If Israel Is a Homeland, Can a Refusenik Be a Refugee?
Rozenman, Eric
ON MY MIND If Israel is a Homeland, Can a Refusenik Be a Refugee? Only one-quarter of the 8,000 Jews who left the Soviet Union in 1987 went to Israel. In 1988, it was less than 10 percent. The...
...Emma Lazarus' golden door closed...
...It ensures that Israeli Jews, lacking a critical mass of population, will remain economically, militarily and socially overburdened...
...Jews are free to leave Israel...
...There are estimated to be 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs in the territories and another 800,000 Israeli Arabs who increasingly identify as Palestinian...
...Clearly, the answer is no...
...For Israel, it may be crucial.—Eric Rozenman...
...From 1920 to 1923, the level of Jewish immigration to Palestine was about 8,000 a year...
...With the memory of the previous half-century of mass immigration from eastern Europe to America still fresh, however, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act...
...Jewish avoidance of Israel casts doubt on the legitimacy of Zionism and the Jewish state...
...But a Jewish state does exist now...
...For Jews—Soviet, South African, or Iranian—to flee to other shores undermines one of Israel's most important raisons d'etre—to provide a haven for threatened Jews...
...Like any figure long in public life, Ben-Gurion can be quoted against himself...
...For American Jews, the question of the destination of Soviet Jewish emigrants is awkward...
...Free choice" is not the issue...
...After the first Zionist century—1880 to 1980, a century defined by immigration and settlement—at least two-thirds of Israel's Jewish population, and its housing and industrial infrastructure, lies within an L-shaped beachhead less than 10 miles wide stretching from Haifa to Tel Aviv and inland to Jerusalem...
...In 1924 it jumped to 13,000...
...Others put the matter more charitably: Should we rejoice that thousands of Soviet Jews can now escape to freedom, like the millions who escaped Czarist rule to come to the United States in the four decades before World War I, or should we lament that the Jewish state—whose first need is for more Jews—is being shunned by Jews...
...However, if Israel is the Jewish homeland, the place where they have to take you in, then no Jew today can be a refugee...
...The Jewish state in old Palestine, demogra-phically and geographically, covers as much territory as greater Indianapolis, with an economy as large as that of greater Philadelphia...
...Looking at the situation inside the pre-1967 Green Line, the ratio of Jews to Arabs is roughly five to one...
...It probably helps stimulate yerida, emigration from Israel...
...Until the collapse of the Persian Gulf oil boom in the early 1980s, Arab emigration from the territories roughly cancelled the Arabs' high birth rate...
...And Jewish immigration to Israel—especially the 160,000 Soviet Jews who arrived in the 1970s, who were the overwhelming majority of those permitted to emigrate—helped keep the balance inside the Green Line workable...
...The end of mass Jewish emigration to the U.S...
...He once said that Israel would be established and have peace with its neighbors only when it had 10 million Jews and had settled the Negev and the Galilee...
...And an estimated 10 percent of Israel's Jewish population has left and now resides permanently outside of Israel...
...brought about by the Johnson-Reed Act proved beneficial to the Zionist cause in Palestine...
...The reason was that in 1924 the Soviets temporarily relaxed their emigration controls...
...If the Arabs persist in seeing this Israel as a successor to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, an alien interloper doomed to wither and disappear, have we not given them some cause...
...Jews everywhere cheered the rescue of their Ethiopian brethren three years ago...
...Many Israelis say five or six million would be enough...
...in 1925 it rose to more than 33,000, the highest single-year total in the pre-Hitler era...
...This means that west of the Jordan River there are 3.6 million Jews to 2.4 million Arabs—less favorable than the ratio of Protestants to Catholics in Northern Ireland...
...While editorial writers and op-ed page columnists look at Israel and see a powerful Middle Eastern state, a geographic demographer sees something else...
...According to historian Conor Cruise O'Brien, "It seems probable that many of those concerned might have chosen America, had that option been still fully open...
...According to O'Brien, the fourth aliyah "played an important part in the growth of the yishuv," in particular laying the basis for the urban economies of Jerusalem and Haifa—whose Jewish populations doubled—and making a city out of the settlement of Tel Aviv...
...So the Jews had to go to Palestine...
...In October 1988, nearly 2,500 Soviet Jewish emigrants arrived in Vienna, the highest monthly total since March 1980...
...Lack of Jewish immigration—even though Israel is the only place in the world where Jews enjoy above-replacement fertility rates—is the other half...
...The increasing number of Arabs constitutes only half the demographic time bomb...
...And today...
...This immigration to Palestine, known as the fourth aliyah, differed from the three previous ones...
...It has been said that the Arabs in Israel and the territories are a demographic time bomb...
...But only 78— 3 percent—chose Israel as their final stop...
...Can free American Jews who refuse to move to Israel morally insist that captive Soviet Jews do so as the condition for gaining their freedom...
...The Soviets are letting out increasing numbers of Jews...
...Had a Jewish state existed in Palestine before World War II, many of those who later perished in the Holocaust would have found a refuge there, having been denied it elsewhere, including in the United States...
...I believe the answer must again be no...
...But it was not...
...South African Jews make aliyah to Australia, American Jews migrate thousands of miles from the northeast to the southwest...
...Increasingly, the question is being asked: Are the vast majority of these emigres really people who identify as Jews or are they people with Jewish ancestry who are taking advantage of this fact to get out of the Soviet Union...
...It is not only Soviet Jews who overwhelmingly vote no, with their feet, in the existential referendum on Zionism...
...No one faulted organizers for failing to provide the Ethiopians with a chance to opt for a European transfer point...
...But should Soviet Jews, once out of Russia, be treated as refugees entitled to priority settlement in the United States...
...The other raison d'etre is the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty as a precondition to the restoration of Jewish nationhood and culture so that Israel might once again become a light unto the Jews, and unto the nations...
...And Israel as a refuge for only some Jews may not endure as a homeland for all Jews...
Vol. 14 • March 1989 • No. 2
