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| Ethnically cleansed Iraqi jews waiting for transfer to a tent camp after arrival in Israel 1950 |
When searching on the internet it is not easy to find information relating to the jewish refugees from arab lands. Search results come up mainly with references to the 'naqba', the self-inflicted disaster created when arabs living in Israel rejected the UN Partition Resolution to divide the country beetween jews and arabs on November 30th 1947 and immediately began their war against the jews (The next morning jews were taken off buses and killed in the Jaffa and coastal area, a pogrom happened in Jerusalem).
So
are arabs really worried
about the welfare of sepharadim, around a million of whom were
expelled from arab countries? This interest
in the welfare of jews is the sasme as that shown towards christians
presently fleeing from Egypt, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the middle
east.
I'm
sure that the suffering of
sepharadi newcomers to Israel was not imagined despite being
reflected and magnified through the distorting lens of arab
propaganda. But essential to understanding this suffering is to know
about the context in which this suffering happened. And of course the
suffering was directly linked to the ethnic cleansing of a million jews
from arab countries. Of course the same thing is happening now to
christians with barely a hoot of protest from the established churches
(they are usually too busy attacking Israel and obsessing about gays to
worry overly much about christians being accused and murdered because of
their religion)
The
government chronically occupied with security and the business of
surviving economically into the next day meant that the reception of
unending waves of newcomers often proceeded with little planning.
Immigrants were thrown together
higgledy piggeldy in all parts of the country and communities were
often mixed. The living conditions were at first often atrocious with
people needing to live in tents until more permanent accommodation
could be built.
The suffering of sepharadim in the
early years in Israel does not however mean that they were
discriminated against. That they suffered greatly also does not
necessarily point to this. Most of the population of Israel suffered
greatly.
So there is need to understand the
context firstly of a population of approximately 700,00 Israelis in a
state that had just been founded having to absorb a million refugees
from arab lands. Within a few short years Israel more than doubled
its population. This was after having fought a brutal war in which 1%
of the population had been killed (10% of the army died in 1948). No
other country has ever faced this problem let alone deal with it.
Western countries such as the UK have had strong reactions by their
peoples to large influxes of immigrants, with extreme racism and even
violence shown to those immigrants in the 1970's. The British
National Front/BNP or the French Front Nationale come to mind. But
the percentage influxes of immigrants to those countries were as
nothing compared to what Israel dealt with successfully in 1948 until
the early 1950's.
The Israeli economy burdened by a heavy
defence commitment had to find shelter, food and accommodation for
all these immigrants and at first there was no money available to
build shelters and also employ the immigrants. Golda Meir recounts
travelling to the USA to ask jews there to find the means to help the
jews thrown out of arab lands. You will see from her writing that she
cared for these people, tried her utmost to find the means to help
absorb them, find them shelter and work. And those Israelis who were
living in the country suffered rationing in order to feed the
newcomers.
I'm sure it is possible to find stories
of resentment and of rejection, Golda Meir's account sounds sincere.
Likewise personal stories recounted in
Deborah Dayan's 'Pioneer' which I will also quote from paint a
picture of the life of immigrants from someone who was involved in
helping them as a sort of voluntary social worker.
There is a need to rebalance the
accounts of discrimination made by those who suffered. They were so
deep in the forest they were unable to see the bigger picture.
Sepharadim suffered just as did ashkenazi immigrants recently arrived
because of the fact that they left their countries penniless and
were usually uneducated. The educated sepharadim and those with
means, when thrown out of arab countries made their way to western
countries, France, the USA and Britain.
The impoverished sepharadim arrived in
a new country that they didn't always want to be in (with the
exception of Yemenites), a country which had just fought against
arabs intent on genocide. That war forced on Israel by local arabs
who shot up the roads already from November 1947 whilst the British
were still ruling the country became an invasion of five arab
countries on 15th May 1948. The war was supported, armed
and even led by the British who left Israel by one door and attempted
to return to a country defeated by the armies of puppet arab
governments.
And when the war ended arab terrorists
made the whole country unsafe.
In his autobiography “Warrior”
Ariel Sharon recounted that in the evening all life stopped. People
barricaded themselves in their homes. Arab terror gangs ruled the
night in the early years of the state and until 'unit 101' was
formed Israel had no answer.
It must be remembered that the
immigrants, sepharadim as well as holocaust survivors from europe
were victims of an extremely difficult situation in the early years
of the israeli state.
Arab propagandists still like to play
up the supposed splits in Israeli society, most notably of the
so-called 'Ashkenazi-sepharadi' split, with ashkenazim taking the
role of the bogeyman. The BBC even managed recently to distort the awarding of
a national singing competition to an arab woman as emblematic of the
discrimination allegedly suffered by arabs. Upon this hook was hung
the imagined sufferings of sepharadim at the hands of ashkenazim
nowadays. The BBC will always manage to twist positive news about
Israel into an example of Israel's nefariousness.
Of course if it ever was a real
problem, the Ashkenazi-sepharadi division is a thing of the past.
Intermarriage, education together in schools and universities as well
as serving together in the army has relegated this problem to
history.
That arabs still obsess over a supposed
Ashkenazi-sepharadi division and derive pleasure from the thought of
an Israel that will implode is not necessarily a bad thing. A
distorted understanding of Israel by its enemies lessens their
ability to harm it.
As I don't possess a working OCR
scanner i'll need to type up the relevant extracts from the following
two books over coming days/weeks:
- My Life – Golda Meir
- Pioneer – Deborah Dayan
If
you are able to get them these
books offer an excellent insight into the early development of Israel, of
the trials and tribulations, of buying and settling the land in the face
of a corrupt and
murderous turkish administration, of the often good relations between
jews and arabs living side by side in villages, but also of arab
marauding, of grazing cattle in the fields of kibbutzim as a provocation
(being repeated nowadays by Negev beduin in the south and also in the galilee), of how
the country was developed out of virtually nothing in the face of
great natural and man made adversity without reading the
autobiographies of people such as Rabin, Begin and Allon.
I must admit not having a great interest in a problem I believe was more manufactured than real (I'm not saying that the perception of discrimination was not a potent factor in the election of the Likud in 1979 because it was) but if you have any interesting sources i'll be happy to read and review them.
To be Continued
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| Ethnically cleansed Iraqi jews waiting for transfer to a tent camp after arrival in Israel 1950
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16th January 2013 - Were there forced adoptions of yemenite children in Israel?
The reader's comment was as follows:
The Haaretz article introduction says
that only 69 yemenite children were unaccounted for after deaths had
been traced. If that is the case then Israel has little possible case
to answer. 69 adopted yemenite children will be covered by abuse,
violence and simple inability to cope cases. Maybe i'm wrong, so if
you have information beyond the 69 please email me it.
It is of course possible that when the
general state of illiteracy was seen by social workers, and the
sometimes shocking hygiene of some in communities which immigrated to
Israel (read more about this in coming weeks) children may have been
forcibly adopted. With such low numbers of forcible adoptions in
contention, it is hard to take a position on such happenings, whether
there was justification or not.
(O..C - The British 1960's,Ken Loach dir.,classic film ) Cathy Come Home raises big questions like this, as well as the more specific, such as whatever became of the thousands of children the closing credits tell us wereremoved into state care as a result of their parents' homelessness
And in Britain in 2012:
Sweden and Norway had a differentpolicy with regards to minority Sami People, Kven and gypsies, one ofextermination. The policy of forcibly aborting single parents and
'feeble minded' was carried on until the 1970's.
These european countries with their
racist eugenicist beliefs attempted either to wipe out 'impure' races or in
Britain's case deport working-class children seen as lesser beings
into effective slavery abroad when they were surplus to requirements
in Britain.
A
policy in Israel may or may not have been
adopted that was misguided, and social workers may or may not have taken
children without justification. But one needs to understand the that
they were working in a different age, and were thinking
that what they did was the best for the child's own future rather than
as a result of any intention to discriminate against or harm sephardim.
That
attitude seems to be still adopted in the UK today.
Whilst every one of those 69 yemenite
children are obviously an open wound to their parents, even if every
one of them was a terrible mistake, it is as nothing to the untold
misery being practised on children in supposedly enlightened european
countries today.
I
wonder if you have ever heard of the Sami People? Did you know about
the British deportations to Australia? And as a last thought, about the
hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi children sold as slaves (sexual and
otherwise) in India? Media is very selective, focusing and magnifying
the least bit of truth about Israel and we who care about Israel need to
be aware of it. That does not mean sweeping mistakes under the carpet,
just having some sense of proportion that Israel although in so many
respects a light to the world, needs to be given a little slack, needs
some understanding even of its imperfections.
I
will continue the series of articles
on the ingathering of sephardim to Israel. Forgive me if I still see
this as a glorious episode in Israel's history, a feat unmatched ever,
anywhere in the world.
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