Jewish people living in Europe are being called to Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is encouraging "mass immigration" of European Jews a month before Israel's national elections, according to The New York Times.
A Jewish guard in Copenhagen was shot outside a synagogue on Saturday during the attack on a Swedish cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet Muhammad, which might have prompted Netanyahu's words on Sunday.
"Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews," Netanyahu said Sunday in Jerusalem, according to The New York Times. "Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home."
Jair Melchior, Denmark's chief rabbi, was "disappointed" by the prime minister's invitation.
"People from Denmark move to Israel because they love Israel, because of Zionism, but not because of terrorism," Melchior told The Associated Press on Sunday, according to The New York Times. "If the way we deal with terror is to run somewhere else, we should all run to a deserted island."
On Sunday, Netanyahu announced a $45 million government plan to support the absorption of the increasing number of immigrants from France, Belgium and Ukraine in 2015, according to The New York Times.
French Jews migrating to Israel doubled in number in 2014 with more than 7,000 moving. A larger wave of French immigrants is expected after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris and the attacks on four Jews in a kosher supermarket.
Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence states that Israel "will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the exiles," but while some see Israel as a refuge, some see Zionism as a more political realization.
An Israeli political science professor, Shlomo Avineri, called Netanyahu's announcement "an intellectual and moral mistake."
"The legitimacy of Israel does not hinge on anti-Semitism," said Avineri, according to The New York Times. "It hinges on the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in the Jewish state."
Avineri asserted that saying Jews are only safe in Israel "puts Netanyahu, and in a way Israel, on a collision course with leaders of the democratic countries and also with the leaders of the Jewish communities."
