind of rescue that made the Book of Exodus feel alive again. Only this time, the miracle had jet engines.
The pattern is consistent across time and geography. From Argentina to France, from Syria to Yemen, Israel has acted when others would not. It tracked down Nazi war criminals when international courts were still debating procedure. It rescued Jewish families from war zones and smuggled Torah scrolls out of collapsing dictatorships. It sent doctors to treat Jewish refugees in Ukraine and security teams to guard synagogues in Africa. And it continues to do so quietly, without speeches or headlines, because it understands something few nations do: that every Jew, no matter where they live, is part of one extended family, and family protects its own.
No other country on earth defends a people scattered across so many lands. Israel’s existence makes Jewish existence possible, everywhere. When a synagogue in Paris is firebombed, when a rabbi is attacked in Brooklyn, when a Jewish school in Buenos Aires receives a threat, somewhere in Tel Aviv or Herzliya, Israeli analysts are listening, watching, analyzing. They don’t wait for permission from the United Nations or the approval of Western editorial boards. They act, because history taught them what happens when no one acts.
There can be no serious question as to whether Jews around the world have a relationship with Israel. That relationship is existential, not political. Israel is the collective insurance policy of the Jewish People, and the only one we have ever had. To be hypercritical of Israel, while applying no comparable moral or strategic standard to other countries, is not only hypocritical; it’s foolish. The double standards applied to Israel reveal not a concern for justice, but a refusal to accept Jewish agency. The same world that once scolded Jews for being passive now scolds us for being strong.
No one demands that France dismantle its army to prove its morality, or that the United States allow its enemies to live to demonstrate its “restraint.” Yet Israel is held to precisely those standards every day, sometimes by Jews themselves. Behind these expectations lies something ancient: the belief that Jews should suffer nobly but never defend themselves. Powerless Jews were pitied; powerful Jews are condemned. But it was powerless Jews whom history devoured. Israel refuses that role. Its strength is not a betrayal of Jewish ethics; it is their expression.
Every Jewish family carries the memory of abandonment: grandparents who were turned away from ports, relatives who vanished when borders closed, names that exist now only on lists. “Never Again” was not a slogan; it was a vow. But “Never Again” only has meaning because Israel exists to make it real. After the Holocaust, Israel became the answer to a question that had haunted Jews for centuries: Who will protect us when the world turns away?
And indeed, the world did turn away, again and again. When Syrian Jews were trapped under dictatorship in the 1980s, Israeli and American Jewish activists worked together, covertly, to get them out. When Ethiopian Jews cried to be rescued, Israel flew them home. When Iranian Jews were imprisoned and executed on false charges of espionage, Israel used back channels to help others escape. These are not political gestures; they are moral imperatives born of memory.
For diaspora Jews, this truth carries both comfort and challenge. The comfort is knowing that somewhere, there is a Jewish army that fights for you, a Jewish intelligence service that guards your name, a Jewish homeland that flies your flag. The challenge is realizing what that means for your place in the world.
Every Jew who watches the Israeli flag rise over the ruins of a terrorist base feels something primal: a mix of pride and relief. It is not nationalism; it is the deep exhale of a people who, for the first time in two millennia, have someone to call when the mob gathers at the gate.
The Jewish People will be stronger when we stop pretending that our acceptance in Western societies is permanent or guaranteed. We are welcome guests, but guests nonetheless, so long as it is convenient. When the winds change, when populists in New York City rise or ideologues in London radicalize, we rediscover what our grandparents already knew: that safety in exile is conditional, and belonging is temporary.
Israel is not a foreign land to Jews; it is home, even for those who never set foot on its soil. It is the one place where the survival of the Jewish People is not a matter of philanthropy or tolerance, but of national policy. Its leaders are not perfect; its politics can be infuriating. But beneath the arguments and the headlines lies a singular truth: Israel is the only country that wakes up every morning thinking about how to keep Jews alive.
In Jewish thought, the people of Israel are described as one body, one soul scattered across the world. When one part hurts, all feel it. That is not metaphor; it is metaphysics. Israel is both a nation-state and the physical manifestation of that shared soul, the covenant made visible. To love Israel is not to idolize it, but to recognize ourselves in it: to see our history, our pain, our stubborn hope made concrete.
Israel protects the Jewish People, but the Jewish People must also protect Israel. Not only with words, but with pride, unity, and commitment. We do not all have to live there, but we must all live for our country. Because Israel’s strength is not merely military; it is moral. It is the living proof that Jewish life, once nearly extinguished, now defends itself.
In our post-October 7th world, where antisemitism rapidly spreads from campuses to municipalities to cultural institutions, where mobs chant for the eradication of the Jewish state under the euphemism of “anti-Zionism,” and where Iranian agents plot synagogue bombings on Western soil, Israel remains what it has always been: the guarantor that Jewish life will continue.
The world often asks why Jews feel bound to Israel. The better question is how could we not? When Jews are attacked in Los Angeles or London, in Melbourne or Buenos Aires, it is Israel that raises its voice, sends its agents, and demands accountability. When Jewish children hide their Star of David necklaces on college campuses, Israel reminds them that their identity is nothing to be ashamed of. When Jewish communities feel abandoned by the governments they trusted, Israel reminds them they are not alone.
Israel’s message to world Jewry is simple and eternal: Jews are not defenseless anymore. That is what distinguishes this era from every previous one in Jewish history. For the first time since the fall of Masada, the Jewish People have the capacity — and the will — to protect ourselves. That power does not corrupt our morality; it completes it.
Every nation on earth has its flaws, but Israel’s existence is not a flaw; it is a miracle sustained by necessity. To apply to Israel moral standards that no other nation could meet is to disguise old prejudices in new language. The same people who once accused Jews of disloyalty now accuse them of being too loyal — to each other. But loyalty to survival is not a crime; it is wisdom learned the hard way.
The world may never fully understand this, but Jews must. Our security in exile is not an accident of history; it is a gift sustained by the vigilance of a nation that never forgot what it means to be hunted. Israel’s survival ensures ours, wherever we live. Its strength keeps open the space for Jewish faith, culture, and thought to flourish freely. Without it, Jewish life would again be lived at the mercy of others.
And so the task for our generation is not only to defend Israel from its enemies, but to defend the idea of Israel from our own forgetfulness. We must teach our children that Israel is not just another country; it is the reason they can walk to synagogue without fear, the reason the world sees a Jewish army where once there were only refugees.
Even if some of us don’t live in Israel, Israel lives in all of us. It beats in our hearts when we say the Shema, when we light Shabbat candles, when we teach our children that being Jewish means something powerful and enduring. Israel is not merely a place on a map; it is the center of gravity for Jewish history, the shield of the Jewish present, and the promise of the Jewish future.
Truth. Before the 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted, my cousin was part of a team that interviewed them to determine if they were Jewish; many others wanted also to come to Israel.
The Diaspora must focus on persuading all Jews, including observant and non, young and old, all political parties, the importance of a unified voice supporting Israel. You said it correctly that Jews in the Diaspora are guests and as such there comes a time when we become unwelcome. As Mark Twain said, history rhymes.
After 10/7, someone said “that pain you feel is peoplehood.” I’ve never felt more (and more every day) connected to our people. Am Yisrael Chai, “literally”!