Growing numbers of Britons and Americans are emigrating to Israel - but why?

Why would anybody leave behind a peaceful and prosperous life to live in a war zone? Because, for some Jewish families, relocating to Israel is a kind of homecoming – and their actions, they hope, will be an inspiration to others. Justin Huggler reports

The door to the flat where Motti Salzberg and his family are spending their first few nights in Israel is covered in notes from well-wishers. "We are so happy for you," reads one. The Salzbergs have just immigrated to Israel from Columbus, Ohio, and since they arrived, Mr Salzberg says, his three young children have been showered with gifts.

Mr Salzberg, a softly spoken young man in a kippa, a Jewish skullcap, is brimming with enthusiasm and already trying out his Hebrew. The family arrived on a specially chartered flight along with 320 other immigrants from the US and Canada – the largest single influx from North America for years. But behind the excitement, there is an awareness that there is another side to coming to live in Israel. It surfaces briefly as we talk. He looks at his daughter, playing in an outsize T-shirt printed specially for coming here, and says: "I'm very aware as a father that my three children are now considered legitimate targets."

This is the dilemma that faces those who decide to emigrate to Israel. They are coming to live in what seems to outsiders to be a war zone. As Mr Salzbergpoints out, ordinary life goes on here. But it goes on under conditions that are far from normal. This is a conflict that takes place in the crowded markets and cafés of the city centres. Where at any moment you could be the victim of a suicide bombing. Where your children could be gunned down on the bus.

Every restaurant, café and supermarket has an armed guard at the door. In crowded places, you can find yourself looking over your shoulder, taking a second glance at anyone who looks overdressed in the hot July weather, as if they might be concealing a suicide-bomb belt. You eat in restaurants that have already had their windows blown out by one bombing. You pass the shattered remains of shop fronts on the street.

For that matter, the new immigrants will have to watch as Palestinian homes are demolished, and Palestinian children are killed by the Israeli army, as nine were in this week's air strike on Gaza. Those who are young enough will have to serve on the front lines in the army.

Over 350 Israeli civilians have been killed in suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants since the current intifada began, according to Amnesty International. Yet thousands of Jewish people continue to emigrate to Israel.

It is perhaps easier to understand the attractions for those coming here from countries such as Russia or Ethiopia, who face grinding poverty at home. But hundreds like Mr Salzberg continue to give up the relative peace and prosperity of North America and Western Europe to come here, though the numbers have been declining since the mid-Nineties. Last year, 1,243 immigrated here from the US, 307 from the UK, and so far this year, the numbers have remained steady. They include people such as Raymond Cannon, a London lawyer who has decided to retire here; Jonny Whine, another Londoner who is 25; Avi and Rachel Abelow, who have brought their 21-month-old baby to live in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

People such as Mr Salzberg. The specially chartered flight the Salzbergs came on was paid for by an organisation called Nefesh b'Nefesh, which wants to keep the numbers arriving from North America up – without it, arrivals would be heavily down on last year. Nefesh b'Nefesh is funded by Christian Zionists.

"Our decision to come really had nothing to do with the situation," says Mr Salzberg. "The decision was, do we want to move to Israel? Of course we were aware of the situation. The moment we really decided to come was when my wife said something to me. She said if we had come three years ago, which we nearly did, would we have gone back to the US because of the violence?" His wife, Rachayle, sits alongside him, nodding in agreement.

Part of the explanation lies in one of the messages pinned to the Salzbergs' door. It reads simply: "Welcome home." For many Jewish people such as the Salzbergs, moving to Israel is a far bigger question than the danger involved. In Hebrew, it is called making aliyah. It is about Zionism, and the return to the promised land.

The district of Jerusalem the Salzbergs are staying in for now is a typical Orthodox Jewish area, the men in heavy black coats and hats despite the heat, the women in long skirts and sleeves. Yet just at the end of the street, across the main road, lies another world. Though you are in the same city, everything is abruptly different: the types of shops and cafés, the music spilling from open windows, the scent. It is Arabic that is spoken on the streets, not Hebrew – this is Arab-dominated East Jerusalem.

Those two words "welcome home" encapsulate the conflict here. For Jews like Mr Salzberg, this is the Jewish homeland, their birthright. But to the Palestinians, it is their homeland, which has been taken from them and occupied by outsiders like Mr Salzberg and his family. "There are issues of oppression and repression among the Palestinians," says Mr Salzberg. "But whatever I might have thought about that before, for me the methodology they have chosen overshadows that. When someone chooses the methodology of terrorism against Israeli civilians, it's subhuman."

In April, with the fighting in the West Bank at its height, Ariel Sharon called on Jewish people to immigrate to Israel from other countries. "We need you," he said. Immigration is a political issue here: it is all about keeping Israel a Jewish state. Aside from the emotional impact of Jews continuing to arrive here, there is the pressing question of demographics. Twenty per cent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians – not those in the West Bank, Gaza Strip or East Jerusalem, who do not have citizenship, but the minority who stayed in Israel proper after 1948. Their birth rate is far higher than that of the Jews. Only recently, the government tried to back a bill that would make it possible to block Israeli Arabs from living on state-owned land.

The Salzbergs say Mr Sharon's appeal had nothing to do with their decision. "We're more spiritual Zionists than political Zionists," he says. "To me it's what Jews bring to Israel that is important."

In the US, Mr Salzberg was a social worker – unusually, given his own background, for Roman Catholic Social Services, something he says was "a really horizon-opening experience". But the divides here are harder to cross. Mr Salzberg plans to open a counselling centre for those traumatised by bombings and other attacks.

You can see the blue of the Mediterranean stretching on forever from the windows of Raymond Cannon's new apartment in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. Down on the square, the locals are drinking beer under the scorching sun. Like many of their friends, Mr Cannon, a 68-year-old former lawyer and his wife, who used to live in the prosperous London suburb of Harrow on the Hill, have decided to retire here.

A few minutes walk from their new flat lies the hotel where in March 29 people at a dinner to celebrate the holy Jewish festival of Passover were killed by a suicide bomber. The oldest to die was 90. Mr Cannon was 100 yards away when the bomb went off, here on a trip to arrange the move. Yet he and his wife have still decided to come. "I lived through the Second World War and the Blitz in London," he says. "I lived in London through the IRA bombings. Life has to go on. I remember when I was a child in London during the war, people slept on the platforms of Tube stations, hundreds of them. We used to continue our school classes in the air-raid shelters.

"We don't regard coming here with great intensity, but it's not an unnatural thing for us to do – the concept of a Jewish state is something with which I've identified all my life, simply because I experienced the Second World War and I had the feeling if the Jews had a place of their own, the Holocaust would not have taken place as it did."

Mr Cannon is an observant Jew, and says he wants to spend his retirement in a Jewish society. But, echoing Mr Salzberg, he insists moving here is not political: "If I go to live in the United States it doesn't mean I support the US policy on Iraq."

Jonny Whine, who has just emigratedfrom Finchley in London, is young enough at 25 that the Israeli army may still call him up and send him to fight in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army met heavy resistance from Palestinians in the West Bank in April, notably in the town of Jenin. They are dangerous places to be. "I'd prefer not to, but if I have to I will," Mr Whine says of serving in the Occupied Territories. "I wouldn't want to live here and have other people doing that for me."

Mr Whine grew up in a Zionist youth movement in Britain. For a time, he was director of his particular movement, but it took an Israeli girlfriend to make him decide to move here. He is hoping to find a job in education, but knows that soaring unemployment could be a problem for him. Of the danger of suicide bombings and other attacks he says: "I think if something is important to you that's not such a big problem." Mr Whine spent his gap year here, and the bus he took every day was bombed. "I could easily have been on it that day," he says. "The next day I got on it again. I think if young people are willing to move here, that might show that maybe the war isn't being won by the other side."

Hesitantly, politely, he says: "I think the British press, excuse me, is blind towards the Palestinians. I think I know a bit more about the reality. The press reports only that Palestinian children have been killed, but perhaps they don't realise the Palestinians put them in front of a tank." He has, he says, never been inside the West Bank.

In the hot hills south of Jerusalem, Avi and Rachel Abelow have brought their 21-month-old baby from Riverdale, New York, and come to live in a cluster of gleaming, new, white buildings on a hilltop, the neatflower beds at odds with the rocky landscape all around. This is the West Bank and Efrat, where they live, is a Jewish settlement.

It is a 20-minute drive to Jerusalem. But Palestinian militants have been known to shoot at cars on the road. By choosing to live in a settlement, the Abelows have put themselves right on the front line. The neat rows of houses are surrounded by a wire fence. There is an armed guard at the gate. Last week at another, more remote settlement, nine settlers were killed when their bus was ambushed by Palestinian gunmen.

"There were better times before, and we believe there will be better times again," says Mr Abelow, who has a job at a financial consultancy here. "We really felt we wanted to be together with the people of Israel, with everything they're going through at the moment. It's a wonderful thing, being a Jew living in Israel."

The settlements are particularly politically charged. To many settlers, they are about staking a claim not only to the land internationally recognised as Israel, but to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip as well, as a Jewish homeland. But to Palestinians, who feel they have already lost most of their homeland to the Israelis, the settlements on the 22 per cent they have left – the West Bank and Gaza Strip – are the last straw. The settlements are built on occupied land, in contravention of international law, and Palestinian officials have argued that this makes the settlers legitimate targets – a claim rejected by human-rights groups.

"I think it's unfortunate it's become a political issue," says Mr Abelow. "I'm sorry it's been a question of deciding where a Jew should live." He gazes out over the hills. "These are the paths that Abraham and Isaac walked," he says.

Meanwhile, all around him across the West Bank, tens of thousands of Palestinians are under military occupation and curfew, unable to work, their children unable to go to school – the only way, says the Israeli government, to prevent militant attacks. Like it or not, the new immigrants are involved in the politics now.