No recent news story better encapsulates the febrile nature of these times than the November exercise in which representatives of Israeli government ministries, welfare agencies and core service providers gamed out various responses to what they termed a “mass immigration event.”
Israel has, as is well known, a wealth of experience in dealing with such events. The state was barely a year old when it airlifted nearly 50,000 Yemeni Jews to a new life in the Jewish state. It more than doubled that number shortly afterward, flying more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel. Similar operations were executed decades later in Ethiopia, with three airlifts transporting the African nation’s beleaguered Jews in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. And it absorbed more than 1 million Jews from the Soviet Union following the collapse of the communist bloc.
Throughout its existence, Israel has made good on its historic pledge to provide a haven to any Jew seeking one. Yet that experience may be of limited value in the present context, as Israeli officials prepare for a not-inevitable-but-distinctly-possible mass influx of Jews fleeing a major upsurge of antisemitism.
...But these countries are not Yemen or Ethiopia in the throes of famine or Russia in a rare moment of freedom in the aftermath of communist rule. Instead, these are affluent democracies where, since the Holocaust, Jews have lived, studied, worked, built their communities and enriched the wider society without seriously believing that events would conspire to drive them out.
...But these countries are not Yemen or Ethiopia in the throes of famine or Russia in a rare moment of freedom in the aftermath of communist rule. Instead, these are affluent democracies where, since the Holocaust, Jews have lived, studied, worked, built their communities and enriched the wider society without seriously believing that events would conspire to drive them out.
...We’re talking about countries like Australia and France, Canada and Britain, and maybe even the United States. These are places where Jews have visibly impacted nearly every aspect of commercial, cultural and political life in conditions where they enjoyed—and technically speaking, continue to enjoy—full civic and social equality.
Historically, antisemitism has been a top-down phenomenon, seized upon by autocrats and dictators, and implemented through legislation and state-sponsored persecution to the point of outright genocide in the case of Nazi Germany. Yet in the last half-century, it has behaved more like a horizontal phenomenon, spreading to different but overlapping branches: the media, the universities, local governments, professional associations, activist organizations and so forth. (Ed note: A somewhat long but very interesing article.) (Read More)
