The eugenist history of the Zionist movement — Palestine
https://x.com/_ZachFoster/status/2021613468621607326
After 1948, Israel opened its doors to all Jews who wanted to move to Israel! This is a lie, one of the greatest Zionist lies in history. Let's dive in.
On May 14, 1948, the British Mandate for Palestine ended and the Zionist leadership declared the establishment of the State of Israel.
Israel could now orchestrate its own immigration policy, and the first people welcomed were, wait for it, fighters! Israeli officials issued strict orders to operatives in Europe that only Jews with military capabilities were to be brought over.
Thereafter, the state began to open its door to Jewish immigrants, albeit with many restrictions.
The Ministry of Aliya continued to screen out the disabled, sick, those with chronic illnesses, and old persons, providing physicians a list of "Medical Rules to Approve Aliyah."
The policy required “that every Oleh would be mentally and physically healthy and capable of work. One should particularly observe … that the candidate shall have no impairment that totally or partially limits his work capacity."
The list called out impairments such as the blind, amputees, people who were in psychiatric hospitals or formerly hospitalized, people suspected to be mentally ill but were never treated by psychiatric hospitals, people with "mental deficiencies," people with "chronic and severe cases of neurosis with signs of lack of any talents," and people with "severe personality disorders."
As Dr. Nahum Goldmann of the Jewish Agency declared in 1948: “A state and a nation are entitled to exercise a certain ruthlessness… a more efficient selection is good for the immigration.”
The policy seems to have been implemented according to plan. Itzhak Rafael, head of the JA’s Aliyah Department, bragged about holding up thousands of visas issued to “invalids” in Tunisia, France, and Germany.
"I held up 2,000 visas in Tunis, which had been issued to old people and invalids, and gave an order not to bring them over. I held up 800 visas in France, which were issued to sick and aged people ... also invalids in Germany, 5,000 people."
Israel made exceptions to its guidelines for Jews facing annihilation, although Morocco constituted an exception to the exception, where even sick and old Jews facing annihilation were rejected.
That seems to be why some two-thirds of Jews who sought to immigrate to Israel from across North Africa were rejected before 1954. After pogroms broke out in 1954 in Morocco, the JA loosened its criteria, now rejecting only about a third of Moroccan Jews hoping to migrate to Israel.
At the same time that undesirable Jews were rejected, masses of Jews were accepted. That had little to do with "rescue" -- for, as we just said, Israel condemned perscuted Moroccan Jews to death, you know, because they were brown.
But Israel did need as many healthy & able-bodied Jews as it could find to guarantee a Jewish supermajority, expand the manpower reservoir to build an army, and, perhaps most importantly, to populate the border regions of the state with 108 civilian settlements, where undesirable Jews were needed on the front lines to act as human shields against the surrounding Palestinian Arabs seeking to return to their homes.
Still, despite the large number of Jews accepted during the first few years of statehood, the eugenicist immigration policies continued into the 1950s. In 1951, Ben-Gurion told his colleagues in private that “it was still necessary to make sure that the ‘blind and lame’ were excluded, because it was impossible to fill the country with ‘welfare cases.’ In 1952, Ben-Gurion responded to an agreement between the Jewish Agency and the Israeli Ministry of Health concerning Jewish immigration from Morocco:
"Is this what we call Aliyah, bringing the paralyzed because we want to make the numbers seem bigger … is this what this country needs? … How can you sign an agreement with no restrictions concerning health and physical conditions … This is against the Law of Return … there are 250,000 Jews in Morocco … so why should we start with the paralyzed and the blind?"
Consider the Vazana family, who wished to emigrate from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s, but remained in Casablanca because Israeli immigration authorities did not let them travel with two of their children classified as disabled by Israel. The family was told they should leave them behind. Their story was a typical case in Morocco.
In late 1951, the Israeli government tightened its already selective immigration policy after a large percentage of the Romanian, Libyan and Iranian Jewish arrivals turned out to be old, disabled, sick or unskilled.
Meanwhile, the Israeli public expressed their horror that so many inferior Jews were allowed to immigrate. “We should not agree in any way that out of all people, the part that is morally or physically backward… would be immigrating to Israel,” Eliezer Livne, a Knesset Member, wrote in 1951. He said the problem was not financial but rather social and spiritual. “Israel is not a refuge for the backward and unproductive circles of the Diaspora communities, but a center for their pioneers and the best among their sons.” As Yehuda Braginsky, a leader in the JA Absorption Department put it, the problem with Moroccan Jews is that they were Moroccan. “I do not believe in curing all the Jews from Morocco,” he said. They were inherently contaminated.
Age, health, wealth and employability were once again key considerations, a policy applying to all immigrants, but especially Iranian and North African Jews. As for the Iranian Jews, in 1953, Ben-Gurion once said in a fit of anger, "six people from Persia arrived by airplane, and all of them have inherited syphilis, this is against our law." As for the North African Jews, many of whom applied to immigrate through the Marseilles JA office, for example, Israel rejected 20 out of 70 cases. One family wished to move to Israel from Algeria in August 1954 but was rejected because “the father, 57-years-old, is sick and incapable of working. His wife is also sick. The two young sons are retarded and the two older ones left the house and do not support their parents.”
In another case, in 1952, when Itzhak Rafael tried to induce 6,000 Jews from southern Tunisia and Morocco to immigrate to Israel, Ben-Gurion objected because some 10% of them were elderly or disabled. Officials discussed a compromise in which Israel would allow the Joint Distribution Committee to resettle the elderly and disabled in larger Jewish communities in Morocco, while Israel would absorb the rest, the desirable human material. But even this was a problem for Ben Gurion, who “exerted all his influence to block the plan,” as one historian put it. For Israel’s Prime Minister, “allowing the immigration of an entire community when many of its members were in poor health would not help build the country.”
In 1954, Prime Minister Moshe Sharet said that the selection should continue "with all cruelty." The rigid selection criteria was "a form of mercy" towards the "person who suffers, who is ill-fated, who is sick or old, who is frail and has no income." They justified the rejections by claiming that they’d be better off staying put.
As late as 1958, in an affair only recently exposed, then Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir suggested blocking handicapped and sick Polish Jews from entry.
History does not care about your feelings or your fragile ego .
All sources to all points made in this tweet can be found in this article:
posted by Satish Sharma at
01:28
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