Followup: Scamming Americans Robbing Palestinians

When Karin and I first circulated Scamming Americans Robbing Palestinians (Picking American Pockets for Israel) and the Spanish language version Ah, Así es Como Funcionan las Cosas . . . , some correspondents noted that the system did not seem to apply to Jews emigrating to Israel from the territories of the former Soviet Union.

 

There are three issues:

• the series of debt consolidation and reselling had to end somewhere,
• when the Friedmanites ruined the economies of the former Soviet states, Russian Jews in the early 1990s did not need the sort of incentives to relocate to Israel that American Jews required, and
• while American Jews returning to America from Israel could serve Zionist purposes by helping to elect pro-Israel candidates and otherwise influence American politics and discourse, a return of Russian Jews to Russia or other former Soviet states provided few benefits to the State of Israel or to the Zionist movement.

Naomi Klein provides an interesting discussion of Russian Jews and Israel in The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p. 432. The text below is probably a little too exculpatory. While I have encountered Russian Jews that are relatively clueless about Israel, some understand exactly how evil Zionism is, and others are anti-Arab anti-Muslim racists.

Nineteen ninety-three had been held up as the dawn of a new hopeful era; instead, it was the year that the occupied territories were transformed from run-down dormitories housing the underclass of the Israeli state into suffocating prisons. In this same period, between 1993 and 2000, the Israeli settlers living in the occupied territories doubled their numbers. What had been in many places rough-hewn settler outposts were transformed into lush, fortified suburbs with their own restricted-access roads, clearly designed to be an addition to the Israeli state. During the Oslo years, Israel also continued to claim key water reserves in the West Bank, feeding the settlements and diverting scarce water back to Israel.

 

The new [Russian] immigrants played a little-examined part here as well. Many residents of the former Soviet Union who arrived in Israel penniless after seeing their life savings disappear in the [Friedmanite] shock therapy devaluations were easily lured into the occupied territories, where houses and apartments were far cheaper, and special loans and bonuses were on offer. Some of the most ambitious settlements -- such as Ariel in the West Bank, which boasts a university, a hotel and a Texas mini golf course -- aggressively recruited in the former Soviet Union, sending scouts and launching Russian-language Web sites. Ariel managed to double its population thanks to this approach, and today it stands as a kind of mini-Moscow, with store signs advertising in both Hebrew and Russian. Half its residents are new immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The Israeli group Peace Now estimates that about twenty-five thousand Israeli citizens living in the illegal settlements fall into this category, and it also notes that many Russians made the move "without a clear understanding of where they were going."

 

 

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