The debate about the
nature of the Israeli state is an important one. In the IHRA misdefinition of
anti-Semitism anti-Semitism is held to be
‘Applying double
standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of
any other democratic nation.’
Leaving aside the absurd wording ‘democratic nation’ which implies some
nations are not democratic, in itself a racist phrase, the IHRA assumes that Israel
is a normal democratic state. Of course we all know that Israel may be democratic
for Israeli Jews but it is Jewish for Arabs.
The
question though is what type of state Israel is. It is now accepted that Israel
is a settler-colonial state much like Apartheid South Africa and Algeria. But
that doesn’t tell us the specific
character of Israel.
Israel
describes itself as a Jewish Democratic state which is an oxymoron. A state can
either be democratic or Jewish but it cannot be both and in practice Israel
promotes the Jewish over the
democratic. But Israel as Jewish state isn’t a religious or theocratic state Jewish
ethnically.
When
Netanyahu’s government introduced the Jewish Nation State Law
in 2018 it gave Israeli Jews only national rights. Although in theory
Palestinian citizens of Israel had equal rights on an individual basis, in
practice this could not but help impinge on those rights.
‘the state views the development of
Jewish settlement as a national value, and will act to encourage and promote
its establishment and consolidation.’
What
this means is being played out currently in the Naqab and East Jerusalem where
the Jewish National Fund and Jewish settlers are ethically
cleansing the indigenous Palestinian population.
Because
Israel defines itself as a ‘Jewish’ state it allows Israelis the right to tell
Palestinians, even those who are nominal citizens, that they should be grateful
they are allowed to live in a Jewish state.
In
January 2019 Al Jazeera published an article by Yoav Litvin The
Zionist fallacy of ‘Jewish supremacy’ which argued that ‘Framing
Zionism as Jewish and not white supremacy is a dangerous proposition.’ This was because saying Israel is a Jewish
Supremacist State would therefore mean all Jews are racial supremacists.
Where
Yoav went wrong was when he argued that
‘To maintain this abusive, white supremacist dynamic,
Zionist propagandists have promoted the anti-Semitic fallacy that Israel is a
Jewish state, which represents Judaism and thus all Jews.
Unfortunately it is a fact, not a fallacy, that Israel
IS a Jewish state. That is what it
calls itself. The question is rather ‘what does it mean to say Israel is a
Jewish state’.
Litvin went on to compound his error by saying that
If
it is accepted, as it is by Zionists, that Israel indeed represents Judaism and
all Jews – an expression of “Jewish supremacy” – then those who are
pro-Palestinian must also reject Jews and Judaism.
This
is a serious error. Israel does not claim to represent Judaism. Certainly it
uses Judaism to legitimise itself, in the process transforming Judaism into an
idolatrous religion that worships land and power, but Israel has never claimed
to represent Judaism. Rather it argues that Zionism is rooted in Judaism and
that the formation of a Jewish state is the culmination of 2,000 years of
Jewish history.
In the 1950s thousands of babies of Yemenite Jews were stolen from hospitals and given to White Jews
Israel
claims to represent the mythical ‘Jewish people’. Being Jewish in Israel is not
a matter of religion but nationality. There are many nationalities in Israel,
since there is no Israeli nationality, but there is only one nationality that matters,
Jewish nationality. In the Population Registry of Israel you can define
yourself as Jewish by nationality and leave religion blank.
Yemenite Jewish children were subject to Nazi-style medical experiments by Israeli doctors in the 1950s and suspected organ thefts
Being
Jewish in Israel entitles you to privileges that non-Jews do not possess. For
example if you are Jewish your land is not liable to be confiscated because you
or one of your family was resident in an ‘enemy’ i.e. Arab state. If you are
Jewish you are expected to serve in the army, and consequently receive welfare
and social security benefits, e.g. student grants, that non-Jews don’t receive.
Litvin
argued that
the framing of Zionism as “white”, not “Jewish” supremacy
enables and strengthens the formation of coalitions between all those opposed
to Zionist settler colonialism in particular and white supremacy in general and
hinders Zionist attempts at sabotage by lobbying cynical accusations of
“anti-Semitism”.
It may well be that framing Zionism as ‘white’ and not
‘Jewish’ would make alliances with for example Black Lives Matter easier
although I’m not convinced. However it would be deeply dishonest to construct
an alliance on such a basis.
That is why I wrote an article for Al Jazeera Why
Israel is a Jewish, not a white supremacist statein February 2019
in which I argued that ‘Recognising Israel as a Jewish supremacist state does not
mean rejecting Jews or Judaism.’ I argued that
‘What
Litvin is doing is substituting wishful thinking for reality and that is never
a good basis on which to construct an argument.’
Police violence against Ethiopian Jews
Yes
Zionism is also racist towards Black
people but that is secondary to its
racism towards non-Jews and Palestinians in particular. I wrote:
It
is of course true that within the Israeli Jewish population, there is
discrimination against the Sephardi/Misrahi Jews and even more against the
Falashas (Ethiopian) Jews. But while intra-Jewish racism exists, the major
division within the Israeli society is not between black and white, but between
Jewish and non-Jewish, and in particular between Israeli Jewish and
Palestinian. That is inescapable.
Litvin made the cardinal
mistake of saying that if Palestinians reject a Jewish state they reject
Judaism.No they reject Jewish
Supremacy.Irish Republicans have never
rejected Protestantism as a religion. On the contrary some of the most famous
Republicans were Protestant, such as Wolfe Tone and
Sir
Roger Casement, executed by the British in 1916 for treason.
Northern Ireland was, in the words of its first Prime Minister James Craig a ‘Protestant State for a Protestant People’.
Did that mean that the opposition of Irish Republicans to the Protestant
Supremacist nature of that state was anti-Protestant? Of course not. What they
objected to was a state of affairs whereby being Protestant entitled you to
privileges that Catholics did not have.
Wolfe Tone, a Protestant leader of the United Irishmen
When we say that Israel is a Jewish Supremacist
state what this means that Israel systematically discriminates against those of
its inhabitants who are not Jewish. Zionism is a matter of race not religion as
Max Nordau explained
at the first Zionist Congress in 1897.
This is not an academic debate. Israel systematically
discriminates against those whose only crime is not being Jewish.The Israeli rabbinate fulfil the same role as
The
Office for Race Classification in South Africa. They are the arbiters of
who is and is not privileged.
That
is why Rabbi Peretz, the head of the Israeli Conversion Authority, ‘rejects
Palestinian applicants without review because of their ethnic origin’. This
is how the Jewish religion has been perverted in order facilitate the
requirements of a racist Jewish state.
Because
Jews are more privileged than non-Jews it is essential to close a loophole
whereby Palestinians might convert to become part of the privileged. There is
no religious or halachic reason to
refuse requests to convert by Palestinians. On the contrary in the Bible the Canaanites
were often converted at the point of a sword. The Jewish religion has
prostituted itself on the altar of Zionism.
B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights group, which
began life in 1989 as a liberal Zionist group, issued a report
a year ago describing Israel as ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan
River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’
Why did B’Tselem describe Israel as a ‘Jewish
supremacist’ state? Because in the work it does supporting Palestinians it is
clear that being Jewish leads to different treatment by the Israeli
authorities. Even Israeli anti-Zionists are treated more gently than
Palestinians.
In the past decade Israel has tried to deport thousands of African refugees from Eritrea and Sudan - their crime? Being Black and not Jewish
Of course within the Israeli Jewish community
it is also true that White Jews discriminate against the Misrahi/Oriental and
Ethiopian Jews. There is no doubt about this. African Jews have been barred
from even entering Israel because they are not recognised as Jews.
In the case of the Abayudaya
group of African Jews, the Jewish Agency, the arm of the World Zionist
Organisation, had recognised them as Jews but the Israeli government
nonetheless barred them from entry.
Children from the Hebrew Israelite community
There
is also the case of the Black Hebrews who came from the USA in the 1960s. Many
of them were originally deported back to the USA. A group were allowed to live
near Dimona in Southern Israel but earlier last year the Israeli government
unveiled a plan
to deport them back to the United States.
Zionism
has always had considerable difficulty accepting that non-White people can be
Jewish. Arthur Ruppin, the most important figure in the pre-state Yishuv, considered
that Arab Jews were racially inferior to European Jews because they were Semitic!
Ruppin was an ardent devotee of Eugenics and the racial sciences and he visited
Professor Hans Gunther, who the Nazis had imposed as Professor of Racial
Sciences at Jenna University to have a friendly chat about their shared topic
of interest.
The Hebrew Israelite community welcome sign
But
here is the rub. Black Jews may complain bitterly about their treatment by
White Jews but that does not make them express solidarity with the
Palestinians. What they are fighting for is equality with White Jews in other
words an equal role in the oppression of the Palestinians. They serve in the
army, they are entitled to ‘Jewish national’ land (93% of all Israeli land) and
other privileges that White Jews enjoy. What they don’t want is to be reduced
to the status of Palestinians. They are the ‘poor white trash’ of Israel.
Ronnie
Barkan, who was one of the founders of Israel’s Boycott from Within, appeared on Resistance TV last year and
claimed, on the basis of my blog article that I had changed my position. He was
wrong and on Wednesday we will be debating the issue.
If Israel is primarily a Jewish Supremacist State it is ALSO a White
Supremacist State
In February 2019, in response to an article
on Al Jazeera by Yoav Litvinon ‘The
Zionist fallacy of ‘Jewish supremacy’ I wrote a responseWhy
Israel is a Jewish, not a white supremacist state. In retrospect I may
have bent the stick too far because yes, Israel is a White Supremacist State
but the primary divide is between Jews and Palestinians not Black and White
Jews. Litvin was right to say that:
Where Litvin went wrong was to say
that ‘Zionist propagandists have promoted the anti-Semitic fallacy that Israel
is a Jewish state, which represents Judaism and thus all Jews.’
Of course it is anti-Semitic to say that Israel is a state of all Jews, with
the implication that all Jews, even anti-Zionists ‘belong’ in Israel. But it is
also true, as a matter of fact that Israel is a Jewish state in so far as
Israel is a Jewish Supremacist State.Just as Northern Ireland was a Protestant Supremacist State, Israel
gives privileges to Jews, all Jews, that it doesn’t give to Palestinians.
Unfortunately
Litvin conflated two things. Israel as a Jewish State does not imply that
Israel is a state representing Judaism but it does mean that Israel is a Jewish
state, in a racially supremacist sense. Hence why Litvin’s statement that
‘If it is
accepted, as it is by Zionists, that Israel indeed represents Judaism and all
Jews – an expression of “Jewish supremacy” – then those who are pro-Palestinian
must also reject Jews and Judaism.
No state represents a particular
religion per se. However many states use religion, as in the case of Saudi
Arabia and Iran, to legitimise repression of their inhabitants. Judaism like
all religions, is not a fixed body of doctrines.It changes as society changes and Jewish
religion has changed politically over the last century from an anti-Zionist to
a Zionist position.
Hence why Litvin made the cardinal
mistake of saying that if Palestinians reject a Jewish state they reject
Judaism.No they reject Jewish
Supremacy.Irish Republicans have never
rejected Protestantism as a religion. On the contrary some of the most famous
Republicans were Protestant, such as Wolfe Tone and
Sir
Roger Casement, executed by the British in 1916 for treason.
Wolfe Tone
So it was necessary for me to write a
corrective to Litvin’s article where I argued that ‘Zionism is certainly tainted by white supremacy, but this is a
secondary, not primary, feature’.
This is seen very clearly in the
following articles.Yes Black Israelis
such as the Ethiopian Jews and the Black Israelite communities in the Negev are
discriminated against vis a vis Jews but
not in terms of the Palestinians. Indeed the struggle against discrimination against
Black Israeli Jews is also a
struggle to be recognised as equal partners
in the oppression of the Palestinians.
There are very few Black Jews in Israel
who recognise that they share a joint struggle with the Palestinians against Zionism.
On the contrary they seek to serve in the Israeli army which is in occupation
of part of Palestine. This is what was known in the United States as the ‘poor
White mentality.’ Black Jews are Israel’s poor Whites.
Underneath Gavin Lewis’ article is an
article in Ha’aretz detailing the struggle of the Black Hebrew Israelite
community to be recognised as full citizens of the Israeli state.Again they do not see their struggle as
complementary to that of the Palestinians.
In
the face of postwar condemnation of Western conquest and apartheid domination
of countries such as Rhodesia and South Africa, as well as a more recent global
tide of Black Lives Matter consciousness, Israel has, via recent Western
political media’s ideological reengineering, escaped scrutiny for its systemic
racist colonial construction, even when its victims are Jewish people of color.
Even when reports of its racism escape this ideological censorship, examples of
racism in Israel are treated as isolated incidents, rather than systemic
characteristics of the entire racist regime.
In
2015, African-American Jewish mother Idit Malka and her young son attempted to
visit Israel as part of an extended family celebration. According to the Jewish
news agency Mondoweiss, “Malka
was not even able to make it out of Ben-Gurion Airport. She and her 10-year-old
child were, upon arrival, promptly detained in a holding cell for close to 48
hours.”(1)
Both Mondoweissand
the Jerusalem Post reported
that, before being deported, an Israeli woman official screamed at Malka that “Eretz Yisrael isn’t a country for cushim [a racist
Hebrew slur for Black people]”[2]
In
the period prior to her visit, Malka had come to believe that, as a Black Jew,
she was also permitted to regard Israel as a homeland. What she believes now as
a Black woman having experienced Israeli racism is open to speculation.
However, had she actually succeeded in going on to spend protracted time in the
country, and perhaps experienced its ongoing practices, it might have caused
her to rigorously revise her opinion.
Israel
has subjected Black Jews to forced contraceptive injections. In 2013, Haaretz and the Times of Israel put
the figure of suppressed Black Jewish reproduction at 50 percent. [3]
That is, even according to Israel’s own media at the time, over 130,000 Black
Jews have had, as a matter of institutional practice, their potential
reproduction forcibly curbed by up to half.[4]
Invoking the horrors of Nazi practices and illuminating the reality of
modern-day eugenics, even Forbes
magazine described it as “forced (if temporary) sterilization.”[5]
In
2009, Israel’s Ynetnews
revealed that there were Israeli neighborhoods operating whites-only housing
polices—designed specifically to keep out Black Ethiopian Jews—citing the town
of Ashkelon as an example.[6]
The irony of white Western settlers keeping Black Jews out of the town is that,
prior to the Nakba, Ashkelon had a ten-thousand-strong Indigenous Arab
population. In 2012, Israel’s Jerusalem
Post was still citing whites-only housing practices. One resident
in the city of Kiryat Malachi was cited by the news outlet as supporting the
racist practice, proclaiming that “a good Ethiopian is an Ethiopian in a
grave.”[7]
In
2017, the Daily Beast reported
that Tel Aviv was racially segregating its kindergartens to keep Black and
white toddlers apart.[8]
In 2018, Israel’s Haaretz
further confirmed this segregation of children. [9]Similarly,
for years, Israel has rejected so-called Black blood donations as “unclean,” which on occasion has caused race riots.’[10]
In 2013, the Times of Israel reported
that this restriction was even imposed on the blood donations of the unusually
prominent Ethiopian Jewish politician Pnina Tamanu Shata.[11]
In
2016, the U.S. San
Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper reported that “over three hundred Black Jews have announced
their intention to refuse any military order to report for reserve duty,
accusing the Israeli government of state-sponsored racism against citizens of
Ethiopian origin.”12 This widespread attitude was hardly surprising given the climate and consciousness
around race in the country. For example, in 2015, numerous news agencies,
including Ynetnews, the Times of Israel,
and the Jerusalem Post,
reported a police attack on an Ethiopian Jew doing his national service, who
was even in his Israeli Defense Forces uniform at the time of the assault.
Hundreds protested when it was announced that police would escape prosecution.[13]
One
of the marketed excuses for Israel’s colonial conquest of Palestine is that the
Jewish white Western invaders supposedly shared an identity with Indigenous
Jews of the region. Yet, in terms of colonial racism, Jewish white settlers
conquering Palestine clearly regarded themselves as an elevated, superior,
separate Western ethnic group, because among their first victims were actually
Indigenous Middle Eastern Jews. In 2017, it came to light that a large number
of children who had been brought up by settler parents were actually
Yemeni-Jewish. Blood tests demonstrated that they had been stolen from Yemeni
parents who had been regarded as too culturally primitive to successfully rear
their own children.
As
the Jewish news organization Mondoweiss
revealed:
Known as the
Yemenite Children Affair, in the first decade after the establishment of the
state of Israel in 1948, there was a systematic kidnapping of newborn Yemenite
children, carried out by Israeli hospitals and government institutions.
Mothers, who often were in Israel for a short time and did not speak Hebrew,
would enter hospitals or other state facilities to give birth. Once the child
was born medical staff told the parents the child died.… The babies who went
missing, parents claim, were given away to childless Ashkenazi families (Jews
of European descent–the dominant ethnic group in Israel at the time).[14]
However,
as Mondoweiss further
pointed out, the complete extent of settler crimes against the Indigenous
Yemeni Jews also included eugenics-like human experimentation: “a Knesset committee followed up by
confirming earlier this month that Yemenite babies died during the 1950s after
state medical institutions conducted experiments on them.”[15]
The
BBC refused to publicize this major scandal, but the un-broadcast “The Yemenite Children Affair” story can still be found buried on its
website. In it, its reports confirm that “there
are healthy babies who died from an experimental treatment. It’s a crime, it
was on purpose, and it led to their death.”[16]
The
BBC’s hidden un-broadcast report also concedes, as part of Israel’s overall
strategy, that
“post-mortem examinations were carried
out on children, who were then buried in mass graves in violation of Jewish
tradition, the special Knesset committee on the disappearance of children
heard. In some cases the children’s hearts were removed for US doctors, who
were studying why there was almost no heart disease in Yemen.”[17]
Obviously,
human experimentation, like the forced sterilization of Black Jews, is
reminiscent of Nazi policies. Strategically, this inescapable comparison is
something Israel forcibly tries—most often through the imposed International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition—to suppress via the false ideological
characterization of this analysis as anti-Semitic; in effect, deliberately
exempting Israel from scrutiny for Nazi-type offences. This, regardless of the
fact, that those who actually fought the Nazis vowed to be ever-vigilant about
scrutinizing the potential reoccurrence of such fascist practices, wherever
they may arise.
There
is little space in this article to deal with religious persecution in Israel.
But it is worth reporting that during the 2012–13 soccer season, the Russian
owner of Beitar Jerusalem football club signed two young Chechen Muslim
strikers. Because of their religion, they were routinely described as “dirty Arabs,” which in itself says a lot
about the status and treatment of Indigenous Arabs in apartheid Israel.
Literally thousands of Israelis drove the athletes out of the club and country
in a campaign of intimidation and occasional violence, depicted in the 2016
documentary Forever Pure.
Clearly,
Israel is not, as it chooses to market itself, simply a Jewish nation, but a
white-settler state that happens to be Jewish, well deserving of the prefix apartheid attached
to its name by many, including the United Nations and other human rights
observers such as Nobel Peace Prize-winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy
Carter. The horrors listed here have all been perpetrated against Black and
Indigenous Jewish people of color, including visitors to the country. However,
in scale and number, these practices are outsized by the equivalently racist,
lethal, tortuous, and entrenched racism against the Indigenous Palestinians.
Sadly, if even “Other” Jews can be victims of Israel’s racist oppression,
nothing spares Palestinians.
The
global cover-up of Israel’s systemic racist oppression has had enormous
ramifications for domestic Western democracy. In 2020, Keir Starmer, the new
neoliberal leader of the UK Labour Party, sacked his shadow education
spokeswomen Rebecca Long Bailey. Long Bailey’s crime was that, after the
killing of George Floyd, she retweeted a British corporate media story
referring to how Israel had trained U.S. police departments responsible for
Black Lives Matter offenses. Astonishingly, Starmer spun this as an
anti-Semitic Jewish conspiracy theory. Despite the numerous available
mainstream sources citing these police training events, no corporate media news
outlet, including the one that ran the original story, contradicted Starmer.
Incredibly,
after images of George Floyd being fatally choked were published, Starmer’s
first instinct was to use the African American’s death to propagandize for an
apartheid country—where many non-tourist areas would likely have been dangerous
for Floyd and his family, and entire towns in which the Floyd family would have
struggled to so much as rent a decent room. Perhaps part of Starmer’s
motivation was the $62,000 donation he received from a pro-Israel lobbyist,
revealed by the Electronic
Intifada this year. Significantly, during the leadership election,
Starmer refused to come clean about his campaign funding. In 2016,
the UK government and corporate media warned the LGBTQ+ community about
potential dangers of visiting North Carolina. Indicative of the second-class
racial status of Black Britons, neither Starmer nor other members of the elite
professional political and media class have warned them of the potential
worst-case scenarios of visiting non-tourist areas of Israel.
Similarly,
in the United States, CNN fired African-American academic Dr. Marc Lamont Hill
as a contributor after he publicly expressed support for Palestinians. Why
should Lamont Hill, as a Black man, say positive things about white-settler
colonialism, particularly a white-settler society responsible for the sort of
practices listed here? Dr. Lamont Hill has U.S. citizenship, a U.S. passport,
and the right to vote. Yet, apparently, he is “only” an African American. Even
in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement, the entire U.S. media
establishment finds it appropriate to take the side of what is, fundamentally,
merely a foreign country, over an African American’s free speech right to
articulate an antiracist sensibility. Clearly, Israeli Zionism is a racist
threat, the influence of which is not restricted to just its own invented
borders.
Afterword: Israel
and White-Settler Societies
The
evils that accompany and result from white-settler conquest should have by now
been dumped into the rubbish bin of history. Many on the political right, and
even the political center, pretend that the ramifications of colonial
holocausts and land theft are no longer with us. Despite this, structural
inequalities remain the current lived experiences of many. If you were a Black
family in a Western society in the twentieth-century postwar era, you would
have found that much of the United States was out of bounds to you because of
segregation. As recently as 1967, if you were a mixed-race family, around
seventeen states—more than a third of the United States—was off-limits because
of anti-miscegenation laws (for decades after, mixed-race relations were still
rarely permitted to be represented in U.S. popular media). White Australian and
white New Zealand immigration policies were designed specifically to keep out
the British Black Commonwealth and other Black nationals. Similarly, Rhodesia
and apartheid South Africa were no place for Black people, be they arriving
immigrant visitors or Indigenous Africans.
Yet,
in twenty-first-century, in the form of Israel, Black and Indigenous peoples of
the world are expected to put up with variants of these traditional
white-settler offenses. And, alarmingly, even parts of the left are threatened
into exempting Zionism from the sort of critique and anticolonial resistance
leveled against other white-settler societies.
About Gavin Lewis
Gavin Lewis is a freelance
Black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in Australia,
Britain, Canada, and the United States on film, media, politics, cultural
theory, race, and representation. He has taught critical theory and film and
cultural studies at a number of British universities.
[3]Some sources
make differing claims about the size of the demographic, however, in 2015, the
BBC listed the demographic as 130,000 (Yossi Mekelberg, “The Plight of Ethiopian Jews in Israel,” BBC, May 24, 2015). By 2019, the Economist was using a figure of 150,000—presumably the
effect of the lifting the contraception policy (“The Killing of a Black Jew Sparks Protests in Israel,” Economist, July 11, 2019).
Scores of community members had
been living in Israel for years illegally when they received deportation
orders. They still hope they can remain in the place they believe God has sent
them.
A member of the Hebrew Israelite community Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz
The Hebrew Israelite community in
the Negev town of Dimona never thought the day would come when the authorities
would order scores of them to leave Israel.
In fact, they were so sure about
their legal status in Israel that in 2015, at their own initiative, they gave
the Interior Ministry a list of community members living in the country under
the radar and lacking any legal status. Five years later, however, they found
that the government had made its own use of the list, sending deportation
notices to around half of those on it. There has been no decision about the
rest, but they will almost certainly face the same fate.
After their request for legal
status was rejected, 45 members of the community – 24 of whom were born in
Israel – filed a lawsuit against the deportation orders. A few days ago the
suit was rejected, meaning
they must leave the country within two weeks. They, however, don’t intend
to do that and are planning a court battle that is expected to delay the
expulsions. A few have declared they'd rather to die than leave the place to
which they believe God sent them to serve him.
The Hebrew Israelite community
first took shape in the United States in the 1960s around the figure of Ben
Carter, who later adopted the name Ben Ammi Ben-Israel and led the group until
his death in 2014. At the end of the 1960s, members of the community began
settling in Israel, mainly in Dimona and another Negev town, Arad.
Children
from the Hebrew Israelite community Credit: Ofer Vaknin
At first the Israeli government
considered them a cult and planned to deport them, but information reaching the
Interior Ministry warned that the group might commit mass suicide. The orders
were rescinded, and attempts to deport them were never resumed, as officials
grew anxious about how deportation would affect Israel’s image or the status of
American Jews. On the other hand, nothing was done to regularize the Hebrew Israelite’
status over the decades.
In 1985, Carter said that if the
government would make them citizens, he would promise not to allow any more
members to reside in Israel illegally. In response, community members who had
resided in Israel for at least a decade and appeared on the group’s membership
roles were granted legal status. Initially, they were granted
temporary-resident status and in 2003 it was upgraded to permanent residence on
humanitarian grounds.
The Interior Ministry says that
permanent residents can apply for citizenship but only if they renounce their
American citizenship. The Hebrew Israelites who qualify have chosen to remain
permanent residents. The exceptions are family members who served in the Israel
Defense Forces, who can obtain citizenship without surrendering their foreign
citizenship.
In recent years, the community
has kept a low profile. Israeli authorities have no idea how many members it
has. “I am aware of about 2,000 community
members, but anything is possible. There may be thousands that we don’t know
about,” Yoel Lipovetsky, head of the Population and Immigration Authority,
told Haaretz.
Reports appearing in the past in
Haaretz and in the Maariv news site point to a population of about 3,000. The
fact that the government doesn’t know testifies to its lack of interest in the
community. As a result, scores of them have been living in Israel, in some
cases for decades, with no legal status or action taken against them. Some
community members have lived
in Israel long enough to become grandparents.
The
Hebrew Israelite community welcome sign: 'Welcome to the village of peace' Credit:
Moti Milord
Hasida Bat Yisrael, 45, says she
was born in Israel and lived here until she was 14, when her family left the
country. “I always wanted to come back,
and when I was the right age I returned,” she says. She was 25 and the
mother of two. Her husband, Joe, came to Israel after her, and since then
they’ve had four more children. Bat Yisrael is slated for deportation, along
with all her children, since none of them have any legal status in Israel. She
refused to be photographed lest the authorities identify her.
Living without legal status is
very difficult. The status-less cannot open a bank account or receive a salary,
and they generally work within the community or get paid in cash. They must pay
privately for medical care because they can’t be HMO members. Essentially, they
get no services from the state authorities. This vacuum is filled by the
community which provides them with economic assistance if necessary.
“To live
without status is very tense,” says Bat Yisrael. She says that
after the birth of one of her children (in a home birth, as is traditional in
the community), she went to the hospital to have herself and the baby checked
out, “and for the one night I stayed
there I spent 10,000 shekels.” Today, she says, “My children see their friends in the community who have status doing
things that can’t do – go to all kinds of place, or do the army.”
Bat Yisrael has a hard time
accepting the Interior Ministry’s decision:
“My life here is the only thing I know.
I thought I would get citizenship, since I was born here, but they rejected
me. I have a lot to give to the state, but because they are constantly placing
obstacles, I can’t break through. I am willing to do anything to stay here;
leaving the country is not an option for me. Even if the court makes a decision
that allows the state to deport me, I will continue to fight. This is my home,
and I am part of this country’s DNA. We come in peace, and want to serve God
from Israel.”
Estelle Rivers, 73, has lived in
Israel since 2003. She worked in the community, but also volunteered outside
it, as an English teacher and amateur singer. She says she converted to Judaism
in 1978, but document testifying to this were never submitted to the
authorities. Rivers says her daughter lived with her, but the difficulties of
living without legal status led her to return to the United States, where she
lives as a Jew.
“We’re here for spiritual reasons,” she says. “We have given our lives, our blood and everything we have to the state.
There is no conceivable reason for the authorities to do to us what they are
doing.” When asked why, then, the state seeks to expel members of the
community, she opines that “our skin
color plays a role here” and adds: “The
authorities may also feel that we are threatening the religious hegemony, but
there is nothing we have done that would make them feel that way.”
Members
of the community working in a sewing workshopCredit: Moti Milord
“I can’t leave this country,” Rivers declares.
“If they force me to leave it will kill me, it is a
death sentence for me. For me this community represents the way the God of
Israel wants us to be, the way the God of Israel wants us to treat each other
and the way the God of Israel wants us to connect to this country. My soul is
in the earth, my heart is in this earth. To be here is my supreme happiness. The
court cannot decide to deport us, it cannot.”
Cynthia Harriet Clark, 56, came
to Israel when she was 18 and met her husband here. They had eight children,
one of whom died. In 2007, Clark traveled to the United States to care for her
ailing mother, and when she sought to return she was denied entry. She lived
separately from her children until she was able to return to Israel in 2019.
Her two adult children are permanent residents, and she says that the status of
the others is currently being processed. Clark, whose daughter Atalia served in
the IDF, has now applied for Israeli citizenship on the strength of her
daughter’s service. According to the Population Authority, she was asked to
provide “original and verified”
documentation of her claim within 45 days, but did not do so, so it was decided
to deport her.
“We
always bring the forms they ask us for, but we are constantly told ‘we need
something else, we need something else,’” says Atalia Clark, 32, a mother
of two herself.
“If they deport my mother, it will break us. I am a
single parent, and she helps me a lot, my children have connected with her. For
many years we did not have a mother here, and it destroyed us; when she left,
my little brother was two-and-a-half years old. For my first birth, she wasn’t
here. We don’t want her to leave again.”
Dawn Hercules came to Israel in
1998 and gave birth to eight children here, the youngest of whom is eight years
old. All of Dawn’s children are destined for deportation along with her, even
though they were born in Israel. Her eldest daughter, Yelital, 23, has lived in
Israel all her life without status. When she tried to enlist in the army she
was refused, and she studied occupational therapy at a college using a
fictitious ID number.
In April, Yelital told Haaretz
about the despair aroused by the deportation order. “I was shocked when they did not accept our appeal,” she now says.
“I thought they would want to regulate our status,
especially for those born here. I have not thought yet about what will happen
next, if the court decides that the state is allowed to deport us. I want to
stay optimistic and hope that everything will work out. I’m not even thinking
about a reality in which we’ll have to leave the country.”
