Smotrich outlines 10-year plan to bring one million olim from North America, Europe - interview

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is drafting a national plan to bring one million Jewish immigrants from North America and Europe to Israel within a decade, and is seeking legislation that would allow entire diaspora communities to receive land and housing without going through Israel's standard tender process, he told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Wednesday.

Smotrich said he presented the outline to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about six weeks ago, arguing that aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) has been neglected while the government pursued what he called revolutions in security and settlement.

"We now need to take aliyah and deal with it at the same scale, the same investment, the same intensity with which we dealt with security and settlement," he said.

The plan's central element is a return to large-scale public construction on the model of Ariel Sharon's programs in the 1990s, which built tens of thousands of housing units for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Smotrich said the Finance Ministry's own professional staff oppose it.

"They oppose it in the Finance Ministry," he said. "But there is nothing to be done. If you want to bring people here, you can talk about people who have very significant means, but not everyone has them. Sell an estate in South Africa and you will not buy a one-room apartment here. Sell a villa in the suburbs of Paris and you will buy a two-room apartment in Ra'anana."

Plans to allocate entire neighborhoods to incoming communities

The legislative component would exempt community absorption projects from tender and planning requirements, allowing the state to allocate a block of buildings or an entire neighborhood to an incoming community, planned in advance with the community and the developer, including a school, synagogue, and other communal institutions.

Israeli land is currently allocated by tender under rules built on equal access, which Smotrich said makes such an allocation impossible today. "This needs a legislative fix, one that allows it both in tender terms and in planning terms," he said.

He cited French Jewry, whose communal institutions he described as unusually strong, as the model case, and said the pitch to such communities would be to arrive intact. "Come with your rabbi, come with your school, come with your community."

Smotrich said the intention is neighborhoods inside existing Israeli cities rather than separate enclaves, adding: "On the other hand, you do not want them speaking French here in a hundred years."

He framed the program in economic as well as ideological terms. "As finance minister, this is not an expense, it is an investment," he said, noting that much of Israel's growth in recent decades followed the arrival of a million immigrants in the 1990s, and that labor shortages are now among the main constraints on growth.

Smotrich pointed to three measures already advanced during his term. A five-year tax exemption for new immigrants, worth up to NIS 1 million per spouse, applies to income earned in Israel. A reform of the taxation of venture capital and hedge funds, developed over more than a year in consultation with the industry including major US fund managers, is intended to make Israeli rates competitive with New York and Florida; it remains stuck awaiting its second and third Knesset readings, which Smotrich attributed to the election and to the conduct of the committee chairman, a Likud MK.

Advance recognition of professional diplomas

The third is advance recognition of professional diplomas, now completed abroad before immigration rather than after arrival. Smotrich said 1,600 doctors are arriving from North America this summer under the new process, and that the government intends to extend the model to additional professions. He said the wave of physicians who arrived from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s is reaching retirement, leaving a gap the health system needs to fill.

Asked whether the government had done enough on immigration during its term, Smotrich said it had not. "Not enough," he said. "Because if I compare it to the other two legs, where we made revolutions."

He praised former immigration and absorption minister Ofir Sofer, who left Religious Zionism over the haredi enlistment legislation, saying he had tried to persuade him to stay and that the two remain friends.

Smotrich opened the interview by citing Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook's reading of a verse in Isaiah describing Jews arriving both as clouds driven by an external wind and as doves returning home, which he applied to the present moment. "There is a huge amount of antisemitism in the world," he said. "But there is also an enormous awakening of Jewish and Zionist feeling."

He added that he believes there is no long-term future for Jewish communities outside Israel, citing assimilation, antisemitism, and a growing sense of insecurity among Jews in an increasing number of countries.

Describing his visits to French Jewish communities, Smotrich noted in passing: "when they still agree to let me into France." Several Western governments have barred him entry over his record on the West Bank.