Writing in the Forward, the Jerusalem Post's opinion editor Seth Frantzman lists some recent and some not so recent examples of Israeli racism. And while his attempt to show American Jews how deeply racist much of Israeli society can be is important, his unusual choice of what to exclude from his article tells much about his grasp of the problem and his evident bias.
Writing in the Forward, the Jerusalem Post's opinion editor Seth Frantzman lists some recent and some not so recent examples of Israeli racism. And while his attempt to show American Jews how deeply racist much of Israeli society can be is important, his unusual choice of what to exclude from his article tells much about his grasp of the problem and his evident bias.
Frantzman fails to mention the horrible anti-Ethiopian-Jews racism by Zionist Orthodox leaders like for NRP head and longtime religious services minister Yosef Burg, by many haredi rabbis and by Chabad, and by some on the secular political right.
Instead, Frantzman – who works for a right of center publication – mentions only the racism of the secular left.
In the same way, when discussing the current wave of anti-African-asylum-seeker racism, Frantzman fails to mention the leading role Sefardi haaredi politicians have played in this racism or the role played by the hard right wing of the Zionist Orthodox movement or, for that matter, the role played by some mainstream Zionist Orthodox rabbis and politiicans or the role played by the secular right wing.
Frantzman doesn't even mention the horrible conduct of the Netanyahu government.
Instead, he concentrates on a remark by a secular Ha'aretz columnist, Gideon Levy, who, in an attempt to point out the racism of the government and many Israelis, noted that something these Israelis say about African asylum seekers could have equally applied to Russian immigrants to Israel.
“A million immigrants from Russia, a third of them non-Jews, some of whom were also found to have a degree of alcohol and crime in their blood,” Levy wrote to illustrate his point.
Frantzman fails to explain to readers that Russians indeed did bring a wave of organized crime and alcoholism to Israel. (Of course, they did not do so in their "blood.")
In Israel, Russians overwhelming vote for right of center parties like Netanyahu's Likud-Beiteinu.
Frantzen also fails to tell readers that the Herut (later Likud) Party viewed Sefardim as potential Herut voters and and in part managed its rise to power in the late 1970s becuase of those Sefardi votes. However Likud – but not Menachem begin – was every bit as racist as Labor or other Ashkenazi parties were, and discrimination against Sefardi members with political aspirations was common. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef took advantage of that racism by forming his Shas Party and siphoning off many Likud voters after Begin resigned and Yitzhak Shamir – no friend to Sefardim – took over.
Frantzen's article is sloppy and biased.
Despite that, it does contain some important historical information Jews should know.
…A little noticed 2011 book by academic Etan Bloom revealed that the father of Israeli sociology and a leading Zionist of the British Mandate named Arthur Ruppin, was a believer in eugenics. In 1919 he argued that the Jewish race should be “purified” and that it was “desirable that only the racially pure come to the land.” As head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), he put his purity schemes into practice, arguing that Ethiopian Jews should not be permitted to immigrate, because “they have no blood connection,” and arguing that Yemenite Jews should be brought only for menial labor.
Ruppin and his fellow travelers were able to influence the Zionist movement, tragically in retrospect, to view non-Europeans as a different caste and to back up their arguments with outdated theories of eugenists. For instance, Chaim Sheba, who became director general of the Health Ministry in 1950, argued, according to a 2005 report that “a high concentration of those ill in body and soul would jeopardize the future of Jewish community in Israel. To support his argument, he used examples from genetic theories which purported to show national gene pools weakened through a lack of genetic vigilance.” Sheba was influential in temporarily preventing Cochin Jews from immigrating. The communist newspaper Davar asserted that a community “with numerous sick, decadent, unrestrained elements will not withstand the social and security test.” Haaretz writer Arieh Gledblum claimed in 1950 that North African Jews’ “primitivism is unsurpassed…. They have little talent for comprehending anything intellectual” and “lack any roots in Judaism.”
Since the 1950s, this legacy of ethnocentrism has haunted Israel. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Israel in 1961, she described her fear of Jews who “looked Arab but spoke Hebrew,” calling them “an Oriental mob.” In 1981, singer Dudu Topaz castigated non-Ashkenazi Jewish voters as “chachachim,” a derogatory term. In 1983, Shulamit Aloni lambasted Sephardic Shas supporters as “barbarous tribal forces.” Shmuel Schnitzer, a journalist, described in 1995 Ethiopian Jews as “thousands of apostates bearing disease.” Noted author Amos Elon pondered in 1953 what effect Moroccan Jews’ “uncontrolled fertility would have on the Jewish people’s genetic robustness,” and in a 2004 interview he was still claiming that “political primitiveness” came from immigrants to Israel.…
Those ideas were used to stop Ethiopian Jews from immigrating to Israel when they otherwise found a way to do so on their own, and they were behind the many attempts by parts of the Government of Israel in the late 1970s through Operation Solomon in 1991 to thwart the their rescue.
Those ideas were also used to shunt Ethiopian Jews into ghettos and undermine much of their absorption.
This is the actual history of Israel, not the fairy tale version you learned in Hebrew school.
And the only way this racism will begin to stop, I think, will be when the government starts an active long-running public information campaign in Israel's major media using major celebrities and politicians to speak out against racism and when the government itself refuses to tolerate it.
Unfortunately, neither is likely to happen.