The War for Israel`s Soul

September 29, 2008 – By: Weiss, Philip

Further evidence of the war within Israeli society: The tragedy of the occupation has brought about  “an unprecedented number of young people who are choosing to go to jail rather than serve in the Israeli army,“

says a Refuser Solidarity group. And the government of Israel is trying to shut down New Profile, a leftwing feminist group that supports these young “shirkers,” New Profile reports. The group describes the spiritual despair that the occupation, and the Nakba before that, has caused inside Israel.

And mentions soldier suicides as the leading cause of death:

• Four generations and over six decades of repeated, unending “military solutions” have engendered an expanding movement of young people who experience and express excruciating inner struggles and rifts in face of the legal duty to serve. …
• For some young people, [these crises] involve highly dangerous levels of personal distress and indeed, in recent years, suicide has claimed the lives of more Israeli soldiers than all other causes-of-death combined.
• Rather than listening to the voice raised by these future citizens, rather than fathoming the social change it reflects and responding with changed, innovative policies, Israel ’s state institutions have chosen to wage a “war” against these youths and the developments they represent.

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.