Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 23

 

The first Jews to return home were not Europeans but Middle Easterners 

 

In 1985, my pre-teen daughter and I attended a concert in Beer Sheva given by the Israeli chanteuse extraordinaire Ofra Haza [1]. Her music straddled West and East, Jewish and Arab, modern and traditional and was phenomenally popular in Israel, throughout the Middle East and even in the West. Her unique talent was snuffed out prematurely – she died at the age of 42 – but her contribution to Israeli and world music lives on. 

            The singer’s brief life was significant for another reason: her family had immigrated to Israel from Yemen and lived in the dilapidated Hatikvah district of Tel Aviv. The singer’s astonishing rise to recognition from humble beginnings epitomises the changing fortunes of many olim (immigrants) of Mizrachi (Middle Eastern, Central Asian or North African) origin in the Jewish state. As readers of this blog will be aware, the accusation that modern Israel is a European colonialist entity is not supported by evidence, including the demographic data: over 60% of Israel’s Jewish population today are Mizrachim who arrived in the country as a result of Arab hostility to the newly re-established Jewish state in 1948. Moreover, a minority of Mizrachi Jews had either never left their homeland, surviving massacres and expulsions perpetrated by a succession of foreign invaders over two millennia, or had returned prior to the twentieth century. The significant role of the Mizrachim in general, and Yemenite Jews in particular, in the history of the Zionist movement is woefully underappreciated. 

            In the monotheistic religious traditions, Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) stretches back to the biblical era. Abraham set out for Canaan with his family around four millennia ago. Moses and Joshua led the Israelites to the Promised Land after the Exodus from Egypt. Later and more historically verifiable aliyot included the return of Jews to Jerusalem from Babylon under the Cyrus Declaration (539 BCE) and the steady trickle of Jews re-entering Judea during Herod’s rule in the Second Temple era. In the 10th century, the leaders of the Karaite Jews, mostly living under Persian rule, urged their followers to settle in Eretz Yisrael. The Karaite olim established a community in Jerusalem, on the western slope of the Kidron Valley. All of these olim were of Asian rather than European origin. 

            The number of Jews migrating to the land of Israel rose significantly between the 13th and 19th centuries, mainly due to a general decline in the status of Jews across Europe and an increase in religious persecution. In the modern Zionist era, the so-called First Aliyah was prompted by Russian pogroms in 1882 following the assassination of the Czar. It was largely unsuccessful as a Zionist enterprise with more than half of the immigrants leaving in the face of poverty, disease and violence, though it helped spread awareness of Zionism throughout the Jewish world. But these European olim were not the first to arrive in the 1880s – that accolade goes Yemenite Jews, the oldest known diaspora community. 

            In 1882, approximately seven months before most of the Eastern European Jews reached their homeland, several hundred immigrants from Yemen, perhaps inspired by false rumours of European olim being granted free land by Baron Rothschild, established a Yemenite quarter in the village of Silwan near Jerusalem (from where they were later ethnically cleansed during the Arab Revolt of 1937). Although the Ottoman authorities quickly banned Yemenite Jews from emigrating, many continued to do so clandestinely. Additional waves of Yemenite immigrants arrived Eretz Israel in the early 1890s and 1900s and succeeded in establishing homes in various locations including the Kerem Hateimanim (Yemenite Quarter) near Jaffa in the early 1900s. One-tenth of the Jewish population of Yemen – an extraordinary proportion in comparison with other diasporas – had made aliyah by 1914 and comprised about six percent of the Jewish population of Eretz Israel [ 2]. Of these, 3,000 lived in Jerusalem, another 1,100 in agricultural settlements (moshavot), and 900 in Jaffa.

            Following Israel's independence, the position of Jews in the Yemen – as in all Arab countries – worsened, and riots and massacres erupted against the small community. When the new ruler authorised Jewish emigration, virtually all the country’s remaining Jews (43,000 of 45,000) took advantage of the offer and in 1949-50 were airlifted via Aden to Israel. This was the celebrated Operation Magic Carpet (known originally in Hebrew as Operation Eagles’ Wings). About 1,500 more followed in the next few years. Still more left at the time of the Six Day War in 1967 and in 2016 most of the remnants were rescued from the civil war by the Jewish Agency. 

            Once in Israel, this ancient and highly devout community struggled to integrate into the reborn Jewish state. The Ashkenazi (European Jewish) political establishment seemed clueless about how to absorb them. Ideologically, political Zionism collided with the values of this traditional and socially conservative group. Modern Zionism was a revolutionary movement that found expression in antidiasporic and antireligious attitudes and policies. The intention was to a create a new society and a new Jew. Over time, a growing number of Yemenite Jews accepted the Labour Zionist doctrines while a hard core resisted them, resulting in their exclusion from mainstream Israeli society. The latter may have been a minority within a minority but they joined forces with other traditionally minded Mizrachim, to oppose the ruling secularists. The ensuing clash of cultures generated bitter resentment on both sides of the divide that reverberates – with major political consequences – in Israel to this day. 

            A degree of reconciliation was eventually achieved. Many within the secular Israeli majority began to pose this pointed question – why do we have to abandon the rich cultural and religious traditions of our forebears? In 1977, the establishment of the Centre for Integration of Sephardic and Oriental Jewish Culture represented an official effort by the Israeli government to acknowledge ethnic heritage as a legitimate component of contemporary Israel. Thereafter, a renaissance of Yemenite and broader Mizrachi culture occurred and attracted the attention of hitherto disinterested sectors of the Israeli populace. 

            Have the Yemenite Jews, and Mizrachi Israelis in general, become fully assimilated into the modern state? Yes and no. The disaffection of the Mizrachim with the ruling Labour Party in the state’s first few decades is often credited with the rise of the ostensibly pro-Mizrachi Likud in 1977 (though even today that party’s leadership remains firmly in the hands of Ashkenazim). And the Mizrachi contribution to both Zionist history and contemporary Israel remains grossly undervalued. 

            In a sense, however, the question is misplaced. Assimilation is no longer an overriding national objective and cultural pluralism is now an accepted characteristic of modern Israel. That should not distract attention from the lingering resentment that many Mizrachim continue to harbour despite constituting a demographic majority in the country. 

            A popular Ofra Haza song, Am Yisrael Chai – the people of Israel lives – resonates with Jews and Israelis across cultural, political and sectarian divisions. It unites a people that is simultaneously western and eastern, religious and secular, unified and diverse. While the whole is arguably greater than the sum of the parts, all of the strands that comprise the nation are crucial to the history, culture, strength and resilience of Israel as she enters the next phase of her rapid evolution. The old Israeli “melting pot” concept has arguably outlived its usefulness and is gradually giving way to the more inclusive “tapestry” or even bouillabaisse image [3]. Many Israelis – and foreign well-wishers – believe that the country is all the more tolerant, vibrant and fascinating for it. 

1. Ofra Haza, Yemenite Songs. Sun-Moon Music, 1985. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_vIydVt7wc 
2. Druyan N. Yemenites In Israel - In Search Of A Cultural Identity. Hebrew Annual Review 1994, 14, 43-54   https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/58798/1/HAR_v14_043.pdf
3. Weill A. Israeli Arts, Culture & Literature: Fifty Years of Culture in Israel - From “Melting Pot” to “Bouillabaisse.”   https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/fifty-years-of-culture-in-israel-from-melting-pot-to-bouillabaisse

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 22

 

Most antiZionists have no idea – and don’t wish to know – what Zionism is

 

“Whatever it is, I’m against it!” declared Groucho Marx in the film Horse Feathers. Many antiZionists would hate being compared to that great Jewish comic genius but it sums up their uncompromising hostility to Zionism in all its forms. 

 

Here are a couple of typical examples. 

 

“Zionism is a racist and settler colonialist movement, which opportunistically co-opts aspects of Judaism in an attempt to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide of indigenous Palestinians…Both antisemites and Zionists construct Jews as a biological race, which needs to be segregated as part of a utopia of global apartheid.” 

Yoav Litvin [1], Israeli-American psychologist   

 

“Since the establishment of Israel, Zionism has commonly been understood to mean the assertion of the right of this state to exist as a Jewish state, requiring the maintenance of a Jewish majority and privileging the rights of Jewish citizens above those of non-Jewish citizens, including the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian.” 

UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign [2] 

It’s not difficult to establish the mendacity of such assertions (provided you avoid Wikipedia that’s been repeatedly hacked by anti-Israeli “editors”). Yet it seems that few people who shout from the rooftops about the supposed evils of Zionism know – or display any curiosity to find out – what the term actually means. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that sheer ignorance rather than malice lies at the heart of antiZionist rhetoric. Whenever I encounter a devoted member of the anti-Israel tribe, I try to explain two things: what Zionism isn’t and what it is. I don’t usually get very far, but more of that later.

What are the common misrepresentations of Zionism, and by extension, Israel? These are so numerous that it’s hard to know where to start. Zionism is said to be: a colonialist European import to the Middle East that dispossessed the indigenous Palestinian people from their homes; a racist political or religious ideology that holds non-Jews in contempt and privileges Israeli Jews over Arabs in an apartheid political system; an aggressively militaristic movement hell-bent on expansionism and imperialism across the Middle East; and a toxic creed that is responsible, directly or indirectly, for the world’s worst violations of human rights. In short, Zionism is the antithesis of all that’s decent and good in the world. It can only be overcome by its total and permanent extirpation from the geopolitical landscape. In plain English, that means the destruction of the state of Israel.  

As I described in an earlier blog, these notions are not just untrue, they are so divorced from reality that they may reasonably be described as psychotic. That doesn’t mean we should shrug them off as the delusional fantasies of an unimportant fringe group. Many of them have entered mainstream political and media discourse and have serious consequences for Israel, her neighbours and, of course, Jews everywhere. 

What, then, is Zionism? At its simplest, it’s a movement that seeks self-determination (a universal human right enshrined in the UN charter) for the Jewish people. Historically, there have been multiple variants on this theme [3] – religious, secular, socialist, revisionist – but such heterogeneity is of secondary importance as all share a common vision: to re-establish self-determination for Jews in their historical homeland. Because that goal was achieved in 1948, some argue that Zionism in now an irrelevance and we live in a post-Zionist era. That argument doesn’t bear scrutiny for two reasons, one internal and the other external. 

 

Within Israel and the wider Jewish world, the contemporary role of Zionism remains hotly debated. For most Jews, it delivers two implicit, interconnected promises – survival and freedom. The latter is impossible without the former: only once physical survival is guaranteed can the Jewish people fulfil the Zionist vision of self-determination in the fullest sense. The existential necessity of a Jewish state is recognised by the vast majority of Jews. Even the original doubters (e.g. Charedi and Reform Jews) are slowly coming round to acceptance. Where there remain significant divisions, they are focused on the present and the future – what does a Jewish state mean, in terms of its culture, values and creativity, and how can its long-term well-being and security be assured? In seeking answers to such questions, Zionism continues to play a key role. 

 

While this collective Jewish introspection continues, the external threat to Zionism remains all too tangible. It’s an extraordinary and shameful reality that Israel is the only country whose right to exist is contested not merely by several of her more intransigent neighbours but by a global alliance of fanatical anti-Israel (“pro-Palestinian”) campaigners and faux-progressive politicians who seek to turn the clock back to the 1940s. They are unlikely to succeed because they are up against a resolute adversary. Nevertheless, a motley crew of activists comprising both old-fashioned antisemites and naïve idealists are rallying to the antiZionist cause in alarmingly increasing numbers. They immerse themselves in an obsessively single minded but intellectually vacuous swamp of hatred in which most of their comrades, whatever their politics, don’t have the faintest idea what Zionism is.

As with all extremist mass movements, antiZionism thrives on the ignorance and credulousness of its followers. Its leaders, who are more knowledgeable than the rank-and file, have cleverly crafted the alibi of “criticism of Israel” into a powerful weapon for attacking Jews. Any lingering doubts about the antisemitic nature of such anger were dispelled in the wake of Israel’s defensive operation against Hamas in May 2021. The global upsurge in blatantly racist violence, verbal and physical, amply demonstrated that opposition to Israeli policies or actions is, for many, merely a pretext for Jew-hatred. The baying mobs calling for the spilling of Jewish blood and the rape of Jewish women [4] have no interest in engaging with the real and complex issues driving the conflict between Israel and her adversaries. They know enough – Israel is a Jewish state and that is sufficient reason to regard her as an alien, illegitimate and irredeemably repugnant entity. In this they are aided and abetted by a perverted political narrative that is willingly reinforced by what used to be called civil society (including parliamentarians, NGOs, trade unions, churches, academics) and amplified by an equally ignorant, lazy or biased media. 

The defamatory narrative about Zionism is potentially lethal not only for diaspora Jews but also for Israelis – and ultimately her regional enemies. If Israel’s existence is predicated on Zionism, and Zionism is the epitome of evil, then logic dictates that Israel can have no future among the family of nations. The UN and its agencies already spend more time condemning alleged Israeli crimes than in discussing the problems of all other countries combined. If this diplomatic poison spreads unchecked throughout the system of international relations and leads to punitive sanctions against the world’s only Jewish state, the prospects for achieving a peaceful settlement of the dispute between Israel and her neighbours will evaporate and pave the way for further endless conflict and suffering on all sides. 

How can we prevent the world from sleepwalking its way into such a tragic scenario? I propose a threefold counterstrategy. First, we need to educate those who are merely uninformed about Zionism while excluding the Jew-haters from the conversation. Second, we must call the bigots to account via the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [5] working definition of antisemitism that explicitly defines most expressions of antiZionism as a form of racism. Third, we must confront antiZionists robustly and relentlessly by all available legal means until they are defeated as a potent political force. Will such an approach work? There’s no guarantee but we have to try as the alternative – that the hatemongers get their way – is unconscionable. 

 

The educational challenge may prove to be the most formidable obstacle to progress. Three centuries ago, Jonathan Swift warned us that “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” Karl Popper, the scientific philosopher who had first-hand experience of the dangers of intractable prejudice in 20^th century Vienna, offers us an insight that is especially apposite today: “True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”

1      Litvin, Y. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/1/9/the-zionist-fallacy-of-jewish-supremacy/

2      UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign. https://www.palestinecampaign.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/Evidence-from-PSC-to-Chakrabarti-inquiry-final-June-2016.pdf

3      Troy G. The Zionist Ideas. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 2018

4      London Evening Standard, 21 May 2021. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/rabbi-antisemitism-rise-london-jewish-community-cst-b936325.html

5      International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism?focus=antisemitismandholocaustdenial

 

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 21 

 

Zionism is a necessity not a choice for Jews

 

In 1909, Henry Ford notoriously offered consumers a stark choice: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." 

 

That’s a version of the 17^th century Hobson’s Choice – take it or leave it – and it pretty much sums up the range of options available to Jews at the end of the 19th century. After trying all the other paths to emancipation apparently on offer – integration, assimilation, the Enlightenment – only Zionism remained. Some Jews, particularly in Europe, felt that it was worth one last throw of the dice and held out hope that they would finally be accepted as equals by the non-Jewish communities that surrounded them. They were tragically mistaken.  

Zionism is not primarily an ideology or a political philosophy but first and foremost a Jewish survival mechanism. The notion that Jews “chose” Zionism from a menu of potential alternatives is false. Other gates to freedom had all been slammed shut. For the Jews confined to the Czarist Pale of Settlement and other ghettoes throughout eastern Europe, the turning point was the assassination in 1881 of Alexander the Second for which the Russian Jews – all Jews – were blamed (though the killer wasn’t a Jew). 

 

The pogroms that followed reached such unprecedented heights of murderous intensity that they propelled the Jews of the Czarist empire in three radical directions – into flight (to other parts of Europe and the USA), into the ranks of the communist and anarchist revolutionaries, and towards Zionism. In 1882, Leon Pinsker [1], a middle-aged Russian-Jewish physician, had the prescience to grasp that only this last offered a realistic long-term hope of Jewish survival:

“We must reconcile ourselves, once and for all, to the idea that the other nations, by nature of their eternal, natural antagonism, will forever reject us. We may not shut our eyes to this natural force, which works like every other elemental force; we must take it into account… We must use all means which human intellect and human experience have devised, in order that the sacred work of national regeneration may not be left to blind chance.”

 

Fourteen years later, a young and highly assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl [2], reached the same conclusion:

“If only we could be left in peace. But I think we shall not be left in peace….Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.”

 

While eastern Europe was an important culture medium for Zionist thinkers and activists, there’s a common misconception that the growing Zionist impulse was an exclusively European phenomenon. In the Jewish communities of the Middle East, some of whose roots in their host countries stretched back millennia, a similar yearning for a return to the Land of Israel had been nurtured over the generations. For these Jews, a political awakening occurred in the late 19^th century in tandem with their European co-religionists. Since their expulsion from their ancestral homelands by the Babylonian and Roman invaders, they had sought to appease the demands of their new Muslim rulers in a ceaseless quest to achieve fuller integration into wider society. Their efforts proved futile. 

 

Consigned to second-class citizenship under the Dhimmitude system, the Jews of the Arab world experienced periodic upsurges of antisemitism that became increasingly oppressive, prompting the Aliyah (immigration to the Land of Israel) of hundreds of Yemenite Jews the late 19^th century. In 1941, a savage pogrom incited by Nazi sympathisers, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was unleashed in Baghdad, where Jews constituted around one third of the population. Well over a hundred Jews were killed and thousands injured. Homes and businesses were looted, and further violence threatened. 

 

The Baghdad Farhud (“violent dispossession”) was far from unique. But for the Jews of Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world, it was a seminal moment, a confirmation of their suspicion that their presence in the region was precarious – tolerated at best and terminal at worst. That gloomy insight thrust the Middle Eastern and European Jews together to make common cause – the attempted revival of sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. For both, lethal antisemitism was a driver of their attraction to Zionism as the only means of creating a safe and welcoming long-term haven.

 

Don’t believe the propagandists who insist that the establishment of Israel in 1948 caused the destructive, bigotry-infected dynamic of Arab antiZionism – it didn’t. Israel’s declaration of independence merely reinvigorated a pre-existing hatred. Blaming the subsequent mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries on this single event is not evidence based. As British journalist Lyn Julius [3] writes:

“The root cause of the post-1948 exodus of over 850,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa was pan-Arab racism, itself influenced by Nazism. Before the first Arab-Israeli war broke out, saturation Nazi propaganda on an illiterate and gullible population had already destroyed any prospect of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs.”

 

Over the past 140 years, first the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community) and then Israel have provided refuge to countless Jews fleeing discrimination, persecution and murder. The precise number is impossible to calculate but it runs to the hundreds of thousands – and ultimately many millions if you include their descendants. That remarkable record more than vindicates the Zionist vision. 

 

But this isn’t just a matter of history. Today we are witnessing a frightening global upsurge in antisemitism that too often costs lives. It’s a disturbing fact that antisemitic individuals, groups and countries are not merely antipathetic to Jews; they want to bring about their complete annihilation. For that reason alone, the existence of Israel, the haven of last resort for all Jews, is non-negotiable. 

 

As Israeli legal scholar Amnon Rubinstein [4] reflected in 2002, Zionism remains the nationalism of no choice for the Jewish people:

“The truth of the matter is that from the extinguished crater – from the apparent volcano of antisemitism – a stream of searing lava occasionally erupts…Just as the Jews of Russia in 1881 and the Jews of Iraq in 1941 felt they had no choice, now too, there is ultimately no gate to salvation open other than the Zionist gate.”

 

By 2021, this is the key lesson most Jews have learned from their long and anguished history: full self-determination was and remains their only cast-iron guarantee of physical, cultural and religious survival.

 

Because antisemitic antiZionism was the underlying cause of the conflict between Israel and her neighbours, it is unlikely to end until Arab and Muslim leaders lay to rest their societies’ anti-Jewish demons. Continuing Arab (and Iranian) antiZionism just reinforces the conviction of Israeli Jews, and indeed most of the global Jewish world, that the Zionist path, embodied in the Jewish state of Israel, is the only one available to them. 

 

To all those antiZionists and “critics of Israel” who never tire of reproaching Jews for their strong support for Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, I have this message – get over it. Israel, the world’s sole Jewish state, is going nowhere. Learn the lessons of the repeated failures of the military and terrorist assaults against the country you despise above all others. You are on the wrong side of history. Your demonstrations, condemnations and boycotts will never succeed in their eliminationist goals.  

 

How can I be so confident in this prediction? For the single, easily verifiable reason that Israel is regarded by the overwhelming majority of Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, as an existential necessity rather than a choice. 

 

1.         Pinsker L. Auto-emancipation (originally published 1882). New York, Maccabaean  Publishing Company, 1906
2.          Herzl T. The Jewish State (originally published 1896). London. Penguin Books, 2010
3.       .  Julius L. Uprooted. London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2018
4.          Rubinstein A. Only the Zionist gate remains open. Haaretz, 14 March 2002