Loyalty To What? To Where? To Whom?

Apparently, the non-Jewish immigrants who will be required to swear allegiance to Israel as “Jewish and democratic” are only the relatively few non-Israeli Arabs who wish to marry Israeli ones. There are, we are told, few or no other non-Jewish immigrants to Israel. Really?

As ever, it all depends on how you define a Jew. But in her desperate attempt to maintain not so much a Jewish as merely a non-Arab majority, Israel is flying in Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone (a position which has nothing to do with Russian Orthodoxy, and can only be attributed to sheer anti-Semitism), East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, Peruvian Indians “converted to Judaism” and put straight onto the planes, absolutely anyone at all. Even Russian Nazis. The Pashtun, who are certainly not Arabs whatever else they may be, are being spoken of as being of Israelite descent, for future reference.

Meanwhile, such Jewish births as there still are in Israel, are largely and increasingly to ultra-Orthodox who so disdain the Zionist State that they will use physical force against its teenage conscripts of both sexes. Those ultra-Orthodox will not be required to swear allegiance to that State, and nor will Russian anti-Semites, the East Africans, the Peruvian Indians, the Russian Nazis or the Pashtun. At least, not yet.

Muhammad is now the single most common name for newborn boys within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. About 14,000 Jews left Israel annually between 1990 and 2005. Half of Israelis aged between 14 and 18 express the desire to live elsewhere. A huge percentage of Israelis holds, or plans to inquire about obtaining, foreign nationality. The Berlin synagogue has 12,000 members, and there are now perhaps 55,000 Jews in Poland, many of whom are immigrants from Israel. Curzon was right when he bemoaned the Balfour Declaration on the grounds that the “advanced and intellectual” Jews would have no desire to live in the Middle East. They cannot wait to go home.

If Israel does not want to become a haven for Russian Nazis, then she needs to repeal the Law of Return, declaring that she is now a settled culture and society in her own right, and precluding any wildly impracticable demand for a corresponding right on the part of Palestinian refugees or their descendants. The people who will do anything for Israel except live there, and who throw their weight around in demanding policies that suit their prejudices expressed from comfortable berths thousands of miles away, can thus be told where to go, or not to bother trying to go.

They include those who, at the Israeli government expense that is in fact the generously subsidising American taxpayer’s expense, are now organised into the latest anti-black party within the Democratic Party. And they include that peerage-selling heart of New Labour, Labour Friends of Israel, which, along with the closely Gove-allied Conservative Friends of Israel, was at the centre of the scandal around paid lobbying in the dying days of the last Parliament. Perhaps loyalty oaths should also be considered in and to the United States or the United Kingdom?