Sharon Calls for a Million Jewish Immigrants to Israel, Shuns the Unmentionable “E” Word

By Andrew I. Killgore

“A Jew who leaves Israel for any reason and does not return for at least one visit within four years.”—Israel’s definition of emigrant

An Agence France-Presse story from the English-language daily Saudi Gazette on April 28 quotes Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying, “If the Jewish people would make an effort…we would not have any problem bringing another million Jews here.”

Sharon saw Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela as countries from which immigrants might come to Israel.

Other countries mentioned as having Jewish communities included South Africa, France and Ukraine. A country Sharon did not mention was the United States.

Nor did he utter the unmentionable-in-Israel “E word”: emigration.

The last report seen in the American media with any explicit numbers on emigration from Israel per year was in 1975. An Associated Press item carried in The New York Times on July 6 of that year had 20,000 “persons” having emigrated from Israel the previous year, 1974. In normal parlance “persons” can be people of any race, religion, age or gender. But since emigration from Israel applies only to Jews, the 20,000 figure is interpreted to mean Jews only.

In 1980 the Jewish Agency said Israel faced a “national emergency” because so many Israelis (500,000) were residing in the United States. The New York Times of Dec. 22, 1980 reported the national emergency story, but provided no information of yearly numbers of emigrants.

The heavily negative Hebrew word yordim (those who go down) is used to describe Jews who emigrate from Israel. The brightly positive aliyah (ascent) refers to immigrating to Israel, or “going up” to Zion Hill in Jerusalem. In the Israeli context, emigration and the United States are negative twins, because the U.S. is where the yordim are going. That’s why Sharon in his recent remarks mentioned neither.

Israel claims 5.2 million Jewish residents, according to the AFP article quoted above. But its state-imposed silence on any specifics about emigration/immigration and its definitional legerdemain reveal that it is losing the battle of demographics to the Palestinians. Deducting 500,000 Israelis already in the U.S. in 1980 and 630,000 who came since then (21 years times 30,000 emigrants per year), one arrives at a current resident Jewish population in Israel of 4.07 million.

(This assumes that over the past 50 years no Jews from Israel emigrated to Western Europe, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, although the writer knew several in Wellington in the mid-1970s.)

As reported in the Feb. 7, 1998 New York Times, a Palestinian census in 1998 counted 2.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Adding 1.1 million Palestinians in Israel-proper, the total comes to 4 million Palestinians in the old British Mandate of Palestine—almost exactly equaling Israel’s Jewish population.

It would appear that, as the saying goes, “The future is now.”

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.