That is a remarkable number, and I want to say so before anything else.<\/p>\n
Now look at who stood in that room. The president. The aliyah and integration minister. The two men who founded the organization.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t one.<\/p>\n
President Isaac Herzog, Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer, Nefesh B’Nefesh founders Rabbi Yehoshua Fass and Tony Gelbart welcome the Douglas family in the President’s Residence, Jerusalem, August 9, 2026. (credit: Yonit Schiller\/Nefesh B’Nefesh)Why do Anglo Olim have no representation in the Knesset?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Slot 43 is not really about Israelis looking down on olim from the West. What it points to is harder to fix.<\/p>\n
Every immigrant community that took power here arrived angry.<\/p>\n
Political power in this country has only ever been built by people who came running from something.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In 78 years, we have not produced a party, a faction, a bloc, or a minister.<\/p>\n
It is not a numbers problem. French aliyah is 40% of the Anglo total and punches well above us. Religious Zionism\u2019s slate this year has a French aliyah operator on it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
You cannot organize a grateful person.<\/p>\n
The most successful failure in Jewish history<\/p>\n
Nefesh B\u2019Nefesh 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Nobody met the Soviet olim<\/a> at the airport. That is exactly why they went and built a party instead.<\/p>\n Twenty-four years and 100,000 people later, I think we can say which approach ends up with seats.<\/p>\n Israel gives us jobs. It does not give us seats<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Every one of those jobs is an appointment. Not one of them is a seat.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He entered the Knesset in 2015 at number four on Kulanu\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Apparently, divided loyalty is fine right until the moment it comes with power attached.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, between his personal picks and the guaranteed places he demanded for Israel Katz, Gideon Sa\u2019ar, and Haim Katz, Prime Minister<\/p>\n Benjamin Netanyahu will control 11 of the party\u2019s top 29 slots. His first pick was a hi-tech entrepreneur with years in Silicon Valley, brought in to give the list economic heft. That is not a constraint anyone is working under. It is a preference, and someone wrote it down as a number.<\/p>\n This is about to change, and nobody is ready<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n