Are Soviet Jews There to Stay or Is Israel Just a Way Station en Route to the West?

By Andrew I. Killgore

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

The United States made available $10 billion in “housing loan guarantees” to help settle Soviet Jews in Israel after the U.S.S.R. fell apart. Did the U.S. waste its taxpayer money?

On the simple level of whether the U.S. government will get all of its money back, the answer is probably not. If there are major defaults on some of the loans, the U.S. will pay the tab if the Israeli government does not repay its debts to the U.S. unless the U.S. Congress appropriates foreign aid money to Israel to do so. Perhaps because of this, all U.S. foreign aid to Israel, whether economic or military aid, has been in the form of grants since 1984. As for repayments of loans to Israel going back to before that date, U.S. law (the Cranston Amendment) provides that annual U.S. economic aid to Israel can never dip below the total of principal and interest due the U.S. that year for repayment of previous American loans to Israel. So, in effect, the U.S. Congress always ends up “forgiving” what Israel owes.

But did the loan guarantees at least get Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet republics to a place in which they wanted to stay? For at least half of them, probably not. However, since Israeli treatment of immigration and emigration information is so occult (defined by Webster as “not easily apprehended or understood”) it takes some good detective work to find out.

On what Soviet Jews wanted to do, the evidence is clear. When the Soviets began letting them go, they were allowed to travel to Italy, where they would choose their preferred final destination. There, even though they have left on visas for Israel, 95 percent of them chose the United States.

Under Israeli coaching, the travel route was changed. At U.S. insistence, Moscow agreed that flights bearing Jewish refugees must go directly to Israel. Meanwhile, under quiet pressure from Israel, the United States decided to limit Jewish emigrants from within former Soviet borders to 50 percent of the annual quota of immigrants to the U.S. who could claim the remunerative status of refugees, which now totals 80,000 per annum.

So what happened to the Jewish refugees who wanted to go to the United States, but were forced by the Israel lobby and its political and journalistic supporters in the United States to go to Israel instead?

Nearly all Jewish refugees from the former U.S.S.R. preferred destinations other than Israel.

Figures have been collected from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics for 1990 through 1997, the years of massive immigration into Israel from within the former Soviet borders, by Youssef Courbage, director of France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies. He published them in the Summer 1999 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Between 1990 and 1997, 833,000 “potential immigrants” arrived in Israel of whom 716,000 were Jews. (Virtually all of the others were non-Jewish spouses or children of the Jewish immigrants.) “Net” Jewish immigration, however, was only 575,000, indicating a “loss” of between 19 and 20 percent when the statistics were tallied in 1997.

But the net loss figure is calculated in a uniquely uninformative Israeli way. For example, the loss figures—those who left Israel—are compiled just from those who moved on to other destinations within the first year after their arrival in Israel. Then these “end-of-year” losses for seven years were totalled, yielding the figure of 575,000.

There seem to be no Israeli statistics for Jews who left Israel during the second, third, fourth or more years after their arrival. So researcher Courbage concludes that in fact there is no way to determine from Israel’s official statistics what will be the “long-term yield” of the wave of Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel.

He does point out, however, that of 427,000 immigrants to Israel between 1972 and 1989, 206,000, or slightly fewer than half, stayed. Therefore since nearly all Jewish refugees from the former U.S.S.R. preferred destinations other than Israel as long as they had the choice, it’s hard to believe that they would have abandoned their preference for the United States or other countries just because Israel made it harder to get there.

An honest conclusion is that Israel has reached its mid-1999 claimed population of 6.1 million (which, of course, includes more than a million Palestinian Arabs) by basing the figure on a technicality. Israelis who have journeyed onward aren’t counted as part of the net loss until they have been away for four years. And all who return for a family visit within that four-year period are still counted as present.

Beyond the Quota

That there are a lot of Jewish immigrants beyond the refugee quota who arrive in the U.S. is easily discernible from reading the weekly Jewish press, particularly from the New York metropolitan area where a high percentage of the Russian Jewish immigrants settle. Jewish charitable agencies there are complaining that by not waiting until they can come into the U.S. with refugee status, which puts the burden of resettlement costs on the federal government, the influx of Jews without such refugee status is putting a huge burden on Jewish charitable institutions.

There’s no way to be sure, but if Israel’s actual resident Jewish population, including the Falashas from Ethiopia, and the Russian Jews still present, is in fact stuck at around four million, they barely outnumber the approximately 3,550,000 Palestinian Arabs presently living within the former mandate of Palestine (some 1 million in Israel, 950,000 in Gaza, 1.4 million on the West Bank, and 200,000 in East Jerusalem). Given the vast disparity between the Palestinian Arab birthrate (among the highest in the world) and the relatively static Jewish birthrate in Israel, Palestinian Arabs may very soon become the majority in Israel and Israeli-occupied territories. This would fulfill after all the universally accepted predictions made before Israel’s “windfall” Jewish influx from the former Soviet Union.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report.