Neo-Nazis in Israel

Sometimes, when you’re running a well-funded colonial venture, you have to put up with having the most disturbing kinds of riff-raff queueing up to take part… But I suppose from the point of view of some Israelis, just so long as the riff-raff in question aren’t, ahem, actually Palestinians seeking to return to their ancestral homes and homeland, then you’d be prepared to put up with them?
But Russian anti-Semites being given help to immigrate to Israel?? Now that’s what I call a story… And Lucy Ash of BBC radio gives an interesting glimpse into it at the end of this piece, which was first aired yesterday.
Her piece is a broad look at what’s been happening to the numbers of the Russian Jews (and non-Jews) who have migrated to Israel in a huge wave since the fall of the Soviet Union. While she leads with some reporting about the high numbers of recent Russian immigrants to Israel who have been “returning” to their earlier homeland, it was this part, lower down in the story, that caught my eye:

    Zalman Gilichensky, a teacher from Jerusalem, claimed that people with very distant Jewish roots and even anti-Semites are being encouraged to move to Israel.
    He said he has evidence of more than 500 outbreaks of anti-Semitism over the past year and he has set up a website to monitor them.
    The incidents include swastika graffiti on the walls of synagogues, and verbal and physical abuse.
    “The only way to stop these attacks is to change our immigration policy,” Mr Gilichensky said. “It does not bother me that some non Jews come here.
    “But I cannot see why we are importing people who hate our guts. Would-be immigrants should have to prove they know something of our history and respect our customs.
    “But the government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet because these attacks are so damaging to the image of Israel.”

Ash added that the Israeli Attorney-General has launched a criminal investigation into,

    a neo-Nazi website [presumably in Russian?] which called itself the White Israeli Union, after pictures appeared of a man in an Israeli army uniform with his arm raised in a “Heil Hitler” salute.
    But since then, other Russian language websites with similar content have appeared, with tasteless jokes about Jewish people and Holocaust denials.

I’d love to know, in addition to these disturbing reports of anti-Jewish anti-Semitism among Russian immigrants, whether anyone has done any studies on the extreme anti-Arab anti-Semitism that has also been reported among some Russian immigrants to Israel?
Interesting, though, that that website seemed to be peddling the discourse of “Whiteness”– which of course makes quite possible the mobilization of hatred against Arabs as well as Jews (who in that context, I suppose, would be judged to be non-“White”)…
Regarding out-migration (return) to Russia by former Russian immigrants to Israel, Ash cited a recent study that noted that of the roughly one million Russian immigrants to Israel, “at least 50,000” returned to Russia between 2001 and 2003.
She interviewed one Russian-Israeli, “Irena”, who said,

    “nobody here cares about your professional skills. Israelis just see Russians as people who have come over to clean their houses, look after old people or sweep the streets.”
    These days Irena mends clothes for a living but she was once chief designer at the Palace of Culture in Sochi, Russia’s most famous Black Sea resort.
    The town was badly affected by the rouble crash in 1998 so Irena went to Israel with 16 members of her family.
    Now, 12 of them, including her husband, have already returned home.
    Sochi is enjoying a revival with 6 million tourists each summer, and Irena’s husband has already opened his second restaurant there.
    By contrast Israel faces high unemployment and a stagnant economy.
    Irena is also nervous about suicide bomb attacks, and worries about her son in the army. When he finishes his military service she plans to go back to Russia.
    “I do not know why the government encouraged us to emigrate in the first place,” she said.
    “They promised us a beautiful future, but life here is pretty tough, and they should have warned us about that.”

Yes, indeed.

33 thoughts on “Neo-Nazis in Israel”

  1. And how is this any different than the anti-American individuals getting into the US for study or immigration? You don’t have to go very far, read some of the latest postings by your own Shirin. If you want actions rather than speech, check the the Lackawana or the Oregon cells caught after 911.
    E. Bilpe

  2. E.B.– I think there’s a massive difference between people who criticize the actions of a government– and thank God we in the US and people in Israel can still generaly do that unmolested– and people who engage in hateful incitement against a whole group of people based solely on their athnic or religious identity.
    I’m surprised you can’t see that difference?
    To allege that what Shirin writes about the actions of US soldiers in Fallujah is in any way equivalent to the genocidal rantings of an anti-Semite is ridiculous.
    Also, so far as I know, the US was never founded to be “a national home for the American people everywhere”, as Israel was for the Jewish peole… Which latter aspect makes their welcoming of anti-Semites even more bizarre.

  3. Thanks for linking to this, Helena. Very interesting. Surely, the anti-semitic, pro-White attitudes of these folks were not apparent at the time they entered Israel. No doubt, in large part, these sentiments were fostered by the treatment they received from their fellow citizens after arriving in their new homeland.
    I wonder at the strange brew that is bubbling in Greater and Lesser Israel these days. So many different groups, all fueled by a sense of ungratified entitlement, all holding grudges against the others. Nothing seems to unite the country except an extreme idea of what constitutes unity. See EBilpe’s post above — who exactly would get to produce the ‘test’ of ‘true’ citizenship? Very scary idea.

  4. Helena,
    I wasn’t clear enough in articulating that the common thread across Russian neo-Nazis living in Israel and the range of Anti-american US residents and citizens is the natural tension between these people’s individual best interest and their ideological or emotional preferences. Just like Shirin expressed her desired to find another place to live (based on John’ Kerry’s defeat, not on Fallujah events) but is surely torn by her professional or ecnomical self interest, the Nazi Russians were torn by their self interest in emigrating to a place with more opportunities and their racist sentiments. I still argue that the parallel is there, Shirin is still here, and I savour the irony that neo-Nazis find their just penitence precisely in having to live in Israel.
    Neither the US nor Israel screens immigrants based on their thoughts, so I am not sure how either one could have prevented this phenomenon. Was there a constructive suggestion in your posting, or just the usual lazy critique.
    E. Bilpe

  6. Rowan, great article that. Thanks for the link.
    E.B. Here’s a good suggestion. How about the Israeli govertnment stop trawling all over the world for new non-Arab immigrants and now, instead of that, get serious about starting to organize the return to their homeplaces of all Palestinian Arabs who– as per resolution 194– are ready to “live in peace with their neighbors”?
    The Boers in South Africa came to terms with the idea of living in civil equality with the people they had previously worked hard to displace, both geographically and politically. So why not the Jewish Israelis?

  7. Rowan, great article that. Thanks for the link.
    E.B. Here’s a good suggestion. How about the Israeli govertnment stop trawling all over the world for new non-Arab immigrants and now, instead of that, get serious about starting to organize the return to their homeplaces of all Palestinian Arabs who– as per resolution 194– are ready to “live in peace with their neighbors”?
    The Boers in South Africa came to terms with the idea of living in civil equality with the people they had previously worked hard to displace, both geographically and politically. So why not the Jewish Israelis?

  8. If you want to look at the Gilchinsky site, it’s here:
    Pogrom.org.il
    to see more of the melancholy and morbid illustrations, click back to the Hebrew pages.
    I think I can say with reasonable certainty that the site of the “White Israeli Union” is still off the air.

  9. In the interest of perspective:

    1. When I discussed this on my blog last year, I got a number of responses from Russian-Israelis (unfortunately all on my defunct Haloscan comment system). The consensus was that the White Israeli Union represented a few dozen or at most a few hundred people, and that it was small even by lunatic fringe standards. It’s far more common for non-Jewish Russians to assimilate to secular Jewish norms.
    2. I have never known any Israelis who felt threatened by this phenomenon. Few outside the Russian-speaking community even know it exists, and those that do know of it don’t consider it the threat it would be in a country where Jews are a minority. (That’s part of the real significance of a Jewish homeland – anti-semitism isn’t dangerous).
    3. The White Israeli Union does advocate anti-Arab racism; among other things, its former web site advocated shooting Palestinians and used the term “black arse” (which is a racist Russian term for Central Asians and is sometimes applied to Arabs or Muslims in general). They basically combine the worst of traditional Russian racism with the worst of the Israeli far right.
    4. It’s pretty ridiculous to say that Israel “encourages” neo-Nazis to immigrate. Israel does encourage Russian immigration, but as others above have mentioned, it doesn’t screen immigrants by viewpoint. No doubt, if the Israeli government knew any potential immigrant to be a neo-Nazi, it wouldn’t welcome that person with open arms.
    5. So why would neo-Nazis want to move to a country full of Jews in the first place? Some didn’t have a choice, because they came with their parents or other relatives (the operators of the White Israeli Union web site were apparently teenagers). Others came to Israel because it was easy to get an immigrant visa, a sixth of the population speaks Russian (even if they’re zhids) and the standard of living is higher than in Moscow. People have done stranger things for money.
    6. The other phenomenon mentioned above – Russian-Israelis returning to the CIS – has also come up for discussion on my site [1, 2]. It isn’t unusual for large waves of immigration to have relatively high rates of attrition, as some immigrants discover that they don’t fit into their new country (see comments of Factory, James MacLean, Randy McDonald and myself). 50,000 returnees out of more than a million, especially over a period of a decade, actually isn’t very high. And of course the satisfied ones don’t return, so the experience of the returnees isn’t necessarily representative.

    Bottom line: I think the BBC exaggerated both phenomena, although I don’t think it was guilty of any bias other than a bias toward sensationalism.

  10. Ms. Helena Cobban,
    Anti-war and anti-globalization groups would be ten times more effective if the anti-Zionist Judeophobes like yourself were cleansed from those movements. Your current flirtation with Islamo-fascist groups opposing Israel and the United Staes only illustrates the hypocrisy of those who claim they support nonviolence, yet who routinely stand in full support of Arabs seeking genocide against the Jews of Israel and an eternal jihad against the United States.
    You have a soft spot for Arab terrorism, especially when it is conducted against Jewish civilians. Through your writing you seek to deligitimze the right of the Israeli people to defend themselves from homicide bombers and others murderers. When Jews are slaughtered on buses, you don’t warm up the laser printer. But when an Arab orchestrator of suicide bombings is killed in an Israeli targeted strike you rant and rave against what you term “assasinations.” Did you ever think that killng Palestinian terrorists before they kill again prevents terrorist attacks, reduces the chance of Israel having to fully invade Palestinian towns, and thus saves Arab and Jewish lives? Note the lack of suicide bombings since Israel “assasinated” the leaders of Hamas.
    You are an excellent example of the “new anti-Semetism” of some on the radical left. This new anti-Semetism ignores Palestinian war crimes, attempts to rewrite history, but primarily seeks the destruction of the one Jewish state in the world. You seek to attain your impossible goal by simply LYING.
    In your most recent column in the CSM you claim that the massacre in Shatila was “Israeli orchestrated.” This is a blatant lie intended solely to discredit Israel. You know very well that it was your own coreligionists that committed that atrocity. By your writing you seek to blame Israel for the acts of the CHRISTIAN PHALANGE miltia. Shouldn’t readers of the CSM be informed that the massacre was committed by Christians? In your twisted world clouded by hatred, CSM readers should only be led to believe that the Jewish state did the wicked deed.
    Shame on you for your hate. The rejectionism, violence and destruction preached by you and others who seek only to destroy Israel as a Jewish state will never bring peace to that troubled region.
    If you want peace, stop supporting those who intentionally murder innocent men, women and children non-combatants on busses, pizza parlors and discos.
    You should try to be more objective, notwithstanding the warm hospitality you received from Arabs in the refugee camps in Lebanon. Remember, none of those folks would be there had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan. Israel would also have been 1/2 the size had the Arabs not began their genocidal war, which continues to this day.

  11. Ms. Helena Cobban,
    Anti-war and anti-globalization groups would be ten times more effective if the anti-Zionist Judeophobes like yourself were cleansed from those movements. Your current flirtation with Islamo-fascist groups opposing Israel and the United Staes only illustrates the hypocrisy of those who claim they support nonviolence, yet who routinely stand in full support of Arabs seeking genocide against the Jews of Israel and an eternal jihad against the United States.
    You have a soft spot for Arab terrorism, especially when it is conducted against Jewish civilians. Through your writing you seek to deligitimze the right of the Israeli people to defend themselves from homicide bombers and others murderers. When Jews are slaughtered on buses, you don’t warm up the laser printer. But when an Arab orchestrator of suicide bombings is killed in an Israeli targeted strike you rant and rave against what you term “assasinations.” Did you ever think that killng Palestinian terrorists before they kill again prevents terrorist attacks, reduces the chance of Israel having to fully invade Palestinian towns, and thus saves Arab and Jewish lives? Note the lack of suicide bombings since Israel “assasinated” the leaders of Hamas.
    You are an excellent example of the “new anti-Semetism” of some on the radical left. This new anti-Semetism ignores Palestinian war crimes, attempts to rewrite history, but primarily seeks the destruction of the one Jewish state in the world. You seek to attain your impossible goal by simply LYING.
    In your most recent column in the CSM you claim that the massacre in Shatila was “Israeli orchestrated.” This is a blatant lie intended solely to discredit Israel. You know very well that it was your own coreligionists that committed that atrocity. By your writing you seek to blame Israel for the acts of the CHRISTIAN PHALANGE miltia. Shouldn’t readers of the CSM be informed that the massacre was committed by Christians? In your twisted world clouded by hatred, CSM readers should only be led to believe that the Jewish state did the wicked deed.
    Shame on you for your hate. The rejectionism, violence and destruction preached by you and others who seek only to destroy Israel as a Jewish state will never bring peace to that troubled region.
    If you want peace, stop supporting those who intentionally murder innocent men, women and children non-combatants on busses, pizza parlors and discos.
    You should try to be more objective, notwithstanding the warm hospitality you received from Arabs in the refugee camps in Lebanon. Remember, none of those folks would be there had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan. Israel would also have been 1/2 the size had the Arabs not began their genocidal war, which continues to this day.

  13. So, Jonathan, we meet again …
    Your blog is quite neat.
    I find the term ‘anti-Semitism’ inept. The fact that it was invented by an ‘anti-Semite’ is neither here nor there. The term is pseudo-scientific and leads directly to false analyses, whoever uses it, as does the psychologistic ‘Judeophobe’. My preference would be
    (1)’anti-Zionist’ for those (such as consistent Jewish Marxists, like Lenni Brenner) who think that the Zionist project can be dismantled and Jews qua Jews would be better off without it, and
    (2)’anti-Judaist’ for those like myself who think all Judaisms (including secular, quasi-Marxist ones a la Borochov) are harmful to their own practitioners and to those around them.

  14. I don’t think anti-Zionism needs to be unpacked from the notion of anti-Semitism, because it was never part of that notion. The two are sometimes conflated for political and other reasons (and they often appear in the same people), but “anti-Zionism” is fundamentally a political viewpoint while anti-semitism is ethnic and/or religious. Nor is “Semite” any more scientific a term than “Jew,” particularly in the nineteenth-century sense in which the term “anti-Semitism” uses it.
    More to the point, “anti-Semitism” is a term with a commonly understood meaning. Sure, it’s stretched on occasion, but the very fact that you know it’s being stretched shows that its real meaning is well understood. “Anti-semitism” is certainly more readily understood and placed in historical context than a neologism would be (which, I suspect, is the real objection many people have to it).
    If you prefer to be called an anti-Judaist, though, I’ll be pleased to oblige you. I’m an anti-anti-Judaist.

  15. Jonathan,
    Helena Cowan is an anti-Semite (or Judeophobe if you prefer) because she denies the Jews, solely, the right to a state of their own. She doesn’t deligiimize Ireland for the Irish or Mexico for the Mexicans, for example. Only one ethnic group, the Jews, in her view, have no right to an independent homeland. She doesn’t speak of a binational state for India and Pakistan, or of reuniting Yugoslavia, where warring enthnic groups were separated to make peace. Only when it comes to the Jews does she favor a binational state (knowing full well that a high Arab birthrate would eventually destroy the Jewish state). Martin Luther King said it best: “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” H Helena Cobban is indeed, a hater of Jews.

  16. Helena Cowan is an anti-Semite (or Judeophobe if you prefer) because she denies the Jews, solely, the right to a state of their own.
    No ethnic group has an inherent “right” to a state of its own if the land in question is already occupied by someone else. The problem of Israel/Palestine stems from Zionism’s claim that Jews had a right to take land occupied by Palestinians. To posit, devoid of context, some kind of abstract “right” that Helena is supposedly trying to deny Jews is specious.
    Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Zionism is a political ideology. Like any ideology it is subject to criticism. It gets less criticism than it should.
    Finally, that MLK quote is questionable. See this article in Zmag.
    Your point of view can be debated, but your tone is purely obnoxious, Patton. You owe Helena an apology.

  17. Helena, you should address your suggestions to the Israelis. If you have some spare time you are free to address my point, which I will restate for you. Inmigration policy is a broad set of rules defined by countries satisfy their needs and goals. It is not a list of names/last names of people who are allowed in. Individuals that appear to fit the policy, but in reality do not, are a fact of life.
    Let’s see this in action with Turks, Bosnians, and muslims in general in today’s Germany. see today’s BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4056109.stm
    The article reads:
    —————–
    The debate centres largely around the three million-strong Muslim community – mostly Turkish, with Bosnians making up the next largest group, followed by people of Arab origin.
    It was sparked by the killing of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, and subsequent attacks in the Netherlands on Muslim and Christian sites.
    Fears that something similar could happen in Germany were fanned by a TV broadcast in which a secret recording caught an imam telling worshippers that Germans would “burn in hell” because they were unbelievers.
    This has been followed by a raft of new proposals for better integration of the Muslim community, against a backdrop of fears that Muslims in Germany inhabit a “parallel society” centred around mosques infiltrated by “hate preachers”.
    If multiculturalism means that it’s OK for 30,000 Turks to live in a certain quarter of Berlin, and never leave, and live like they’re still in deepest Turkey, then the term is now discredited.
    “A democracy cannot tolerate lawless zones or parallel societies,” declared Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. “Immigrants must respect our laws and acknowledge our democratic ways of doing things.”
    ———————
    I am sure in your infinite wisdom, Helena, you also have some advice for the Germans. Let us have it.
    E. Bilpe
    PS: Welcome back Rowan. Was your dramatic departure just theatrics? I bet you were still lurking this board.

  18. Michael: A few words. (1) The Kahane Commission report. (2) Kurds, Tamils, Quechua, Berbers… The world is full of nations that don’t have their own states! Need more? Xhosa, Igbo, Zulus, Mandau…. Actually, there are more fully-formed nations in the world that don’t have states than there are that do…
    (3) Name-calling doesn’t help the discussion.

  19. Kurds, Tamils, Quechua, Berbers… The world is full of nations that don’t have their own states!
    On the other hand, how many of the nations that do have states have given them up or lost them? The trend since WW2 has been to expand the self-determination of national groups either as states or as national minorities within states, not to contract it. The point now is not whether Jews should have a state – we already do – but whether that state has the right to continue to exist on the same terms as other states. (Those terms, of course, include not occupying other people’s territory, but the solution to that is withdrawal to the 1967 borders rather than dismantling of the existing state.)
    The manner of origin of a state is not usually seen as relevant to its right to exist once the state has gained international recognition – otherwise Australia, NZ and all the New World countries would be in trouble. Nor has binationalism or multinationalism been seriously suggested as a solution to similar conflicts outside Israel-Palestine (except in Cyprus, which is a special case and which is now moving toward a two-state settlement). Much as I think Michael Patton owes you an apology, his analogies to Yugoslavia and India-Pakistan are legitimate.

  20. For Helena Cobban, the question IS in fact whether the Jews have a right to a state. For her and others of her ilk, an Israeli retreat to the 1948 armistace lines would not be satisfactory. At a minimum, she favors a bi-national state, which for the reasons known to all on this board, would destroy Israel as a Jewish state.
    Ms. Cobban, the Israeli commission which investigated Sabra and Shatila did not find that Israel ORCHESTRATED the massacre, as you claimed in your most recent CSM article. You should know better than to mislead your readers. Why didn’t you mention the true facts? You didn’t even refer to the Phalange once in the article, but instead went out of your way to criticize Israel. Some intellectual honesty on your part would be greatly appreciated.
    By the way Helena, the only country in the Middle East where Arab women can vote is in Israel. The only country where gays can live openly and free of persecution is in Israel. The only middle eastern country where labor unions are active, and in general, where progresive social policies are actually practiced, is in Israel. This drives people on the radical left crazy, but its the harsh truth. Put that in your pot pipe and smoke it you Islamo-fascist slut. (Helena, someone who hates as much as you do deserves to be called every bad name on the planet.)

  21. part of the original Zionist dream was a vision of a country where citizens would not all be doctors, lawyers, diamond sellers, merchants, torah students, etc…but perform “nonjewish” funtions such as firefighting, streetcleaning, military service, etc…a nation like all others…well in a grotesque sort of way is it so remarkable that they might find some fervid antiSemites in their midst in addition to criminals, prostitutes, drug trafficers and other antisocial elments?

  23. I apologize for calling Helena Cobban a slut. I don’t apologize for calling her a Judeophobe, nor do I apologize for calling her an Islamofascist. Its just ridiculous that she travles around the Arab world like she’s under their spell, completely ignoring their rampant xenophobia, homophobia, male chaevenism (sp) totalitariansm, and religious inteolerance. Yet she spends most of her time bashing Israel and America. Its sickening. How can she ingnore the hatred and intolerance, much of it state run and state sponsored yet supported by the population. No freedom of speech, of religion, of the press. Yet she’d rather pick on the Jews. Her values disgust me.

Comments are closed.