Dan Singer - Start-up Nation

Even after World War II ended and the Holocaust became widely known, Western countries were still unwilling to welcome surviving Jews. The Canadian government captured the mood of many governments when one of its officials declared, “ None is too many!” British quotas on immigration to Palestine became increasingly tight during this period, as well. For many Jews, there literally was no place to go. 13

Deeply aware of this history, when Britain’s colonial term in Palestine expired, on May 14, 1948, “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” was issued by the Jewish People’s Council. It stated, “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness. . . . THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration.” 14

Israel became the only nation in history to explicitly address in its founding documents the need for a liberal immigration policy. In 1950, Israel’s new government made good on that declaration with the Law of Return, which to this day guarantees that “every Jew has the right to come to this country.” There are no numerical quotas.

The law also defines as a Jew “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism.” Citizenship status is also granted to non-Jewish spouses of Jews, to non-Jewish children and grandchildren of Jews, and to their spouses, as well.

In the United States, an individual must wait five years before applying for naturalization (three years if a spouse of a U.S. citizen). U.S. law also requires that an immigrant seeking citizenship demonstrate an ability to understand English and pass a civics exam. Israeli citizenship becomes effective on the day of arrival, no matter what the language spoken by the immigrant, and there are no tests at all.

As David McWilliams describes it, most Israelis speak Hebrew plus another language, which was the only language they spoke upon arrival. In some Israeli towns, he says, “there is a Spanish-language paper published every day in Ladino, the medieval Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews kicked out of Andalucia by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. . . . In Tel Aviv’s busy Dizengoff Street, old cafés hum with German. The older German immigrants still chat away in Hoch Deutsch—the language of Goethe, Schiller, and Bismarck. . . . Further down the street, you are in little Odessa. Russian signs, Russian food, Russian newspapers, even Russian-language television are now the norm.” 15

Like Shai and Reuven Agassi, there are also millions of Israelis with roots in the Arab Muslim world. At the time of Israeli independence, some five hundred thousand Jews had been living in Arab Muslim countries, with roots going back centuries. But a wave of Arab nationalism swept many of these countries after World War II, along with a wave of pogroms, forcing Jews to flee. Most wound up in Israel.

Crucially, Israel may be the only country that seeks to increase immigration, and not just of people of narrowly defined origins or economic status, as the Ethiopian immigration missions evidence. The job of welcoming and encouraging immigration is a cabinet position with a dedicated ministry behind it. Unlike the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which maintains as one of its primary responsibilities keeping immigrants out, the Israeli Immigration and Absorption Ministry is solely focused on bringing them in.

If Israelis hear on the radio at the end of the year that immigration was down, this is received as bad news, like reports that there was not enough rainfall that year. During election seasons, candidates for prime minister from different parties frequently pledge to bring in “another million immigrants” during their term.

In addition to the Ethiopian airlifts, this commitment has been repeatedly, and at times dramatically, demonstrated. One such example is Operation Magic Carpet, in which, between 1949 and 1950, the Israeli government secretly airlifted forty-nine thousand Yemenite Jews to Israel in surplus British and American transport planes. These were poverty-stricken Jews, with no means of making their way to Israel on their own. Thousands more did not survive the three-week trek to a British airstrip in Aden.

But perhaps the least-known immigration effort involves post–World War II Romania. About 350,000 Jews resided in Romania in the late 1940s, and although some escaped to Palestine, the Communist government held hostage others who wished to leave. Israel first provided drills and pipes for Romania’s oil industry in exchange for 100,000 exit visas. But beginning in the 1960s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu demanded hard cash to allow Jews to leave the country. Between 1968 and 1989, the Israeli government paid Ceaus¸escu $112,498,800 for the freedom of 40,577 Jews. That comes out to $2,772 per person.

Against this backdrop, the Israeli government has made the chief mission of the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption the integration of immigrants into society. Language training is one of the most urgent and comprehensive priorities for the government. To this day, the ministry organizes free full-immersion Hebrew courses for new immigrants: five hours each day, for at least six months. The government even offers a stipend to help cover living expenses during language training, so newcomers can focus on learning their new language rather than being distracted with trying to make ends meet.

To accredit foreign education, the Ministry of Education maintains a Department for the Evaluation of Overseas Degrees. And the government conducts courses to help immigrants prepare for professional licensing exams. The Center for Absorption in Science helps match arriving scientists with Israeli employers, and the absorption ministry runs entrepreneurship centers, which provide assistance with obtaining start-up capital. 16

There are also absorption programs supported by the government but launched by independent Israeli citizens. Asher Elias, for example, believes there is a future for Ethiopians in the vaunted high-tech industry in Israel. Elias’s parents came to Israel in the 1960s from Ethiopia, nearly twenty years before the mass immigration of Ethiopian Jews. Asher’s older sister, Rina, was the first Ethiopian-Israeli born in Israel.

After completing a degree in business administration at the College of Management in Jerusalem, Elias took a marketing job at a high-tech company and attended Selah University, then in Jerusalem, to study software engineering—he had always been a computer junkie. But Elias was shocked when he could find only four other Ethiopians working in Israel’s high-tech sector.

“There was no opportunity for Ethiopians,” he said. “The only paths to the high-tech sector were through the computer science departments at public universities or private technical colleges. Ethiopians were underperforming on the high school matriculation exams, which precluded them from the top universities; and private colleges were too expensive.”

Elias envisioned a different path. Together with an American software engineer, in 2003 he established a not-for-profit organization called Tech Careers, a boot camp to prepare Ethiopians for jobs in high tech.

Ben-Gurion, both before and after the state’s founding, had made immigration one of the nation’s top priorities. Immigrants with no safe haven needed to be aided in their journey to the fledgling Jewish state, he believed; perhaps more importantly, immigrant Jews were needed to settle the land, to fight in Israel’s wars, and to breathe life into the nascent state’s economy. This is still seen as true today.

CHAPTER 8

The Diaspora

Stealing Airplanes