Guest post from Dr. Silverman:
The anti-Ethiopian Jewish immigrant discrimination and prejudice that that John highlighted last night are part of a larger pattern of discrimination than most Americans, and even most Jewish Americans know. Israel has a serious problem with ethnocentrism and discrimination among its Jewish population. While there are many ways to divvy up Judaism according to religion – by how devout someone is or whether Jewish ritual practice is Ashkenazic (of Western and Eastern European origin) or Sephardic (of Spanish or Portuguese origin), Israeli society has always been stratified by the ethnic origins of its Jewish citizenry. Israelis of European descent, who also use the term Ashkenazi for their ethnicity as well as their religious practice, have always made up the top social, political, and economic positions of Israeli society. Below them were the Jews who came from the Arab states. While there are great differences in the histories and experiences of these different groups, from Moroccan Jews to Iraqi ones, they are often either lumped together either by the non-Ashkenazi religious descriptor of Sephardi or more accurately by themselves as Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews.
The Mizrahi Israelis were always treated as second class and looked down on by the Israeli Jews who came from Europe. This had to do with a variety of things: the religious chauvinism of Ashkenazi (European) Judaism against other surviving variants – Sephardic Judaism (Jews of Spanish and Portugeuse descent), the Mizrahim, the Kochini (Jews of India’s spice coast), etc. Some of it was the fact (WARNING!- .pdf download) that the earliest Jewish settlers from Europe were engaging in a clear act of ethno-national self-liberation that was at the same time also clearly an act of colonization. These European Jewish immigrants and settlers were themselves from societies that were generating the concepts of radicalized science/biology that would become prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th Century and provide much of the ideological basis for World War II and the Holocaust. They essentially brought their societal prejudices with them.
One of the best books dealing with these issues of Israeliness is Amos Oz’s Here and There in the Land of Israel. Oz pulls no punches in confronting differences in what it means to be an Israeli, even if his work is now somewhat dated. Another classic attempt to deal with the issue is the Israeli comedy Salah Shabati starring Topol. Salah Shabati is about a Mizrahi Israeli family and its wily patriarch (Topol) who outsmarts the supposedly more sophisticated Ashkenazi Israelis. The reality, however, is that it took until the 1980s to actually have a Mizrahi Jewish Israeli in the Israeli cabinet – David Levy.
When the Ethiopian Jews got to Israel they were placed into the societal/social space below the Mizrahi Israelis. As a result it is no surprise (WARNING!- .pdf download) that Israelis of Ethiopian Jewish descent are experiencing discrimination and outright racism and prejudice, such as forced birth control. It is also not surprising that some of the members of the Ethiopian Jewish community are finding themselves having trouble jumping through all the various hoops that are being created to keep them from immigrating to Israel. Moreover, Ethiopian Jewish protests against discrimination and prejudice is nothing new, it’s just that this time US news media decided to cover it. What the Ethiopian Jews are facing, like the Arab Jews before them, are problems navigating social integration into Israeli society – many of which are created by other Israelis. This is in marked difference to the experience of the Jews who came from Russia at the fall of the Soviet Union, which clearly shows some of the hypocrisy and prejudice at work.
Interesting and depressing. The forced birth control shocked me, to be honest, particularly given the collective Jewish experience during the Holocaust.
kindness
What I find most comical is the notion that Ethiopian Jews require more services from the government. Left unsaid is the ultraorthodox Jews, many of whom now live in the settlements who have (their version of) quiverfull families all of whom are supported on the government dole because…..ultraorthodox damn it!
Hypocrisy does not recognize human made borders.
Betty Cracker
The world is just chock-full of assholes.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
The lesson of the Shoah for contemporary Israeli thought can be summarized thusly: IGMFY
Fred Flintrock
What about left-handed, gay hemophiliacs? Huh?
rikyrah
thanks for this information. I’m glad others are speaking up about it.
Paul in KY
My reading has been that the Jews already there think the Ethiopian Jews are slackers & a drain on society. Which can be pretty rich, when you think about all the ‘religious students’ who are basically on the dole.
Paul in KY
@kindness: See you beat me to it. Should have read your comment.
Elie
It all boils down to the deeply backed in instinct for tribalism. This gets exacerbated in times of fear and uncertainty — like the world is in right now.. What is the answer? I don’t know. Sharing this information at least allows us to know what is going on. The remedy for it is something else again. At least the Israeli’s can’t do this in anonymity.. we SEE what is going on… another mark on their already deeply troubled and tarnished reputation as a “democratic” state.
Cluttered Mind
@Paul in KY: Gotta crack down on those strapping young bucks buying gefilte fish with their food stamps.
Paul in KY
@Cluttered Mind: That actually seems to be the sentiment, as these Jews are especially dusky.
Brachiator
@kindness:
Good point. It would be interesting, though to see a comparison on exactly how much is spent to subsidize the ultra-orthodox vs how much is spent on Ethiopian Jews.
Here are a couple of tidbits about some of the ultra-orthodox:
More here..
http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2014/12/five-and-a-half-myths-about-ultra-orthodox-jews/
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Topologically speaking, that’s an interesting proposition.
Cervantes
Inconceivable.
Belafon
@Paul in KY: In other words, they’re viewed just like blacks here.
Cluttered Mind
@Paul in KY: I’m aware. I chose my joke accordingly. It really sucks.
schrodinger's cat
I don’t find it surprising in the least. Looking down on others who are not like us, has been a human obsession since forever. The divisions can be racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, anything will do actually.
chopper
it’s a small country and there’s always been a whiff of pull-up-the-ladder mentality from new immigrants as i mentioned in the last thread. the largest group in recent history being russian jews who quickly established themselves and shit on a whole bunch of others, especially dark-skinned people.
but this was also true of the european immigrants of old; now that i’m here, it’s getting too full, let’s slow this immigration shit down!
Beta’s biggest issue outside of being black is that they’re late to the party.
the Conster
@Elie:
Nothing good comes from claiming you’re supernaturally “chosen”.
Paul in KY
@Belafon: I’m thinking so. No real way to know, as I have never been to Israel or within 1,000 miles of it.
FlipYrWhig
@schrodinger’s cat: People who look down on other people are all the same. I hate those guys.
Big ole hound
It would appear that there is a lot of anti-semitic feeling in Israel if you are not of European background so the hurt feelings and complaints among American Jews is a bit strange.
Mike E
@kindness:
Nor do ultra-orthodox Jews recognize the state of Israel.
eta Heh, the rotating tag: Screw the Judaean People’s Front. Splitters.
Chris
Ya… I get the sense that there’s a pretty big chunk of the Jewish American community that feels a strong bond with Israel because reasons, but doesn’t actually know a whole hell of a lot about the place they feel so bonded with, and that’s before you even get to things like the Arab/Israeli conflict. While a lot of them do Aliyah, I’m not sure that really helps either, since I doubt if most of the organizations that facilitate that are keen to show off Israel’s ugly spots.
(Not a Jewish-specific problem. Same could’ve been said of all these Irish-Americans collecting funds for the Brave Freedom Fighters of the Old Country, back in the day).
Elie
@the Conster:
Isn’t that just tribalism mapped to terminology? Yep. That is only modified by mindful choice and learning over time.. Right now the Israelis are captive to their anxiety and fear. They know their vaunted “reputation” as a leading light in world democracy is under fire as well as their influence in the world. This will impact them more and more over time in very measurable ways.
Adam L Silverman
@Big ole hound: it goes beyond this. There’s a widely held sentiment among Jewish Israelis, or there used to be, that one could not be fully Jewish unless one lived in Israel. This was regardless of whether one was observant or not.
dedc79
@the Conster: you realize this is a line typically trotted out by actual anti-semites? For believers (I am not one) chosen-ness referred to god’s historical choice to deliver the commandments to the israelites, not belief in some kind of innate superiority over others.
Botsplainer
Don’t worry. Its just America’s bestest friend and greatest ally ever doing what it does best.
Arm The Homeless
Not a day goes by that I don’t thank my parents for raising theirs kids to be productive, well-meaning heathens.
Organized Religion seems so emotionally draining.
BTW, are there any Juicers in the Atlanta area interested in a meet-up the last week of May? It’s conference season, yo!
Adam L Silverman
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: actually the lesson is an old axiom I learned from a political science professor as an undergrad, who’s parents happened to have been refugees who fled ahead of the Nazis: “if you treat a group of people despotically, then free them and allow them to set up their own state and society, they will likely establish a tyranny”. Essentially a social learning explanation for social and political behavior. When all you have ever learned is how to survive and navigate despotic and tyrannical and absolute forms of government it’s going to be hard to know how to set up anything else. This is one reason, along with raised expectations that can almost never be filled, that revolutions so often fail – the color revolutions the various Arab Springs – and why external attempts at societal reconstruction are so difficult and require a huge commitment in time, money, and people.
Chris
@kindness:
Exactly like here, in other words, where conservative states that’ve been gorging themselves for seventy years on Yankee and Californian money handed out by the feds simply take it for granted as their due (in fact, don’t even realize it’s there anymore, because that’s how long they’ve lived with it) while black and immigrant families in the inner city are considered lazy and a drain on the economy because of thirty dollars in food stamps a month.
It kind of makes sense; the left doesn’t go in for attacks on anybody as a moocher or a leech simply because they happen to require government investment, while the right furiously denies that it’s not completely self-sufficient. So “right wing moochers” isn’t a meme that’s ever settled in.
chopper
and let’s face it, ethiopian jewish immigration to israel for the most part was very limited. there was a spike in the early 90’s; one single ‘operation’ brought in about a fifth of the entire lot, which basically happened at the request of the US. israel wasn’t really all that interested otherwise.
while the number of immigrants was not that large, the majority of ethiopian israelis today are not immigrants but the children of immigrants. so unlike their parents they feel that, as born-and-raised israelis, that they deserve equal treatment.
Tenar Darell
My mother used to say that suffering doesn’t create nobility, just suffering. And that Jewish people, once in power, were just as capable of prejudice and discrimination as any other group. (Which I later translated to: anybody can become a dick, so watch yourself).
SRW1
@kindness:
But, but, …., what about the output in holyness!?
Paul in KY
@Adam L Silverman: However, they do take funds from fake-Jews not living in Israel.
cokane
Just a formatting tip on your writing, if you’re going to link to a pdf, just write “(pdf)” and make those three letters the hyper link. Your paragraphs will read more smoothly imo.
leeleeFL
Interesting that this came up today. I, for some unknown reason, started singing the song about predjudice (you’ve got to be taught) from South Pacific. Then, I started crying cause I wanted another chance to thank my Mom for raising me such that I did not believe the way the singer did. Mom-you were amazing.
chopper
@Adam L Silverman:
another big reason is, when you’ve escaped some despotic genocidal regime to establish your own homeland you’re likely to be pretty paranoid about ‘others’. you’re not likely to trust people who aren’t ‘your people’ and you’re likely to establish a country that caters primarily to your group.
it’s like when people escaped religious persecution in england to establish the american colonies, then immediately started committing religious persecution of catholics or whatever else.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
I honestly don’t think this is or has ever been the case. It takes something more, something special, for people anywhere to get beyond tribalism and the exercise of in-group vs out-group exclusions.
It’s not just that people learn to be tyrants. The urge to become tyrants is part of our nature.
Cacti
I’ve always found it more than a trifle ironic that in the “Jewish ancestral homeland” the Jews with the closest connection to that region of the world (Sephardim and Mizrahim) are the second class of Israeli Jewish society.
Tenar Darell
@Big ole hound: There’s is another part of this. Briefly, you’re only considered a Jew in Israel, particularly for the law of return and citizenship, if
1) both your parents are Jewish (proof required, usually burial records going back to whoever immigrated from the old country)
2) your mother is Jewish (you have to prove this too)
3) if you are a convert, the conversion has to be Orthodox
The alienation of American Jews is part of the terrible price that was built into the original bargain with the Rabbinate right from the beginning. It is important to note most American Jews attend Reform or Conservative Temples. Reform and Conservative Rabbis don’t really exist in Israel. You’re either secular, or religious, and the rabbis are what would be considered Orthodox in the U.S.
So there are a lot of American Jews, who were brought up to basically associate the support of Israel with their Jewishness. For example, a rite of passage for American Jewish teenagers is a summer in Israel. However the Orthodox Rabbinate which was given control of “birth, marriage and death” is now blocking these same American Jews from full participation in Jewish life because of the issue of conversion. What happens when your kids are brought up as Jews, but your wife converted with a Reform or Conservative rabbi? Your child is not considered a Jew in Israel. That is a big Biden deal.
(Of course, it’s more than “who is Jewish.” The other part is that American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal, and Israel is growing more and more conservative and reactionary. But that is another story).
Paul in KY
@Cacti: Which is one small reason why the Jewish Homeland should have been placed in East Prussia.
Brachiator
@Tenar Darell:
What does this have to do with the plight of Ethiopian Jews?
CONGRATULATIONS!
Why? The Israelis are determined to do unto others everything that’s been done to them.
Roger Moore
@Tenar Darell:
This. The way I see it, there are two basic responses to suffering, which I see as being close to the heart of liberal and conservative world views. A liberal suffers and develops empathy and a desire to save others from suffering. A conservative suffers, learns that suffering is part of the world, and resolves to make sure it happens to somebody else.
It’s like the statement “The world isn’t fair”. Conservatives see that as a general-purpose way of ending a discussion built around questions of fairness. Liberals see it as a starting point for a discussion about how to make the world more fair. They see the same facts, but come to different conclusions.
Tenar Darell
@Brachiator: Honestly, nothing directly. But @big ole hound said:
I was essentially trying to provide greater depth to a reason there are real hurt feelings. ETA I should have pointed that out.
Brachiator
@Elie:
Almost every modern democracy is having to deal with challenges of nationalism, xenophobia, irrational ethnic or religious intolerance.
And certainly we in the US have no particular ability to lecture anyone on tolerance or to show ourselves as a shining beacon of enlightenment.
chopper
@Tenar Darell:
according to my old rabbi there was a short period when israel’s government considered conservative conversions to be kosher, but it was as i said short.
hell, even orthodox converts have been given the cold shoulder in recent years.
Chris
@Tenar Darell:
That is despicable.
How the fuck one gets to call oneself “the Jewish state” while giving such a blatant preferential status to one particular sect at the expense of the others (to the point that that sect gets to decide who is and isn’t allowed to become Jewish), I don’t know. Just call it “the Orthodox Jewish state” already and stop pretending.
This is, to be fair, absolutely normal behavior for most states with a religious-based identity – self-described “Muslim” governments like Saudi Arabia and Iran tend to very clearly mark who, between Sunni and Shi’a, they actually mean by “Muslim,” and the Christian examples of this throughout history are too numerous to list.
But Israel stakes a huge chunk of its national mythology on being not “a” Jewish state but “THE” Jewish state, much of the justification for its existence being that all the Jews of the world (not just the Orthodox Jews) need a safe haven that they can seek refuge in when shit gets really bad elsewhere. If it’s going to keep peddling that mythology, Israel really needs to be called on this shit loudly and often.
dmbeaster
Aside from the ethnicity conflicts, there is also the shitstorm issue of “Who is a Jew?” There is a high degree of this crap in Israel at all levels.
Flatlander
The Oriental Jewish majority in Israel today are mostly the descendants of the 800,000 or so Jews who had to flee other parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab world after the European Jews made their colony in Palestine. For the most part, they were doing fine where they were until Israel blew up their worlds. Then they had to leave all their property behind to come live next to people who called them sub-human beasts, monkeys, schwarzers, and who still think they’re not good enough sixty years later. It shouldn’t be surprising if some of them think Israel was a bad idea.
Paul in KY
@Chris: Once those religious nutwads became crucial to Likud majorities.
Brachiator
@Chris:
It’s an issue that Israeli’s are debating and struggling to deal with.
Ya know, it’s kinda like American fundamentalists trying to pull the rug out from under immigrants by wanting to abolish the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
And of course, prior to the adoption of the 14th Amendment the Dred Scott decision held that black people living in the great inclusive democracy of the United States were not and could never be citizens because, well you know.
Roger Moore
@Tenar Darell:
I’m not sure I buy the last sentence, because the religion and politics are intertwined. Orthodox Judaism is inherently more conservative than Reformed Judaism, both religiously and politically. The relative political liberalism of American Jews is not separable from their tendency to steer away from Orthodox religious beliefs. When Israel decided to hand over questions of Judaism exclusively to Orthodox rabbis, they biased the country toward political conservatism.
Doug r
@Betty Cracker: My heritage is Mennonite. My dad used to tell me when they immigrated here how the Mennonite and Mennonite Brethren didn’t get along.
bcinaz
So racism and religious bigotry aren’t the unique province of American Christians and Muslim Extremists. Good to know.
Aleta
@kindness:
As well as ostracism due to racism, it seems like whenever a group or individual doesn’t dovetail with the dominant culture (or surrounding family), it’s attributed to laziness, stupidity, hostility, overall incompetence, or evil. For someone not skilled in the ways of the surrounding group (language, or hearing ability, or pace) it can be natural to withdraw, quiet down, observe but not participate. (As a new cat might do, or an old person without peers.) But the perception is they are not pulling their weight, or they are dangerous, or insolent, or they ‘hate what we stand for.’ They need to be ‘taught a lesson’ or made to leave.
Tenar Darell
@dmbeaster: Thanks for the reference. I’m a little out of date, so even an article from 2013 about Who is a Jew? is very helpful. I hadn’t heard that they had begun rejecting conversions by Orthodox Rabbis.
@Chris: @chopper: Israel, after all, was founded, in part, as a refuge for all Jews. Yet most American Jews didn’t want to move there; they were happy to support Israel by buying bonds, and teaching their children to care for that country as that refuge, while bringing up American Jewish citizens. Conversion was rare to non-existent in 1947. I doubt the American Jews who were shipping arms and going off to Israel to fight ever thought on the one hand that American Jews would become widely accepted in this country, while on the other their opinions would be ignored by later Israeli governments. Irony doesn’t even begin to cover this, does it?
Freemark
JC stated “The forced birth control shocked me, to be honest, particularly given the collective Jewish experience during the Holocaust.”
I feel the same way about the Palestinian ghettos the Israelis have created. The Palestinian ghettos, especially the Gaza strip, are way too disturbingly similar to the city ghettos created by the Nazis. You would think the Israelis would find the similarities just as disturbing considering their collective history, but not so much.
BobS
@the Conster: “Chosen” is not intended to imply a ‘superior’ status — it means a ‘superior’ obligation and duty.
Tenar Darell
@Roger Moore: You’re connecting the two better than I could have. That’s why I didn’t really try.
Gravenstone
@Brachiator:
Rather puts a different spin on American “conservatives” and their complaint about how our domestic welfare programs encourage minorities to opt out of the work force. This shining example from our client state might not be the sort of thing they want a light shined upon.
some guy
A society built on apartheid enables racist disctimination? Water is still wet and the sun still rises in the East,right?
dedc79
@Flatlander: I don’t think that’s historically accurate at least not in entirety. Libya, for example, where jews had lived for centuries, was no longer a fun place for Jews to be in the 1940s. And that was years before the partition plan and the establishment of the state of Israel.
Morocco in contrast protected its jews from the edicts of Vichy France, but turned on its jewish population after Israel was established.
Elie
@Brachiator:
I definitely agree and did not mean to lecture the Israelis on equality and justice. That said, they used to operate out of a sense of entitled outrage about how horrible their plight was under the NAZIs and that they had a particular understanding of morality and justice. They cannot afford that affectation any longer and I believe they rode that wave for a lot longer than they should have. Instead, they just get to join the rest of us with feet of clay but who know we have to try hard (and will frequently fail), to live up to the expectations of humanitarianism and justice. I would hold that Israel has wandered a ways from that and is courting being thought of as the new South Africa from when it was an apartheid state. While it is economically strong, it would not be able to tolerate sanctions or other actions to boycott its products or limit the travel of its citizens. Alas, we live in a finite and ultimately intertwined word… They can keep up whatever they want, but sooner or later it costs. Over time it may cost a lot.
Cervantes
@Brachiator:
Sounds like collective responsibility. You wouldn’t be arguing that, would you?
Barring that, no, I see no problem calling out “race hatred” wherever it raises its ugly head.
Heliopause
This point is usually understated when discussing the US relationship with Israel. It’s no coincidence that our political class is devoted to this oasis of European control in the heart of the Islamic world, just as it’s no coincidence that the most trusted security partners (the “five eyes”) are all anglophone and majority European descent.
Patricia Kayden
@some guy: And the fact that a country which had ties to apartheid South Africa is now engaging in discrimination is also not shocking to me.
Brachiator
@Gravenstone:
Conservatives (Hell, most Americans) generally don’t know squat about the details of Israeli society. Nor would they give a rat’s ass. And for many fundamentalists, the only Israel that exists is the one they read about in their Bibles.
@Heliopause:
We also love and trust the Saudis. They ain’t European.
@Elie:
It is always a challenge to be just. And when you get down to it, Judaism (unlike Christianity at times) does not claim a special understanding of morality and justice, but an obligation to be moral and just (all that “light unto the nations” stuff). The Israelis have failed spectacularly with respect to the Ethiopian Jews. It remains to be seen whether they can rise to the occasion.
Meanwhile, there is a special irony in some people here noting that Israel is as bad as the US. The worst implication is that some people care as little about Ethiopian Jews as they care about black people in America. They just want to convenient perch from which they can bash America and Israel.
dedc79
@Brachiator:
Seconded. And I guess I must’ve missed Balloon Juice’s 5-part series on Spanish (or Italian, or greek, or german, or Brazilian, etc…) mistreatment of African minorities.
Jews, having had the great misfortune of being the target of a nearly successful global genocide, now have to suffer through a lot of “Why doesn’t the jewish state treat their minorities better than every other country treats its minorities?”
Sly
One of the saddest elements in the writings of Frederick Douglass pertain to his realization that Northern White Protestants, even many who proclaim abolitionism, engage in the same kind of chauvinistic paternalism as the Southern White Protestants from whom he escaped. I think the angriest denunciation he wrote was about the time he was made to receive communion after all the white congregants at a Methodist Church in New Bedford, MA (the so-called “Fugitives’ Gibraltar”).
That various types of Jews, or any other ethno-religious group, engage in the same type of hierarchical social ordering even when they themselves have been historical victims of it shouldn’t really be shocking, people being people.
Brachiator
@Cervantes:
At some point, we are individually and collectively responsible for ending racism in America.
You wouldn’t be arguing that blogging is sufficient, would you?
Towards what end? And as the prophet said,
“Calling out” race hatred is easy, and lazy. What else you got?
Roger Moore
@dedc79:
Come on. Israel gets a ton of well-deserved shit aimed primarily at their treatment of the Palestinians, which is an ongoing human rights disaster and deserving of all the condemnation it gets. They’re getting a little bit extra right now because their treatment of Ethiopian Jews happens to be in the news, the same way any other country will get some criticism when their mistreatment of minorities flares up into something newsworthy, e.g. French treatment of Muslims after the Charlie Hebdo attack.
SC
i dont know how much of this article is 100% accurate. The Ethiopian Jews many suffer from discrimination but most of them will still side with settlers and Likudniks when it comes to treatment of Palestinians. I guess they really have to prove their loyalty to Israel. who knows, they too could be accused of being Kenyan Muslims
J R in WV
When I was a kid, in grade school, I read all the time, compulsively, as an escape. I was interested in history, especially recent history of how the world got so fucked up in the middle of the 20th century.
So then I found the books by Leon Uris, who wrote exhaustively researched novels about WW II, the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the German SS, Exodus, etc. Of course he wrote about the Jews as heroes, fighting against Nazis in Germany and the Middle East, and including the colonial British, who owned Palestine at the time as a result of winning the first World War.
So I was pretty pro-Israeli as a youth. Then I got hold of the religious Orthodox Jewish sect, which was pretty disappointing. Uris didn’t mention the Orthodox very much, as they weren’t into the warfare and tended to depend upon the Zionists to protect them from the Arabist tribes.
Now we see the Jewish state in Israel treating their Palestinians exactly as they were treated in Europe, ghettoized, with pogroms and all. I don’t know what else you can call the recent attack on Gaza but an anti-Arabic pogrom. And doesn’t that just suck.
The Jews (and of course not all of them, by no means!) are nearly turned around into… tyrants bound to hold their Arabs down in subservience. It’s horrible! Just because they aren’t Jewish. Even though they share a common culture in so many ways. I guess there’s no feuds like family feuds, which is a saying around here.
I think the Israelis should get the fuck out of the Palestinian West Bank, tear down the walls and fences, allow Palestinians with work permits (which should be easy to get) free access to their work places. Hell, they ought to be able to visit museums and concerts freely, too.
I also want to point out an element of geography: The nation now called Jordan was very recently the nation of Trans-Jordanian Palestine. The Jordanian rulers were very threatened by Palestinian refugees, and felt that they had to put most of them out of [Trans-Jordanian] Palestine.
That is fucked up also too. Although I do understand why that was necessary from the viewpoint of the Jordanian Royal family – the refugees weren’t going to have any loyalty to the current ruling family, not at all. Realpolitik – in the Kissingerian manner. amiright?
There’s also the variation in population growth – the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews have more kids than the Ashkenazi Jews do; the Palestinian Arabs have more kids than any of the Jewish tribes. So how do you remain a Jewish Democracy under those circumstances?
If you allow the Israeli Arabs to remain part of the Israeli electorate, eventually the Jewish voters could be outnumbered by the Muslim Israelis. Especially if you allow any of the Palestinian refugees, some of whom evidently have deeds to land now part of Israel, to return to their ancestral farms. How can you do it?
There obviously needs to be some invention of new methods of democracy if we aren’t going to see people separated by force into ethnic and religious groups, and moved into ghettos where they won’t have the ballot as one of their few civil rights.
The Israeli Bedouin are already in this position. Given little swathes of desert, not given Israeli passports or citizenship, I don’t think, but residency permits. Because as nomadic herdsmen, they didn’t own any given tracts of land. They just used specific areas briefly as they moved on their annual passage through the Middle East, for centuries.
But since they only used that land for a few weeks they never tried to gain ownership – I don’t think they actually understood the concept of owning the desert, really. Much like the Native Americans, who lived on the land, depended on the land, but had no concept of owning it, since it was there long before they came and would be there when they were all dead.
And this whole mess of ancient cultures clashing, religious and tribal feuding, people following ancient holy books written down from more ancient oral tradition, then translated over and over, with committees fighting over the meaning of a sentence for 20 or 30 years. Not to mention the feudal versus capitalist versus socialist methods of organizing a society, for good measure.
This is one tiny corner of the whole twisted Gordian knot of the Middle East, or looking at a slightly larger picture, Muslim versus Christian cultures.
Amazing… and so very depressing. I used to have a very over-simplified belief structure for the Middle-East and could justify the actions of the Israeli government easliy. But now I know more, too much, to make those easy decisions about the Jews and Arabs and all the other splinter religious groups, from Ashkenazi to Zoroastrian.
depressing!
dmbeaster
@Brachiator: That their plight is one aspect of a larger problem.
dmbeaster
@Tenar Darell: The “Who is a Jew” argument is a lot uglier than discussed in that one article. I just looked for one decent link on it for those not familiar with the issue.
Brachiator
@dedc79:
Of course, we look at this through an American lens. As I understand it, a Sephardi Jew is a Jew. A person who converted to Judaism is a Jew. An Ethiopian Jew is a Jew. None of these people should be considered to be “minorities.”
As I noted, the Israelis have a big problem to deal with here.
Meanwhile, I see that Netanyahu met with the soldier who was abused by the cops.
After all his criticizing of Obama, it sounds as if Bibi is following in Obama’s steps here by having a meeting with the soldier, kinda like when Obama had a meeting with the cop involved in the harassment of Henry Louis Gates.
Cervantes
@Brachiator:
You suggested — what? — that because there are racists in America, therefore no American should call out racism anywhere else? Here is what you wrote:
That was your “argument.” I objected. I am no more responsible for, say, what the Ku Klux Klan did and does than “the Jews” were for killing Jesus. (This last was the point of the reference to collective responsibility.)
And as for the following:
If you’re calling me a hypocrite, you may be right; do feel free to explain.
No one suggested that calling out anything is sufficient. You were suggesting it was illegitimate for “we in the US” to do it. Do you see the difference? I am not optimistic.
dmbeaster
@J R in WV:
Actually, rethink this question based on the following. There is a belief that the pre-1967 war boundaries mean something. But they only existed for 18 years, and ceased to exist 48 years ago. Israel does not call the conquered lands the “occupied territories,” and they get indignant when outsiders do. De facto, they are viewed as part of Israel, and their maps show it as such.
OK. Accepting the Israeli view of things, the jews in the jewish state are a minority who retain power in their democracy by denying the vote to most of their Muslim occupants.
Maybe Jimmy Carter had it right after all.
And as a historical note, Israel was founded by the deliberate mass expulsion of Arabs from lands not awarded to Israel by the UN, but viewed as essential by Israel’s foundrrs to form a viable state. Those are the 1967 boundaries that are now a relic.
It is amazing that Israelis are so fractious to even jews.
Cervantes
@dedc79:
What link is it you think exists between [1] and [2]? I’m sure you’re not suggesting that [3] official Israeli behavior is beyond criticism; and I’m sure you’re not suggesting [3] because of [1]. So what are you suggesting?
The Pale Scot
@dmbeaster:
Without the pressure of security, I think Israel would decay into civil war quite easily.
Adam L Silverman
@Tenar Darell: There are a couple of caveats to this. When the Soviet Union was on its last legs and finally agreed to let Jews living in the Soviet states, but especially in Russia, leave for Israel the Israel’s explained the Law of Return requirements – basically what you’ve described above in regard to what constitutes Jewishness. The Soviets told them they would either take everyone the Soviets identified as a Jew and sent or no one would be allowed to go. Israel buckled and the Soviets sent a whole bunch of people that fit the Jewish religious definition and Israeli Law of Return definition and a whole lot of people that didn’t. This included using the barest connection (one Jewish parent or grandparent for example) to Judaism to send prisoners and others the Soviets wanted to get rid of. For some of the Ethiopian Jews they’ve insisted on being able to document up to nine generations of Jewish descent. For the Falash Mura it can be even more. In some cases one half of the family has had their documentation accepted and made it
to Israel and the other half is stuck in Ethiopia because they’ve been told their claim isn’t good enough. It’s also important to remember that the immigration ministry is always one of the ones that the ultra-Orthodox parties want control of to join a coalition government.
Heliopause
@Brachiator:
America’s best buddies are all anglophone and/or European descent. Feel free to argue this uncontroversial fact if you like.
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: I’ve got newspaper clippings from back in the 90s when I was pulling sources together for my master’s thesis, which dealt with Israeli and Palestinian religious extremists and their effects on the security environment and peace process, that detail how the Orthodoxy rabbis in charge of immigration actually had the graves of Jews who had converted and moved to Israel with their families dug up because they decided the conversion wasn’t kosher/ritually pure enough. This is a huge no no – desecration of the dead is a major sin in Judaism and there are elaborate rules should a grave have to be disinterred and a body moved. Basically they have their own very narrow, though very elaborate, interpretation of what Judaism is and if you don’t conform to it, then you’re not really Jewish.
Adam L Silverman
@Chris: actually Ben Gurion thought he had avoided a lot of that. He cut a deal with Rabbi Kook (pronounced cook) the Elder that made the Jewish sabbath the official day of rest, made kosher food the default for all government and military facilities, let Haredi (ultra-devout) Israeli Jews out of military service, things like that. Cook dropped his opposition to the founding of the state. This actually worked for a long time. The Haredi numbers didn’t really become an issue for the first couple of decades, but once the Six Day War was over Kook’s son, Rabbi Kook the Younger, became the theological and ideological force behind the religious settler movement centered on his yeshiva Merkaz HaRav (The Rabbi’s Center). The best description of this is Ian Lustig’s For the Land and the Lord, which Lustig has published online in case you don’t want to buy a hard copy.
Cervantes
@Adam L Silverman:
Pretty sure you know the following but I’ll mention it, anyway.
If one knows anything at all about Jewish culture, especially here in the US, one has heard countless times the notion that “Jewish” denotes an ethnicity — and, the implication is, not merely a religion. From this notion comes the idea that “secular Jew” is not an oxymoron. While a purely logical mind may rebel at this oddity, genetic research does suggest that Jewish communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe all descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population and are all genetically closer to each other than to their surrounding host communities. The one exception: Ethiopian Jews, who are genetically closer to non-Jewish Ethiopians than they are to other Jews. A possible explanation: to a much larger extent than Jews elsewhere, Ethiopians Jews became Jews by conversion.
Flatlander
@Cervantes: And the funniest thing about that is that Ashkenazi Jews are on balance 80% not Jewish.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37821/title/Genetic-Roots-of-the-Ashkenazi-Jews/
Meaning, of course, that many Ashkenazis are ethnically Jewish to a positively homeopathic degree. Which explains the gaggle of blue-eyed, blond kids on the steps of my local temple.
Adam L Silverman
@Cervantes:
Cervantes and Flatlanders,
Yes, I’m tracking. The prevailing belief is that the Bene Yisrael/Ethiopian Jews are the descendants of the tribe of Dan, which married into the local population. While I’ve not looked at the biblical archeology research in a long time, I recall that there used to be a lively debate that the tribe of Dan was originally the Danatu – most likely a Hellenic group that would’ve fallen under the Phillistine label – that somehow joined the Israelites. The other interesting item, if I’m remembering correctly, is that the genetic testing of the Palestinians shows they have the same genetic similarities as the Jews. This shouldn’t be too surprising as it confirms to what happened in a lot of places: portions of the population converted to conform to the new religious reality in an area. In this case first Christianity then Islam. It does, however my further heighten the irony and the tragedy of the Israeli/Palestinian dispute.
Flatlander
@Adam L Silverman: I guess this is pretty much the reason the Ashkenazi can’t rely on genetic testing to gate Jewishness and thus Right of Return. The Arab next door would turn up as more Jewish than them 9 out of 10 times.