I’d like to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, with this photograph of modern day Israelis, who came to a hilltop overlooking Gaza to watch the IDF soldiers do their work.
I’ve yet to encounter a WWII photograph of German citizens cheerleading as their soldiers rampaged through their neighbors’ homes.
Of course, this situation is different. These Israelis are hoping to settle, or resume their illegal settlements, the occupied territories, as soon as enough of the Palestinians are driven out or exterminated.
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust vow “never again,” but it only applies to them.
Who are these people then? Israel has less than 7 1/2 million people of which 20% are Arab. That means that the Jewish population is about 5 1/2 million. Where did they come from then?
Palestinians are denied the right to return to their lands taken away from them by progressive waves of Jewish immigrants, but in the 1990s alone, 772,000 of the new 956,000 incoming immigrants came from Russia! You can see easily why Israel is called a colonial settler state with this figure.
Why were these Russians allowed immigration into lands already in dispute between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis? Jewish Russians were not exactly living under some grand yoke in Russia despite the fact that there is some discrimination there. It was in fact a joint policy decision of the Israeli and US government that allowed this new Right Wing influx of Eastern European immigrants into the region, and these new immigrants are now used as a battering ram of US policy throughout the entire region. They could have stayed easily outside the region without having had to suffer in any horrible manner. Instead they received the privilege, denied to others, to immigrate away from Russia, their actual homeland.
These new immigrants are now a growing part of the so-called Israeli Defense Forces in fact. It is their faces that enforces the very real discrimination used against Palestinians.
These Russians would have most likely wanted to immigrate to the United States like most Russians who wanted to flee the chaos of poverty that their Cold War beat country had to endure. But being Jewish, the US and Israel saw an opportunity to reinforce its reactionary policies in the ‘Holy Land’, so they opened the gates to those who wanted to take yet more Arab land from the indigenous population, many of whom were already refugees from previous thefts of their homes and property.
That, in short, is the real story about Israel, ‘the Jewish State’. Not a pretty picture.
For immigration statistics, see the following web site…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah