First They Came for the Arabs, but Now They Come for the Slavs.

Discrimination in Israel is a sure thing
The long history of attempts to establish a safe Jewish state in Palestine within the scope of the colonial inheritance of Great Britain and France is over. The Palestinian intifada has finished off this illusion. So many dreams shattered!

The Jews went to Palestine, hoping that they would have a quiet life in their historic fatherland. They had only one wish: to live well in the country that swore to protect them, yet this was during the 1970s and 1980s of the past century.

Now, the situation in Israel is different. The country is waging war with the Arab world, and defeat in this war means death. Israel is spending millions on arms, building a defensive wall to protect itself against terrorists, ect. The Jews are threatening Arabs with nuclear weapons, but the Arabs have a little something going their way as well.

Israeli sociologists have calculated that Jews will make up only 45% of the entire population of Palestine by 2020. Eight million Arabs will live in Israel by that time, on the West Bank, and in the Gaza Strip. The expected number of the Jewish population will not exceed 6.3 million people. This is connected both with one of the world’s highest birth rates among Palestinians and with the reverse immigration from Israel. Israeli Jews are decreasing in their numbers each year.

The state has forgotten its promises. Furthermore, the state is limiting its own citizens' rights. This concerns immigrants from the former USSR.

Here is a recent example. A group of young Israelis, Russians by nationality, wanted to organize a Slavic union in their new fatherland. However, Israeli officials refused to register such an organization. The initiators of the Slavic union claimed that nobody gave them a reason to explain why there cannot be a union of Slavs in Israel. They said that there were thousands public organizations in Israel, including ones based on ethnic principles.

There are Jews, Arabs, and immigrants from the East and West living in Israel. They all have their own organizations, both political and public. However, there is not group to stand up for the interests of Slavs, despite of the fact that there are so many Russian Jews living in Israel.

It is common knowledge that over a million people immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. But how many gentiles are there among them? About 250 thousand. The spiritual leader of the ultra-religious Shas party, Rabbi Ovadja Joseph, said that there are very few "real" Jews among the Russians. The rabbi definitely means those Jews that have Jewish mothers. Jewish fathers or even Jewish grandfathers give a person the right to "return" to Israel. Nevertheless, this person will not be considered a Jew in Israel.

These facts were a true revelation for many people who moved to Israel from the former USSR being “Jews because of their fathers.” They were very surprised to find out that their nationality was Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian, etc, depending on the nationality of their mothers.

Those gentiles in Israel (there are up to 600 thousand of them there) have "Slavic" roots, even if they came to Israel from Moldavia, Azerbaijan, or Kazakhstan (non-Slavic nations). Gentiles in Israel suffer from discrimination.

Dmitry Litvinovich PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov