Updating Shmaryahu Levin

I'm sure you've all heard Shmaryahu Levin's witty definition of a Zionist as a Jew who gives money to another Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.

Well, in light of the following two news items, it's pretty obvious that matters have become a tad more complicated since Levin's day (1867-1935) - along the lines of the proverbial left hand having absolutely no bloody idea whatever what the right's doing:

"United Israel Appeal (UIA) continues to fund aliyah flights and assistance for Jews fleeing countries of distress. There are currently over 3,000 Ethiopians waiting to come to Israel and UIA is dedicated to completing this operation by October 2013. The smooth integration of these Olim into Israeli society through absorption centres is a paramount task. These centres provide critical initial housing, intensive educational programs and the cultural tools for them to become independent and contributing members of mainstream Israeli society." (The final Ethiopian aliyah, UIA 2013 Campaign Focus, The Australian Jewish News, 25/1/13)

"Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent. The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry's director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According to a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically." (Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent, Alistair Dawber, The Independent, 27/1/13)

This somewhat surreal state of affairs suggests that it's time we updated Levin's definition with a view to factoring in some of the latest twists and turns in what it means to be a Zionist today, twists and turns which Levin himself couldn't possibly have foreseen - or even imagined in his wildest dreams. So here goes:

These days a Zionist is a white Jew who gives tax-exempt money to a 'charity' such as the UIA, which funds another white Jew to discover 'lost tribes', some of whom are black, uproot them, and send them  to occupied Palestine. Once there they are subjected to racist abuse  - Go home Cushi! - and their women injected with drugs to stop them from having any more black babies.

OK, so it's clunkier than Levin's original, but how else is one to capture the above nuances?