• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 828 0

that raised other interesting questions: Is Judaism a religion or, so to speak, a condition? Can a Jew, like Brother Daniel; abandon his religion and yet remain a Jew? He could, of course, have acquired Israeli citizenship after three years’ residence, like any Moslem or Christian, but he wanted it as his right under the Law of Return. The doctrine established by his case may in the long run, as cases continue to arise, undergo a change. Perhaps someday that old question, What is a Jew? may find an answer, although one thing is certain—if Israelis remain Jews, they will continue to dispute it.)

On July 30, 1961, the millionth immigrant since statehood arrived. Of these million, 431,000 came from Europe (beginning with 99,000 escapees and survivors from the concentration camps), with the largest groups coming from Romania and Poland; about 500,000 came from Asia and North Africa, including 125,000 from Iraq, 45,000 from Yemen, 33,000 from Turkey, others from Iran, India, and China, and 237,000 from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria. Thirteen thousand came from North and South America. The influx was never regular or planned, but came in waves or rushes in response to political crises and pressures. Airlifts brought the exodus from Iraq and Yemen under a time deadline. Groups surged out from Poland and Romania, and a few from Russia, between sporadic liftings and lowerings of the Iron Curtain. In 1956 the number rose sharply in response to the revolt in Hungary and to the Suez campaign, which brought about the expulsion of 15,000 to 20,000 Jews from Egypt, many of them of the professional classes. Since 1961 another quarter of a million have come. Boats arrive at Haifa every week. Reception, examination, registration for first papers, arrangements for transportation and housing, and an initial grant of cash and food all take place on board. Every Jew admitted becomes a citizen with the vote at once; every non-Jew, once admitted, may become a citizen after three years’ residence. It requires a visual effort of the imagination to picture what the settlement of almost 1.5 million strangers, nearly all requiring social and financial assistance, involves, not only physically in terms of housing, job-finding, adaptation, and schooling, but in the psychological strains on society, and the tensions and frictions both among the immigrants themselves and between them and the earlier residents. By contrast, the 500,000 Arab refugees of 1948, who have since doubled their number and remain an undigested lump and a charge on the U.N., could merge into the host countries with no barriers of language or custom, if the will to absorb them were present. Much of the cost of the operation in Israel, being beyond the powers of the state, is raised by contributions from Jews abroad and administered by a form of state within a state—the Jewish Agency. The origins, nature, and role of this remarkable institution, which is the residual office of the World Zionist Organization that virtually governed the Jews of Palestine under the Mandate, are complex, but it can be said that the work of the Agency for the time being is indispensable, while its implications are unresolved.

The effort on behalf of the immigrants is not of course purely eleemosynary. Israel needs these people to fill the vessel of the state. Besides filling the villages vacated by the Arabs in 1948, they create new settlements on land formerly non-arable. Twenty-one new towns and 380 new rural villages have been established since—and because—they began to arrive, and it is their increase of the manpower of Israel that now enables it to produce over three quarters of its own food as well as enough food exports to pay for the balance. The immigrants’ labor is needed for defense purposes as well. The settlements are of every kind. Some are small, struggling communities with outhouses, weeds, and a few cows; others, multiple housing developments with streets, flung down on what was last month an empty hillside.

The greatest difficulty is providing income-producing work, especially