Two nights back, Charlie Rose had on former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy to talk about the Israeli elections, and at 12:30 he brings up what he calls a fundamental issue, one I’d never focused on, involving the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Israelis. I thought he meant Palestinian Israelis. No:
We have today a situation in Israel in which 100s of 1000s of Israelis do not have a personal status in the country. They are not recognized technically as Jews. They come from the Soviet Union or have been born to Soviet…
When they want to marry, they have no way to marry and they have to go outside the country in order to marry. Their Jewish identity [is] not recognized by the state. These are very serious problems, because in the end this could be a major split inside Israeli society. Which I have said in the past… I think this is a greater threat to Israel than the Iranian nuclear threat.
I see that Philip Reeves of NPR reported on this earlier this month:
REEVES: The new arrivals qualified for citizenships under Israel’s Law of Return if they had or were married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. Rabbinical law, though, says that Jewishness passes through the maternal line. This defined more than 300,000 of the Russian-speaking immigrants as non-Jews. Galili says that was very tough for the new arrivals to accept.
GALILI: And they come here and they have the non-Jewish mother and the Jewish father. And suddenly, this motherland who’s expecting them to come says, oh, I forgot to tell you, you are not Jewish here.
REEVES: There are no civil marriages in Israel. If Russian Israelis defined as non-Jews wish to marry, they must go abroad or convert. Galili says conversion is not a popular option.
So this is an existential threat? It wasn’t two decades ago that Americans were being implored to set Russian Jews free. Now what is this Israel to which they were liberated? And what about the 100s of 1000s of Palestinians whose lack of status mean nothing at all to that former Mossad chief? Call me confused, but what an absurd community Israel is. Built in large part on the wreckage of an Arab and Muslim society, this society’s identity is always up for grabs, because it is based in large measure on international Jewish citizenship– and Zionists from the U.S., Europe and Israel all have different ideas about what that Jewishness means. And of course Palestinians don’t qualify any more than Christian Russians; but god knows that they were born there… My head is spinning
Let us give credit to the American spy, Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel the information it gave to the Soviet Union for agreeing to let these Russians emmigrate to Israel.
present day living + bronze age mentality?
train wreck?
It is often remarked, and it has more than a grain of truth to it, that there are so many ethnic and racial divisions within Israeli Jewry that if there wasn’t the ‘Arab'(or nowadays Iranian) threat to focus on, the society would fall apart in ethnic struggle.
This was very much the focus during the early 20 years as the Ashkenazi elite privately worried if they made a mistake by bringing in the ‘barbarious’ Arab Jews.
Noam Sheizaf has a pretty decent piece up at 972 mag about the increased racialization of Israeli politics.
‘The ethnic vote and the white coalition’:
http://972mag.com/the-ethnic-vote-and-the-white-coalition-7-takeaways-from-israels-elections/64613/
If you constantly talk about ‘demographic time-bombs’ and ‘Arab fifth columns’ what happens is that you legitimize racism in the mainstream political discourse and this in turn means that at some point, and Israel is there already, it becomes very hard to maintain the us vs them in times of (relative) peace and suddenly the in-group racism starts to grow.
Last year one of the top Labor MKs called Amir Peretz, who was almost PM at one point(and who’s an Arab Jew) a ‘moroccan’ in an offhand racist comment when talking about his ‘temper’ – he did so when talking to the U.S. ambassador(via Wikileaks).
Netanyahu’s desperate push for Moshe Kahlon is similarly an understanding of this. Shas’ outburst against the ‘Ashkenazi elite’ this election season confirms this, as well as their racist ad about the Russian arch-shiksa ‘stealing’ Jewish men(a known racist meme, favoured even in the supposedly more liberal diaspora).
Netanyahu probably fears these developments, which might be one of the reasons why he lets the crazies keep burning their anti-Arab racism lest the Jewish population in Israel fall apart in racist internecine fighting.
Isn’t that just beautiful?
Illegal settlers disqualified by the official theocracy and the official racism of the earlier illegal settlers, who imported them!
That often strikes me as something to be used relentlessly against the Zionists all across civilized countries (and the US, too, if anyone here gave a damn about racism and theocracy, and Russia, too.)
Call me confused, but what an absurd community Israel is.
Sure is. Here is a link to the latest quarterly update confirming that from the British Foreign Office on Countries of Concern (regarding human rights): http://fcohrdreport.readandcomment.com/human-rights-in-countries-of-concern/israel-and-the-opts/quarterly-updates-israel/