"Arab and Soviet Jews ruined Israel"
A research note for subscribers.
In my last Soviet Jew installment, I mentioned that Israel’s European ruling elite wanted to trigger a mass migration of Soviet Jews to the Holy Land in part because they wanted to counteract a big influx of Middle Eastern Jews into Israel that was happening at the time. They were worried that these “oriental” Jews were turning Israel into a backwards Arabic society, rather than the modern European one they saw in their dreams. An early example of Jews-on-Jew bigotry. Fred Lazin writes about this in his work on Soviet Jewish migration, which I site.
While doing some more reading, I came across an example that illustrates this point pretty well. It’s from a 2020 interview that Haaretz did with Yaakov Sharett, a member of a founding Zionist family and himself a player in Israel’s clandestine activity in the U.S.S.R.1 He voiced this sentiment directly, starting with Arab Jews.