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Two relatives embrace as a flight from Georgia lands at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport two weeks ago (Dan Keinan).
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Last update - 00:00 22/08/2008
Jerusalem & Babylon / Loving aliyah, hating the new immigrant
By Anshel Pfeffer
Tags: Jewish World, immigration 

Last week, a group of Israelis stood around the Israeli ambassador to Georgia, Yitzhak Gerber, in the Tbilisi Airport terminal, menacing him. "We saw a group of Georgians boarding the plane before us," one of them said. "Why are you letting them on the flight before us?" It did him no good explaining to them that the families they had just seen were new immigrants to Israel who had fled the Russian army that had bombed their homes and that anyway, there were enough seats on the plane for all of them. They were adamant: "You have to let the real Israelis go on first; what kind of an ambassador are you?"

They weren't some assortment of lowlife riffraff. Many of them belonged to a group of teachers who were on a tour organized by their union. But the moment they felt slightly at threat, even though the Georgian capital has remained calm throughout the entire South Ossetian conflict, they reverted to the worst kind of Israeli behavior, the magia li mode - we deserve it and no one shall have it before us. Typical Israelis at their worst.

But this wasn't just some nasty streak surfacing at a time of distress. The mistrust that many "veteran" Israelis harbor toward Diaspora Jews is real. They have to confirm to two basic stereotypes, either "rich American uncles," subjects of envy but ripe for the fleecing, or poor benighted Ethiopians and Russians who better be grateful for whatever they are given, and if they heaven forbid ask for a bit more, will immediately be castigated for greediness.
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There's nothing new about this attitude. The huge amounts spent by all the governments on absorbing new immigrants (though a great deal of that comes from donations from abroad), and all the lip service from generations of politicians on the importance of the ingathering of the exiles merely hide the fact that Israel loves immigration, which boosts the demographic marker and provides valuable "human capital." But Israel hates the immigrants with their grubby, grasping ways.

This hatred reared its head at that crush by the checkout counter at Tbilisi. I shudder to think how much uglier the scenes might have been had the danger in the capital been real and the Russians actually at the gate. Am I stereotyping the "ugly Israeli"? Of course I am. That doesn't mean I think all Israelis share the same disdain for the Diaspora and abhorrence of immigrants. I saw many exceptions to that rule in Georgia also - among the Jewish Agency and Nativ officials who worked all hours at the Tbilisi embassy to issue a record number of aliyah visas over three days. I especially saw it among the representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee, who probably prefer to remain nameless - Israeli citizens who worked on both sides of the front, rescuing Jews from bombed-out streets and supplying emergency relief to the refugee centers.

Most of these people could be easily making in the private sector salaries three or four times what they make in their government or NGO jobs; they still cling to an old-fashioned notion of trans-Jewish collective responsibility. Most of them are not religious, and if you ask them to explain this commitment, they often find it difficult to articulate their motives. For many of them it's not even Zionism, as the vogue is today in helping Jewish communities wherever they are, whether or not they plan on moving to the Promised Land. I couldn't help feeling that this kind of Israeli is a dying species; someone who feels a loyalty to something that doesn't need to be explained but is a bit wider than the country's borders. Something that is rather more unique than the international fellowship of mankind.

In the event, there wasn't a stampede last week of Georgian Jews wanting to escape to Israel; 90 percent of those who flew to Tel Aviv were Israeli holidaymakers, anxious to avoid the war. But it's a sure bet that even if there were no Israeli passport holders, just foreign Jews in distress, Israel would still have organized an airlift to rescue them. Just as it did for the Jews of Iraq and Yemen in the 1950s and for the Ethiopians 40 years later.

Contingency plans exist to rescue other communities who might find themselves in danger. But how certain can we be that Israeli governments in the future will follow the same course? Risking air-force planes, personnel and crucial diplomatic interests in a costly operation to save thousands of non-Israelis who never showed much interest in coming to Israel in fair-weather days might not be such a popular move if the selfishness on evidence last week at Tbilisi Airport is tolerated much longer.
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