An Israeli Columnist Called Six Million American Jews Traitors. Here's Why He's Wrong.

Hagai Segal's ultimatum to American Jewry is passionate, sweeping, and wrong on every count.

A prominent Israeli columnist recently told six million American Jews that they are traitors. Not metaphorically. Not in passing. Writing in Makor Rishon on the eve of Israel’s 78th Independence Day, Hagai Segal addressed American Jewry directly: “Dear brothers, you are traitors. Traitors to us and traitors to yourselves.” He accused them of insincerity every time they open a prayer book, and issued a five-year ultimatum: immigrate to Israel en masse by 2031, or watch Israel dismantle the Jewish Agency, sever institutional ties with diaspora communities, and formally exclude Jews living abroad from halakhic calculations that have bound the Jewish people together for centuries.

His frustration is not new, and on a narrow demographic level it is not entirely without basis. Of the roughly 6.3 million Jews living in the United States today, only 3,773 made aliyah in all of 2025. Segal describes this as immigration “in a trickle, in a horrifyingly stingy manner, meager to the point of insulting the vision of the return to Zion.” That is a real and legitimate tension. But the argument he builds on top of that frustration is something else entirely. It is not a serious policy proposal. It is a provocation that manages, in a single essay, to be theologically confused, economically illiterate, and strategically self-defeating.

Start with the theology, because Segal opened there. He tells American Jews that when they pray three times a day for the ingathering of the exiles, “you don’t really mean it, because the shofar has already sounded, and there is no longer any technical or political obstacle to the gathering of our exiles, only a selfish obstacle on your part.” But this only works if you accept that the modern State of Israel is the fulfillment of that prayer, and that is a premise with a great deal of Jewish history and religious thought arrayed against it. The Jerusalem of Jewish liturgy is not a nation-state. It is not a Knesset, a Defense Ministry, or a secular government that has spent decades in bitter internal conflict over its own Jewish character. The prayer for the ingathering of the exiles is a prayer for divine redemption, for a world made whole under the sovereignty of God, not under the sovereignty of a coalition government in Jerusalem. To equate the two is not Zionism. It is a theological sleight of hand. Many deeply observant Jews, not fringe radicals but serious scholars and communities with centuries of tradition behind them, have argued precisely this. The state may be a historical miracle and a political necessity. It is not, by that fact alone, the answer to the Amidah. Segal is entitled to believe it is. He is not entitled to call those who disagree traitors.

But set theology aside, because the more damaging flaw in Segal’s argument is economic and strategic, and here the numbers are unforgiving.

Walk through any major Israeli institution and you will find, carved into the stone above the entrance or etched onto a donor wall inside, the name of an American Jewish family and the words “Friends of.” Friends of the Hebrew University. Friends of the Technion. Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. Friends of Hadassah Medical Center. These are not sentimental gestures. They are the financial architecture of Israeli civil society. A joint study by researchers at NYU and Tel Aviv University found that in 2021 alone, American donors contributed over $2.65 billion to Israel’s nonprofit sector, with “Friends of” organizations accounting for nearly 45 percent of that total and their share still growing. U.S. donors collectively provided up to three-quarters of all international philanthropic funding to Israeli nonprofits. The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces distributed more than $132 million in 2025, the largest annual sum in its 44-year history. In the first month after October 7, North American Jewry raised an estimated $1 billion in emergency donations. This is structural, not sentimental. Israeli universities, hospitals, and military welfare organizations have built their budgets around the assumption that diaspora Jews will keep writing the checks. When Segal dismisses all of this as “the joy of destitute poor people who received a dollar from a millionaire cousin,” he is not being provocative. He is being ignorant of his own country’s balance sheet.

And then there is Washington. The annual U.S. military aid package, the diplomatic shield at the United Nations, and the broader American political will to stand with Israel in moments of crisis are sustained, year after year, by the political engagement of an American Jewish community that votes, donates, lobbies, and advocates. Remove that community from the American political landscape by relocating it to the Negev, and you have not strengthened Israel. You have amputated one of its most vital limbs.

There is also a compounding irony that Segal seems entirely unaware of. Israel currently deploys thousands of shlichim, emissaries, to Jewish communities across North America, staffing day schools, running summer camps, leading Birthright trips, and working inside synagogues. The Israeli government funds this outreach. The Jewish Agency coordinates it. Billions of dollars and decades of effort have gone into building a diaspora that is engaged, Zionist, and philanthropically active. Segal himself acknowledges this, writing that “we send them emissaries, swoon over the initiatives of the Nefesh B’Nefesh organization.” He says it as though it is a mark of Israeli generosity. He does not seem to notice that it demolishes his own argument. You cannot simultaneously construct a vast infrastructure designed to keep Jews thriving in the diaspora and then call those same Jews traitors for living there. And threatening to dismantle that very infrastructure as punishment for insufficient aliyah is not an ultimatum. It is self-sabotage.

Nor can Segal avoid the uncomfortable question of yerida. Hundreds of thousands of native-born Israelis have chosen to leave, settling in Berlin, New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles. Before issuing ultimatums to communities abroad, it might be worth asking why so many people who were already there chose to go. Beyond that, if Israel genuinely wants more aliyah, it might start by making the process less punishing. American Jews who do make aliyah consistently cite the same obstacles: an impenetrable bureaucracy, prohibitive housing costs, a professional landscape that does not easily absorb foreign credentials, and a cost of living that has risen sharply. These are not excuses. They are policy failures. If the Israeli government treated mass aliyah as the urgent national priority Segal claims it is, it would fix them. The fact that it has not suggests the urgency is more rhetorical than real.

There is also a fundamental intellectual dishonesty running through Segal’s argument that needs to be named directly. He cannot decide who he is actually angry at. In the same essay, he accuses the Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn who davens three times a day of insincerity in his prayers, and in the next breath points to “some” who “have even reached the low point of supporting the Hamas invasion of Israeli territory on October 7.” He lumps together the Shabbos-observant family in Teaneck who sends their children to Jewish day school and donates to every Israeli institution they can find with the editor of Jewish Currents who treats Zionism as a moral crime. These are not the same people. They do not share the same values, the same relationship to Israel, the same theology, or the same politics. To address them in a single rebuke is not moral seriousness. It is intellectual laziness masquerading as prophetic fury.

Then there is the matter of the IDF draft, which Segal raises only to dismiss. He acknowledges that the Haredi community evades military service, then waves it away by noting that they “at least live in the country and assist to the best of their ability in solving the demographic problem.” This is a staggering concession buried in a paragraph about American Jewish failure. Israel is currently in the middle of a wrenching national crisis over the refusal of a large and growing segment of its own population to serve. The Supreme Court has ruled the exemptions illegal. Soldiers who have served multiple reserve tours since October 7 are watching their neighbors receive state stipends while refusing to share the burden. This is a real, immediate, solvable problem that lies entirely within Israel’s own hands. It requires political will, not American immigration. To suggest that mass aliyah from abroad is the answer to a manpower shortage that Israel is actively choosing to perpetuate through its own draft policies is not a serious argument. It is a way of avoiding one.

One need not argue that diaspora life is preferable to life in Israel to find Segal’s central charge profoundly ignorant. The word he chose is traitor. Not mistaken. Not spiritually diminished. Traitor. Consider what that word actually requires. A traitor betrays an obligation he has clearly and unambiguously accepted. Segal himself acknowledges that there is no legal or political barrier preventing American Jews from making aliyah. There is no draft notice they are ignoring, no oath they have broken, no law they are violating. What he is really saying is that they have failed to fulfill what he believes to be a moral and religious duty. That may be a legitimate critique. But a failure to meet a contested religious obligation, one that serious halakhic authorities have debated for generations, is not treason. It is a disagreement. Calling it treason does not make the argument stronger. It reveals that Segal has run out of one.

His essay is, at bottom, a demand that American Jews answer for a choice they have every right to make. He has dressed that demand in the language of prophecy, tradition, and existential urgency. Strip away the rhetoric and what remains is an argument that is theologically presumptuous, strategically incoherent, and blind to the very financial and political lifelines that sustain the state he is defending. Israel at 78 faces real and serious challenges. The Haredi draft crisis is real. The demographic pressures are real. The cost of housing and the dysfunction of the absorption bureaucracy are real. These are problems that require honest leadership and political courage from within Israel, not a guilt campaign directed at communities abroad that have, by any fair accounting, given more to this state than Segal is willing to admit.

If he wants more American Jews to come, he might try making the case for Israel on its merits, with honesty about its failures and generosity toward those who love it from a distance. What he should stop doing is calling them traitors. That word belongs to people who have turned against their own. American Jews who pray for Jerusalem, fund its hospitals, lobby its allies, and mourn its dead have not turned against anything. They have simply not moved there. In a free society, under any serious reading of Jewish law or ethics, that is their right. And no ultimatum, however passionately delivered, is going to change that.