No recent news story better encapsulates the febrile nature of these times than the November exercise in which representatives of Israeli government ministries, welfare agencies and core service providers gamed out various responses to what they termed a “mass immigration event.”

Israel has, as is well known, a wealth of experience in dealing with such events. The state was barely a year old when it airlifted nearly 50,000 Yemeni Jews to a new life in the Jewish state. It more than doubled that number shortly afterward, flying more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel. Similar operations were executed decades later in Ethiopia, with three airlifts transporting the African nation’s beleaguered Jews in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. And it absorbed more than 1 million Jews from the Soviet Unio

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