Olmert warns of ‘evil wind’ of extremism in Israel

Ehud Olmert warns of ‘evil wind’ of extremism in Israel

Monday September 29 2008

A resurgent ultranationalist religious underground movement is threatening Israel’s democracy, the nation’s outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, warned yesterday.

Olmert lashed out at the extreme right for the first time in his two-and-a-half-year premiership after a prominent Israeli critic of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank was violently attacked last week.

“A bad wind of extremism, hate, evil, violence and contempt for state authorities is blowing through certain sectors of the Israeli public and threatening Israeli democracy,”

said Olmert in his opening remarks to the weekly cabinet meeting.

The wrong sort of immigrants.

Israel encourages immigration by Jews from Europe and the US, but those from Ethiopia are now less welcome

Tuesday August 19 2008

The Israeli government’s decision to halt immigration from Ethiopia prompted angry scenes in Jerusalem on Sunday, during a protest outside the prime minister’s house. Around 5,000 demonstrators voiced their condemnation of the authorities’ actions, with the chairman of the Organisation of Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel describing the situation as “a crime against Zionism, and the original Zionist idea of saving Jews from around the world”.

Israel is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to absorbing new olim [immigrants], largely thanks to the small print in the country’s immigration policy.

• Mirroring Hitler’s assertion that anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent was to be considered untermenschen, the founding fathers of Israel declared that anyone with similar ancestry would therefore qualify for full citizenship of the newborn state.

Over the years, millions of Jews have taken up this offer, and today around 15% of Israel’s seven million population is made up of first-generation olim. Of that number, the vast majority come from the former Soviet Union, and the next largest group hail from Ethiopia, a country which has seen a mass migration of its native Jews to Israel dating back to the 1970s.