Wednesday, February 02, 2005
"Anti-Semitism" in Israel! A colleague in Britain alerted me to one of the most bizarre stories I have seen within memory. The English-language edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported today that there is a neo-Nazi website IN ISRAEL run by Russian immigrants who came to Israel young and have lived there for years. According to the writer of the Haaretz article, Lily Galili, the notorious "Right of Return" applies to people who are only ancestrally Jewish, not presently observant nor Jewish-identified.
To the list of oddities by which the world is now defined, a few local paradoxes can be added. It appears that the number of Russian Jews who will emigrate to Germany this year will be larger than the number who come to Israel; the law under which Jews from the former Soviet Union can immigrate to Germany is close to the restricted definition of "Jewish under Jewish law." The Israeli Law of Return, however, is in fact based on the Nuremberg Laws, in which the Germans expanded the definition of who is Jewish in accordance with their own needs.
I have said before that Zionists take a "racial" view of Jewishness, and this proves it. Apparently the Law of Return permits immigration of anyone who had even one grandparent who was Jewish. Hitler would be proud that his regime's definition of "Jewish" has been adopted by the Israeli state.
+
When they arrive in Israel, some immigrants find it hard to adjust and find work that suits them. Says Ms. Galili:
It must be understood that there are cases in which a verbal anti-Semitic reaction is a response to racism encountered here by non-Jewish immigrants, especially the young people whose lives the Israeli establishment embitters, pushing them to alienation from the state. * * *
[D]ealing with the phenomenon must begin with the demographic madness, whereby everyone is welcome to come here as long as he is not an Arab. Even if he hates the state, even if he hates Jews, he is considered a positive contribution to the needs of the demographic head-count. About a year ago, Lutfi Mashour, the editor of the Arabic newspaper Al-Sinara, told Haaretz that while the Jews are obsessing about the Arab demographic threat, a demographic problem is burgeoning for them in quite a different place.
So what is Israel to do about alienation among immigrants? A writer Ms. Galili quotes proposes a simple solution:
"... It's easy to deal with the neo-Nazi movement they should simply be thrown out of here." [says Maya Kaganskaya]
That's what every democracy does to dissenters, right? Oh. No. That's wrong. People legally in the United States are governmentally entitled to hold and advocate unpopular views (tho some employers will fire them for disapproved views, especially Jewish employers for anti-Zionist views). But then, we're a real democracy. Israel is not, even tho it shouts to the world endlessly that it is 'the only democracy in the Middle East' a claim, by the way, that recent elections in Palestine and Iraq render utterly void even if one were to call Israel a democracy, which one shouldn't.
+
The irony is luscious: to keep the Arabs from outnumbering them thru natural increase and immigration, Arab immigration is forbidden and non-Arab, ancestrally Jewish immigration is encouraged, subsidized by public and private funds from the United States. But in throwing their net wide, the Israelis are bringing in a few people who are furiously hostile to Jews!
+
The Jews assert a "Right of Return" to people who have never been to Israel, many of whom have no ancestors who were ever in the Middle East but were of European or other ethnicity who converted to Judaism centuries ago. Some of them do not identify as Jewish, do not approve of Judaism, and can't stand Jews.
+
Meanwhile, Arabs who were born in what is now Israel are forbidden to return to a land they actually lived in, even if they are ready to make peace with their Jewish neighbors and create a vibrant multi-ethnic, multireligious, and multicultural society! Brilliant. Small wonder that Zionist Jews brag about how smart they are. Einsteins, every one of them.