Optimism in Politics: Reflections on Contemporary History by Walter Laqueur

Author:Walter Laqueur [Laqueur, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781351501453
Google: VCRBDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 37489306
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part 4

Israel and Jewish Affairs

* * *

The New Million

Professional photographers have a sharp eye for their surroundings. Oded Balilty is one of them, an Israeli Pulitzer prize winner, he thought that he knew well the country in which he was born and had grown up. But as he was commissioned to produce a series on Russian Jews in Israel, he realized that he was dealing with a world whose existence he had never been aware of. This was certainly not a unique case; historians and political scientists in their books about Israel usually mention, only in passing (if at all), the community that “changed the Middle East to the core,” according to Mrs. Lily Galili and Mr. Roman Bronfman. The title of their new book probably constitutes a slight exaggeration, but the Russian aliya of the last two decades has been (and continues to be) of great importance. If so, why is so little attention paid to it?

This is mainly perhaps because native Israelis were not that much interested in a community that kept itself apart from the mainstream, culturally, socially, and eventually also politically. But this is certainly not the whole story and it is the great merit of this book to provide, for the first time, a comprehensive attempt to explain the character of this community.

Mrs. Galili is a well-known journalist who was, for many years, on the staff of Haaretz and who followed the mixed fortunes of the Russian aliya in Israel. Bronfman, who arrived in Israel in 1980, had been a community activist, and he served as a member of the Knesset but later on left politics for business.

Most of the newcomers arrived in Israel in the early 1990s, and their absorption went through the usual difficulties facing every wave of immigrants. How to find work for (to give but two examples) the many physicians and musicians who came? The number of ex-Soviet physicians was about twice as large as the number of Israeli doctors practicing in the country at the time. Given these and many other problems, namely the relatively high number of elderly people and other newcomers not considered productive by the Israelis, it seems surprising in retrospect that the absorption was not a failure.

It is frequently forgotten today that there were high expectations on the part of the yishuv. Following the disappearance of European Jewry, the great majority of newcomers arrived from North Africa and Muslim countries. There was no other human reservoir and the feeling was, as President Peres put it in an interview with the authors of this book, “if they (the Russian Jews) would not have come we would have been lost.”

Nevertheless, however welcome the arrival of the immigrants from the Muslim countries, strengthening the demographic base of the young state, this was hardly the “much needed human material” that Herzl and his successors had envisaged as the founders and builders of the new state. The Russian immigration wave, on the other hand (it was hoped), would bring those above all needed, scientists and technologists those who would establish a modern country, European style.

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