Visitors to the Facebook page of Aliyah and Integration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata are welcomed by a colorful post about "Operation Rock of Israel" to bring here the last Jews of Ethiopia.
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This presentation is a mirage. The last Jews of Ethiopia who wanted to make aliyah to Israel did so many years ago and since then a cynical campaign has been ongoing, organized by lobbyists and politicians to bring to Israel more and more Ethiopian citizens who are not Jewish, not even by the permissive definition set by the Law of Return. The functionaries make a living from "saving Jews," the politicians gain new voters by direct import, and the State of Israel pays huge sums of money for the dubious right to undermine the country's Jewish character.
All recent Israeli governments have given in to populism and political extortion and have sinned by adopting this risible practice. To bypass the Law of Return, the immigrants are brought to Israel through the Entry into Israel Law. Every few years the last plane of Ethiopian immigrants lands at Ben Gurion Airport and the politicians publish celebratory declarations about the "completion of bringing the seed of Israel" to the country.
And then it all begins over again. It is a never-ending ritual because the new immigrants, who are the relatives of more veteran immigrants, have their own relatives who have been left behind. And when they come to Israel, they too will have relatives left in Ethiopia – and so on, over and over again.
Thus, in a march of folly, with Israeli flags and professionally directed emotional images, the chain of false aliyah has been going on for years, with no end. Since there are 120 million people in Ethiopia, all of whom – as is the case for all of humanity – are someone's relatives, many of them will inevitably be able to claim – even if not always to prove – that they have some kind of family connection to Jews. The question thus arises, Where does the boundary lie? In 2003, the state brought to Israel Falashmura who it had been determined were matrilineal descendants of Jews.
Here, the saga should have come to an end. But since then, the parameters have been expanded, again and again, the criteria have been eased under political pressures, and thousands of citizens of Ethiopia have been brought to Israel after the demands regarding their Jewish origin became ever-more fragile.
One has to admit that the images from Addis Ababa and Gundar are touching. Wearing a kippah and standing with a prayer book in a synagogue is indeed photogenic. But that doesn't make still doesn't make you Jewish. A former Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia, Avi Granot, wrote at the time: "In my visits to the compound, In those cases where my visit was not planned, I didn't find them carrying on a Jewish lifestyle.
The crowded morning prayers occurred only on pre-announced visits. Many of the poor residents of Ethiopia expect to find a better life out in the world and Israel is a desired destination." Even if we assume that since then, things have changed drastically and the people waiting in the camp have begun to live a truly Jewish life, it is clear that they rediscovered their Judaism – which is highly doubtful and is not recognized by the Law of Return – after it transpired that it comes with flight tickets to the West and the world of plenty.
At this stage in the article, the self-righteous scream "racism!" is already ringing in my ears, and here is the place to say unequivocally that the time has come to change and drastically restrict the Law of Return which is misused by tens of thousands of Eastern European immigrants to Israel, as revealed by Raviv Druker in an investigative report on Channel 13.
The law in its present format is used to provide eligibility for Aliya to people who have no practical connection to Judaism and an entire industry has emerged in Russia issuing Israeli passports. In many cases, these are people who do not even wish to come to live in Israel – they receive their passports and fly off to the next destination at the first available opportunity. The State of Israel must fight opportunistic immigration, not encourage it, no matter whether the source of immigration is Africa, Europe, or any other continent.
Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not the state of relatives of the third or 10th degree of members of the Jewish people. One can say loudly and clearly without shame and without having to surrender to post-Zionist propaganda that seeks to intentionally create confusion between the terms, nationalism, and nationality in order to dress any legitimate expression of nationalism in a false cloak of racism.
Continuing to bring tens of thousands of people who do not in any way constitute part of the Jewish nation does not merely undermine the Jewish character of the State of Israel, it plays directly into the hands of Palestinian propaganda that claims that the Jewish people are an invented nation and therefore the Jews have no right to a state of their own.
Despite all of the above, from the moment anyone lands in Israel legally, it is incumbent on the state and Israeli society to treat them as a part of us. It does not matter at all whether we thought before they disembarked from the plane that they should not have been allowed to come here. From that moment they are full Israeli citizens with equal rights and equal duties who have the privilege to come to a country where one can hold an open dialogue on the most sensitive issues and which has no place or tolerance for racism – nor for a culture of shutting people up.
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