The Color of Israel

Racism is an ugly charge, and Jimmy Carter’s popularization of the association of Apartheid with Israel is as slanderous as it is ignorant. The obvious reality is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial, and multi-lingual society that rivals the United States and every other country that I have visited.

It would only take a few minutes walking down a street in Israel, and the most rudimentary knowledge of South African apartheid, to understand what an oxymoron the term apartheid is when misapplied to modern Israel. Most Americans tend to imagine Israel as a country that looks kind of like the last Bar Mitzvah they went to, with perhaps a bit of a tan. In fact, Israel is incredibly diverse racially, culturally, and religiously.

In America, the vast majority of Jews, like myself, are of Ashkenazi, or Eastern European decent. So prevalent are Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S., that we often think of them as “looking Jewish”. In Israel, you will meet Jewish people of nearly every color and from nearly all corners of the world. There are many black Jews from Ethiopia. There are so many that they appear to be in similar proportion to African Americans in the U.S. I have to admit some surprise when I see black people in Israeli Army uniforms speaking Hebrew.

My Israeli wife, who many people mistake as a native of India, was born in central Asia. Her family is part of a large Jewish community in Israel that emigrated here from the far east of the former Soviet Union. An even greater number of recent immigrants have arrived from Russia proper. To my eyes, this group is analogous to Hispanics in America. They are the largest, most recent group to move to the country, and many still communicate in the language of the countries that they left. Russian speakers are everywhere, and Russian language media is at least as common here as Spanish is in the U.S.

Arab Jews are also numerous here. What is an Arab Jew? Arab is an ethnicity, and there are many Jews in Israel who’s family had been living in Arab countries for generations. Their food, culture, and language are unmistakably Arab, yet they practice Judaism. It is very easy to confuse the Arab ethnicity with Islam the religion. If you scratch the surface a little, you will realize that most Muslims live in non-Arab nations, and that a significant minority of Arabs practice Christianity, Judaism, or other religions.

In addition to Jews, Israel, of course is home to Arab Christians as well. Furthermore, there are Bedouins, which are non-Palestinian Arabs of nomadic descent. There are also Druze, a distinct minority in and of themselves. Israel is also the home to Haifa, the center of the Bahai faith. Finally, of course, there are Israeli Arabs. They are Israeli citizens and they may or may not identify themselves as Palestinians, as all residents of the region once did. In fact, until the state of Israel was established in 1948, Jews here commonly referred to themselves as Palestinians. The Jewish newspaper the Jerusalem Post was previously named the Palestine Post. It is true that Israeli Arabs do not have all of the de facto civil rights that minorities currently enjoy in the United States. They do have equal rights under the law, and they seem to have more rights than African Americans did forty years ago.

I have also visited South Africa and learned about Apartheid. Apartheid was the systematic racial classification and segregation system that the white minority in South Africa used to discriminate against the black majority there. In Apartheid, each person was classified as one of many “races” by such arbitrary characteristics as skin color and hair texture. Often, two siblings were classified as belonging to different races. People were then issued an identity card which then determined access to just about every civil, legal, and economic aspect of society. The segregation was absolute.

In contrast, I see many Israeli Arabs, let alone Jews of every color at restaurants, in hotels, and at shopping malls. Arabs and Jews do tend to live in separate towns and neighborhoods, although some cities are integrated. Where segregation exists, it is self imposed, like in the United States. Israeli Arabs tend to live in the areas that their family’s have lived for generations, while the Jews tend to live in newer neighborhoods they have built themselves.

To witness the reality of modern Israel is understand the Apartheid charge is simply a modern version of blood libel against the Jews.