By Rabbi Dow Marmur
JERUSALEM — On the face of it, Israel is being turned into a ghetto. As soon as the wall on the Egyptian border will be completed, they’ll start building one on the Jordanian side. But whereas the traditional ghetto walls were to keep Jews out of the non-Jewish world, this time it’s the other way around: Israel is anxious to stop non-Jewish migrants from entering from the south and the west. The wall is intended to stem the flow.
Though there’re many poor people in Israel, though the country is surrounded by less than friendly neighbours, though a large part of the Jewish diaspora is staying put in different parts of the world, there’re many foreigners who risk their lives to come here.
Part of the desire to make sure that Israel remains a Jewish state is to keep them out. Eli Yishai of the nationalist-Orthodox Shas party is the Minister of the Interior. His responsibility includes immigrants and he’s particularly anxious to keep out non-Jews from settling in the Jewish state. The wall will serve his purpose.
Those who believe that the anti-Israel campaigns around the world are current incarnations of anti-Semitism like to describe Israel as a collective that has taken the place of the Jew as an individual. As the Jew has been the pariah through the ages, so the Jewish state has become the pariah in our time. If that were true, it would make sense to view Israel as a ghetto,
But it isn’t so. Of course, there’s anti-Semitism in the world and, of course, some of it, perhaps nowadays much of it, manifests itself as attacks on Israel, but the picture is much more complicated and, mercifully, much less ominous.
That’s so not only because, as mentioned above, the walls around Israel are being built from within to keep out unwanted strangers, but because the way human beings communicate in the 21st century, borders don’t mean as much as they used to. Israelis are inveterate world travellers and millions of visitors come here every year. In the world of scholarship in general and science in particular, the contact between the Jewish state and the rest of the world is almost unlimited, despite the sick and feeble attempts to boycott Israeli universities. The fact that yet another Israeli scientist received the Nobel Prize this year is an apt illustration.
Virtually all secular Israelis – and they’re still in the majority – and a good proportion of Orthodox ones are culturally connected to the rest of the world. No wall, however high, will change that. Every Israeli with a high-school education reads and speaks the lingua franca of the modern world: English. Many, perhaps most, of the TV programmes are in English. They help viewers to improve their knowledge of the language. At the same time, Israeli books are being translated into foreign tongues and Israeli films reach international audiences. No,Israel is decidedly not a ghetto.
One could even argue that because it’s not a ghetto, but an attractive country to untold millions of non-Jews, it needs to protect itself from invasions of people who come here for economic, not political reasons. At the same time, because Israelwants to be part of the family of nations, it tries to distinguish between genuine refugees and others. It’s not an easy task and like many other countries –Canada and the United States among them – it doesn’t always get it right. Internal tensions between ultra-nationalists and liberals further complicate matters. But come what may, Israel is not a ghetto.
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Rabbi Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. He now divides his time between Canada and Israel and may be contacted at dow.marmur@sdjewishworld.com