The Jewish majority in Israel/Palestine is threatened by reverse aliyah, the trend of Israelis with opportunities to leave that country for the west. Alex Beam at the Boston Globe reports on an Israeli gov’t campaign to guilt Israelis into moving back by putting up billboards in the Boston area.
The government has used many different incentives in its long-term program to reverse the “brain drain’’ of highly qualified citizens to Western Europe and the United States. This most recent campaign attempts to use a new tool: guilt. The message of the Cambridge billboard, which is reprised in several 30-second TV ads you can see at the website klita.gov.il, is that Israelis who linger too long in the diaspora risk losing their Jewish roots. In one of the ads, a family is Skyping their grandparents in Israel at Hanukkah, and the presumably assimilated daughter refers to the season as “Christmas.’’ A look of pain shoots across her grandparents’ faces….
There are 10,000 Israeli citizens in the Boston area and perhaps a million in the United States. Israel offers generous incentives, including 10 years of tax relief from overseas income or investment, Hebrew lessons for children – even 200 free cellphone minutes – to returnees…
Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis[:] “When Israel was created, it was declared that Jews could only be safe inside that homeland. But America challenges that, offering a place where Jews can live in equality with other people and not suffer from anti-Semitism.
“Israel offers generous incentives, including 10 years of tax relief from overseas income or investment, Hebrew lessons for children – even 200 free cellphone minutes – to returnees…”
All this, and they still need to use guilt to try and lure folks back. The powers that be must be getting quite desperate. And it’s not surprising! The specter of an Israel run full tilt by the Spitting Jews must be terrifying to many citizens.
which raises the question as to how much it would cost, utilizing incentives to promote reverse-aliyah, to drain the zionist entity dry of its jewish settlers? with a million former settlers already in america and thousands more in europe, how many additional israelis emigrating elsewhere would it take to render the zionist entity nonviable? – a half-million, one million? And say the cost was twenty thousand dollars per settler opting for reverse-aliyah, the cost to get 1 million settlers out of the zionist entity would be what, 20 billion dollars? surely this isn’t an insurmountable sum, considering the wealth of oil rich gulf nations, not to mention the u.s. of a. and other western nations that forced the settler-entity upon an unwilling arab/islamic world. bargain basement price too, compared to what’s being spent on the p/i conflict, along with the other wars that said conflict gives birth to.
It might be that Israel’s Jewish population is growing even as some of its educated population is slowly moving out. Leaving the settlement-minded, ultra-nationalist, Masada-types. There will be no leaven! Heavens, it must be like eating nothing but matzo. Imagine, an Israel without liberals (I know, i know; but anyhow) and the ultra’s with their fingers on the “button”.
Data I have come across puts the figure closer to 200,000 Israelis in the US, not a million.
“The ultra-Orthodox are changing the face of the IDF” By Amos Harel
“The former IDF rabbi was right about the reservist generals who have protested what they see as extremist religious trends within the army: This isn’t the army they used to know.”
http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/the-ultra-orthodox-are-changing-the-face-of-the-idf-1.396302
seafoid posted this link on another thread. It fits here too.