Israel as a non-arab state: the political implications of mass immigration of non-jews

Abstract

Hundreds of thousands of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel between 1989 and the present are not Jewish, yet they legally gain Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. The flow of so many non-Jewish, non-Arabs into the state greatly complicates the demographic, cultural, statistical, and political landscape. This article explains the legal, bureaucratic, and political conditions which have sustained this immigration and suggests some of its long-term implications for the political identity of the country. Cognoscenti have always known that the `aliyah (wave of immigration) from the former Soviet Union (FSU) has contained significant numbers of non-Jews. Despite official reluctance to discuss the matter publicly, this knowledge has gradually spread through Israeli society. It is now clear that very large proportion of these immigrants are not Jewish, and this by virtually anyone's definition of who is Jew. With more than three quarters of million immigrants having arrived from the FSU between 1989 and the end of 1998, the status of these non-Jewish immigrant citizens has become more than weird and whispered fact or an ironic twist of fate. It has become sociological feature of Israeli life, political problem, statistician's nightmare, and the latest vehicle for exploring the changing and fragile meaning of Israel as a Jewish state. This article will try to establish what is known about this issue.l It begins with discussion of the question of numbers-how many people are there in Israel in this category (citizens arrived as immigrants under the Law of Return,2 mostly from the FSU, but are not recognized as Jewish). It then moves to brief explanation of the legal, bureaucratic, and political conditions that produced this phenomenon and are sustaining it. It concludes with suggestions about the long term implications of Israel's transformation from state clearly divided between Jewish majority and an Arab minority into country where identity categories are multiple, blurred, and uncertain, and whose majority is more accurately and meaningfully regarded as non-Arab. HOW MANY NON-JEWS AMONG THE FSU IMMIGRANTS? In 1990, then Interior Minister Rabbi Aryeh De'eri and Immigration and Absorption Minister Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz (both from the mainly Oriental Jewish and ultra-Orthodox Shas Party) caused brief flurry by breaking the taboo against public discussion of the Jewish or non-Jewish identity of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union. De'eri told his staff at the interior ministry that 30 percent of the immigrants arriving in Israel were not Jewish. Peretz, appearing before the Immigration and Absorption Committee of the Knesset, warned that of the seven million people eligible to immigrate into Israel under the Law of Return, only two million were Jews.3 Discussion of the reports by De'eri and Peretz lasted only day or two, and focused mostly on the bad judgment reflected in mentioning such matters in public. The debate was reignited four months later following more remarks by Peretz, including estimates that as many as 40 percent of FSU immigrants were gentiles, and proposal for changing the Law of Return to reduce the number of gentile immigrants. For reasons noted below, however, Peretz's proposal attracted little support and triggered expressions of outrage from across the political spectrum.4 Indeed, despite the voluminous data produced by government ministries and various Israeli think tanks on socio-economic characteristics of the new immigrant population, their housing patterns and preferences, and their political opinions, virtually nothing is reported in these studies about the proportion that is or is not Jewish. Therefore little in the way of systematic data is available. But by collecting the public statements made by informed activists and politicians, drawing on published interviews with Jewish Agency officials directly responsible, in various regions of the FSU, for mobilizing and vetting immigrants, making prudent inferences from Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and other official data, and assisted by few demographers have made some observations on the question, it is possible to gauge the magnitude of the non-Jewish immigrant population and to document the trend toward large proportions of non-Jews among the arrivals from the FSU in recent years. …

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