WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The “Israel is Apartheid” canard doesn’t accuse Israel of mistreating people of color. Its bringing home of, among others, destitute Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews disproves that. The claim is Israel mistreats “Palestinians.” But compare how two dozen Arab states have treated indigenously Middle-eastern Jews. Israel has every right and surpassing need to be “Jewish,” and Palestinian Arabs have a Palestine homeland, being the majority population of a Jew-less Arab state sitting on 78% of Palestine land.
Israel is “Apartheid”? My Alaska! Ask Alaska Air
Are you irked by the canard being spread around the world, most lately by Antisemitism International, that our Jewish homeland’s State of Israel is “apartheid”? Type into your browser “AlaskaAir.com.” In the search box on the homepage of Alaska Airlines that comes up, enter “Yemen.” Up will come
“From the Archives: How Alaska Airlines Evacuated 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel ‘On the Wings of Eagles’”
This happened three-quarters of a century ago, in 1949, with the newly reborn State of Israel – on the heels of its War of Independence of 1948-49 – ingathering not only Holocaust survivors from Europe but Mizrahi “Jews of color” from North African and Mideast Arab lands. Fifty thousand came from Yemen in the southern Arabian peninsula during Israel’s Operation Magic Carpet, literally on Alaska Airline’s “eagles’ wings.” Here’s how Alaska Airlines characterized this long-pummeled minority, utterly isolated from modern times, which had tenaciously clung to its Jewish peoplehood and religion in a backward intolerant land:
“Yemenite Jews had been nomadic for centuries. Considered outsiders in Yemen, Yemenite Jews struggled to find a place of their own. Migrating from place to place across the desert, driven away by violence and persecution, the Yemenite Jews were deeply devout. They stuck to Scripture, believing that they would one day be returned to their homeland in Israel ‘on the wings of eagles.’”
The Yemenite Jews weren’t unique. Across the Red Sea from Yemen, in the African country of Ethiopia, lived another “Jews of Color” branch of the Jewish people, likewise “considered outsiders” – black Ethiopian Jews. The saga of their rescue and redemption by Israel – Operations Moses and Solomon – likewise stands as a huge undertaking of a tiny country whose people were wholly disinterested in discriminating on the basis of people’s color of skin.
So Amnesty International et ilk’s “Apartheid” canard against Israel isn’t the classic “Apartheid” charge of discriminating against people “of color.” Israelis themselves aren’t “white.” Israel’s largest population segment is Mizrahi, descendants of Jews kicked out of mostly Arab Muslim lands. Indeed, “Israeli” is increasingly a melding of homeland Mizrahi, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish streams. Amnesty’s bitch is that Israel has no right to be “Jewish.”
Here’s how Richard Kemp summarized Amnesty’s report on Gatestone a week ago, Amnesty International Wants To End the Jewish State:
“Let us be in no doubt, this report is not a criticism of the State of Israel. It is a chillingly clear manifesto pronouncing Israel an illegal entity with no right to exist. Page after page, it shows a deeply-troubling obsession with righting the supposed wrong of 1948. It calls for Israel to be flooded with generation after generation of descendants of Arabs who left in 1948, and who expected to return after five invading armies had wiped Israel off the map. Such an influx of so-called refugees would be unprecedented anywhere in the world. It would mean the termination of the State of Israel, a condition of perpetual conflict between Arabs and Jews under a single Palestinian state, and the end of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.” [emphasis added]
But Israel has every bit as much right to be the homeland state of the Jews as every state that calls itself “The Arab Republic of ….” has to be Arab. Jews have lived there in homeland claiming presence for three millennia. The Palestine Mandate provided for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home. Today, 78% of Palestine is all-Arab Jew-less Jordan.
So let’s us, if not Amnesty International, talk for a moment about “apartheid” in that 78% of Palestine that’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan. See, e.g., a 2015 Times of Israel article, Dodging Swatikas and Israel Hate, Jordan’s Secret Jews Slip Beneath the Radar. But as the article’s subtitle, The Untold Story of the Jewish-American Aid Workers Living, Studying and Traveling in the Hashemite Kingdom [emphasis added], makes clear, “Jordan’s Secret Jews” aren’t indigenous Middle-eastern Jews living there.
Things may have changed somewhat from 2015, already long after the Israel-Jordan peace agreement, but here’s a revealing excerpt of that TOI article on where things stood at that time:
“Almost all countries throughout the Middle East boast illustrious Jewish histories and long-standing Jewish communities – nearly all of which were expelled and depopulated with the establishment of Israel. Actually, a dwindling handful of Jews still lives — beleaguered and, at least publicly, hostile to Zionism — in some of these countries; Yemen, Egypt, Iran and Tunisia come to mind.
“Yet one country in the region is noticeably absent from the tribal map — Jordan. Despite its proximity to Jerusalem and references to biblical Israelite settlement within its borders, no Jewish community in recent memory ever resided within the borders of the Hashemite Kingdom.
“Today, the Jews of Jordan — a trickle of American aid workers in Amman who hide their identities, alongside Israeli officials at the local embassy — may be the first Jews to live on the east bank of the Jordan river for centuries.
“Jews are prohibited under Jordanian law from owning property or acquiring citizenship.”
American Jews who would see Israel shrunken back to the existentially perilous, historic Jerusalem excluding ceasefire lines of 1949 – a/k/a “a two-state solution along the 1967 lines, save for mutually-agreed territorial adjustments thereto” – need to rethink. Israel isn’t a little “America,” a democracy for everyone who happens to live there. It’s the historic homeland of a people a majority of whose homeland population never left the Mideast.
If Israel has to choose between “democratic” and “Jewish,” it has to choose “Jewish” – its raison d’etre – and we American Jews have to support it in that. For close to two millennia between Judaea’s final destruction by Rome and Israel’s independence as the land of Israel’s next native state, Diaspora Jewry had been brutalized and kicked around European Christendom – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom – and “considered outsiders” in Arab and other Muslim lands. Israel has to be militarily secure and Jewishly meaningful, and fully able to bring home to the homeland Jews being discriminated against, as were indigenously Middle-eastern Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews, in foreign lands.
And don’t pity “The Palestinians.” Arabs have two dozen Middle East nations, including one sitting on 78% of Palestine with a majority population of Palestinian Arabs, none of which two dozen Arab states treats Jews as equal with Arabs.