Democratic Palestine : 38 (ص 17)
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- Democratic Palestine : 38 (ص 17)
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migration
Perspective
has to be the basic task of Israel and Zionism»(quoted by
Kanaan, pp.115-6). Desperately seeking more immigration,
Ben Gurion told a cabinet meeting on August 15th, 1948:
«Generations have not suffered and struggled to see only
800,000 Jews in this country. It is the duty of the present
generation to redeem the Jews in Arab and European coun-
tries»(quoted by Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel?,
1969, p.197).
In August 1949, Ben Gurion said to a group of US
Zionists visiting Israel: «Although we realized our dream of
establishing a Jewish State, we are still at the beginning.
Today, there are only 900,000 Jews in Israel, while the gre-
ater part of the Jewish people are still abroad. It consists of
bringing all Jews to Israel»(quoted by Lilienthal, p.191). To
Soviet Jewish immigrants outside their West Bank settlement
neibes
the Zionists, this meant forcing Jews to come to Israel by
any means. In this vein, an editorial in Davar, the news-
paper of the governing Mapai party (Labor), stated:«I shall
not be ashamed to confess that, if I had power, as I have
the will, I would select a score of efficient young men -
intelligent, decent, devoted to our ideal and burning with
the desire to help redeem Jews, and I would send them to
the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self-satisfac-
tion. The task of these young men would be to disguise
themselves as non-Jews and, acting upon the brutal
Zionism, plague these Jews with anti-Semitic slogans such as
‘Bloody Jews,’ ‘Jews go to Palestine,’ and similar ‘in-
timacies.’ I can vouch that the results, in terms of a consid-
erable immigration to Israel from these countries, would be
ten thousand times larger than the results brought by
thousands of emissaries who have been preaching for
decades to deaf ears»(quoted by Lilienthal, pp.207-8).
In fact, Zionist leaders spared no efforts to achieve the
liquidation of the diaspora, sometimes by propaganda about
a better future for those who come to Israel, at times by ter-
rorist acts for those who refused. Submitting a report to the
Zionist-controlled American Jewish Conference about how
to deal with Jews who refuse to immigrate to Palestine,
Chaplain Klausner said: «I am convinced that the people
must be forced to go to Palestine. They are not prepared to’
understand their own position nor the promises of the
future. To them, an American dollar looms as the greatest
of objectives. By ‘force’ I suggest a program. It is not a new
program. It was used before, and most recently. It was used
in the evacuation of the Jews from Poland and in the story
of the ‘Exodus’»(quoted by Lilienthal, p.194).
Having failed to secure massive immigration of
Ashkenazi Jews from Europe and America, the Zionist
movement began to exert heavy pressure, including force,
on Jews living in Arab countries. In Baghdad, Zionist agents
planted bombs in coffee houses and bookshops to force the
reluctant Iraqi Jews to emigrate. In June 1953, Iraqi Foreign
Minister Tewfiq Sweidi told Alfred Lilienthal: «At the end
of the first 11 months only 30,000 (Jews) had registered for
emigration. One of the buses carrying Jews to the airport
was bombed - Zionists were accused of this act - and within
two months more than 80,000 had expressed a desire to
depart»(Lilienthal, p.199). Ilan Halevi writes: «between
1948 and 1967, one million ‘Arab Jews’ came from
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and
Lebanon to Palestine,» as a result of the Zionist cam-
paign(A History of the Jews, Ancient and Modern, 1987,
p.197).
Immigration limitations
After the influx of Arab Jews, which occurred mainly in
the fifties, Zionist immigration began to stagnate. In spite of
their appeals, Zionists were unable to fulfill their aim of «in-
gathering all Jews;» only a fraction of Jews in the world
chose to live in Israel. True, there was an upsurge of immig-
ration after the Israeli victory in the 1967 war, but it soon
began to decline due to a number of factors, in particular
after the 1973 war. In the context of the general unwilling-
ness of Jews living in Western countries to immigrate to
Israel, much of the subsequent discussion of immigration has
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