Humanity or Zionism

Talk about children overboard:

"Israel will expel 400 native-born children of non-Jewish foreign workers to help safeguard the country's Jewish identity... Announcing the decision on Sunday, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the new policy was also aimed at halting the flow of illegal immigrants across Israel's border with Egypt. 'This decision is influenced by two main considerations, of humanity and Zionism', Mr Netanyahu said. 'On the one hand, this problem is a humanitarian problem - we all feel and understand the hearts of children - but, on the other hand, there are Zionist considerations and ensuring the character of the state of Israel'." (Israel warned of backlash for expelling 400 children, Jason Koutsoukis, Sydney Morning Herald, 3/8/10)

Well put, Bibi! Anybody who knows anything about political Zionism knows that, for Zionists, preserving the religio-racial purity of the tribe trumps humanitarian considerations every time. Whether it's ethnically cleansing Palestine to ensure a Jewish majority in 1948* or obsessing about the Palestinian birthrate today**, stocking the country with the right kind of people and maintaining that Jewish demographic edge is everything.

[*"Only a state with at least 80% of Jews is a viable and stable state." (Ben-Gurion, quoted in Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p 48); **"If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens. The Declaration of Independence said Israel should be a Jewish and democratic state, but to ensure the Jewish character was not engulfed by demography, it is necessary to ensure a Jewish majority." (Benjamin Netanyahu, quoted in Netanyahu: Israel's Arabs are the real demographic threat, Alon & Benn, Haaretz, 18/12/03)]

Now forget foreign or Palestinian children, the Zionist obsession with a Jewish, as opposed to an inclusive, non-discriminatory, pluralist, state has even come before Jewish children. The shameful story of Ben-Gurion's blocking of plans to evacuate orphaned Jewish children to England and France after the liberation of Europe in 1945 has been ably documented in Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Story of Jews in Displaced Persons Camps & their Forced Role in the Founding of Israel (2004), and is reflected in the famous quote attributed to Ben-Gurion by Zionist scholar Martin Gilbert: "If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel" (Israel was everything, New York Times, 21/6/87)

But the madness doesn't end there. How about one bunch of delusional Zionists deciding that another bunch don't quite make the grade?: "Hillary Rubin felt she was living out her ancestors' dream when she decided to move to Israel in 2006. Now she says she is being forced to leave the country to fulfill her own dream - getting married. 'Zionism runs in my family', the Detroit native says, adding that her grandfather's uncle was Nahum Sokolow*. But after filing for a wedding license and being told she needed to prove the Jewishness of her maternal lineage for four generations, she is wondering whether she made the right decision in immigrating to a Jewish state that doubts her Jewishness." (Sokolow's niece 'not Jewish enough' to marry here, Raphael Ahren, Haaretz, 30/7/10)

[*President World Zionist Congress, 1931-35]

Only in Israel.