February 1992, Page 9

Special Report

Israel's Cynical Use of Soviet Jews to Justify US Loan Guarantees

By Rachelle Marshall

In the looking-glass world of Israeli spin artists, words have no connection with reality. Thus a country that reserves 93 percent of its land solely for the Jewish segment of its population, and has the highest number of political prisoners per capita in the world, becomes "the Middle East's only democracy." A government that steals US military secrets and barters them to the Soviets for the release of Soviet Jews becomes America's "vital strategic ally." That country's bombing and invasion of its Lebanese neighbor is called "Operation Peace in the Galilee."

Truth Turned Inside Out

The latest example of truth turned inside out comes with Israel's request for $10 billion in US loan guarantees. The funds are needed, say Israeli officials, to provide shelter, jobs and other facilities for the 350,000 Soviet Jews who have recently arrived in Israel and for those expected to follow. In fact, the reverse is true: Israel is not asking for money in order to take care of the new immigrants. It needs the immigrants as a rationale for acquiring more money.

Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Housing Minister Ariel Sharon, leave no dount that their immediate priority is to make Israel's takeover of the occupied West Bank and Gaza irreversible by doubling the number of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. This year the government allocated $500 million for new settlements, and Shamir has promised that in 1992 two-thirds of all publicly financed housing will be built in the occupied territories. Since last March, Israel has seized at least 46,000 additional acres on the West Bank. The loan guarantees will provide Israel with the means to continue this expansion, despite an economy weakened by bloated military expenditures and huge debts.

Shamir tells Israelis "we need the whole of Greater Israel in order to settle the wave of new immigrants from the Soviet Union." Meanwhile, backers of the loan guarantees tell Americans that since the US urged the Soviet Union to allow Jews to leave, it now must help pay for their survival in Israel. Both statements are grossly misleading. The influx of immigrants to Israel stems from the fact that the Israeli government does everything in its power to force Soviet Jews, however unwillingly, to come to the Jewish state rather than go elsewhere. And once they arrive it denies them passports to prevent them from leaving.

In the past, more than 90 percent of the Jews leaving the Soviet Union chose to migrate to the US or Europe until Israel pressured Washington to cut its admission quota and shut down its Vienna-Rome immigration center. Israel also demands that Soviet immigrants who do manage to leave Israel be forcibly returned. On Dec. 16, for instance, the Dutch government responded to Israel's urgings by refusing asylum to 43 Soviet Jews who had fled to Holland because they were disillusioned with Israel. Accompanied by 20 Dutch policemen, the refugees were returned to Ben-Gurion airport "protesting loudly," according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

Immigration to Israel has dropped by a third.

With an ominous echo of the past, Israel has asked Germany to admit only Soviet Jews with "German blood," saying all others belong in the "Jewish homeland." The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany recently complained to a correspondent for the Northern California Jewish Bulletin: "We Jews here in Germany feel that Israel's argument is nonsense. We should tell the goyim [non-Jews] 'don't let Jews in'? That's ridiculous, But that's what the Israeli government wants from us."

The sordid truth behind Israel's image as a haven for beleaguered refugees is that, once they arrive, the newcomers are treated with callous neglect.

Even Jewish immigration authorities are critical of the government. Uri Gordon of the Jewish Agency's Immigration Department warned last fall that Israel was unprepared to cope with large numbers of new immigrants. Agency Chairman Simcha Dinitz has declared that "the unemployment crisis among immigrants to Israel has not found a place on the government's real agenda."

On Dec. 29, The New York Times reported that unemployment among immigrants has reached 40 percent. As a result of these conditions, 30 percent of Soviet Jewish respondents to a recent poll said they hoped to be living somewhere else within five years. Immigration to Israel has dropped by a third.

The plight of Soviet refugees cannot be blamed on Israel's lack of resources. On the contrary, instead of using available funds where they would do the most good for the new immigrants at the least cost-by building job-creating industries, schools, hospitals, and housing within Israel itself-the government is rapidly throwing up new settlements in barren areas which require an expensive new infrastructure of roads, sewers, and utility systems. The new units then have to be heavily subsidized in order to attract tenants. The net result is that Israel's hardline leaders are spending money that might otherwise be used to aid Soviet Jews on projects that further their own expansionist goals. At the same time, they are using the presence of the new immigrants as a means of bullying the US into paying the bill.

Given the tragic history of the Jewish people in Europe, few would deny that the US and other countries, including Israel, must stand ready to welcome all those who wish to emigrate. Meanwhile, however, the plight of more than 350,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from Kuwait following the Gulf war is at least equally urgent but receives little attention.

An Equally Urgent Plight

Most of these recent refugees are surviving precariously in Jordan which, unlike Israel, has received virtually no aid to provide a haven for them. According to the Jersusalem-based Alternative Information Center, among those expelled from Kuwait are some 20,000 Gazans who are even more desperate, since they are forbidden to enter either Jordan or Egypt or to return to Gaza.

There are still, of course, more than half a million Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan who were forced from their homes by Israel in 1948 or 1967, or who are descended from those who were forced out at these times. Without economic opportunity, the security of passports, or even a national identity, they are among the most deprived people in the world. It is a measure of the distorted perspective with which American supporters of Israel view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that they are asking the US to finance the absorption into Israel of Europeans who have no ties to the culture or geography of that part of the world, while nearly a million Palestinians suffer in involuntary exile.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. She is a member of New Jewish Agenda, and writes frequently on the Middle East.

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