The ‘Racist Israel’ canard

Barack Obama’s long-overdue trip to Israel next week will last only 48 hours, yet he will make time to dine with 22-year-old Yityish Aynaw, the first black Miss Israel.  Yes, you heard me right.  ‘Racist,’ ‘apartheid’ Israel has honored a black citizen with the ultimate national prize for feminine beauty.

More than 120,000 black Ethiopian Jews live peacefully and comfortably in Israel.  And they didn’t sneak over the border at night.  Israel literally flew them into the country in two great waves in 1984 and 1991.  Operation Solomon in 1991 saw 14,325 Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel, with 36 hours of non-stop flights on 34 Israeli aircraft, including Israel Air Force and El Al cargo planes.

Of course some level of social tension does exist in this racially mixed society.  But the same could be said regarding the Latin American community in the US, or the Algerian community in France, or the Turkish community in Germany.  ‘Racist Israel’ is no more racist than any other western country dealing with large-scale immigration.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Arab and Muslim-majority neighbors are daily committing mass slaughter and institutional discrimination along ethnic and religious lines:

• In Syria, a largely Alawite regime has slaughtered approximately 70,000 people among the largely Sunni population
• In Egypt, the Coptic Christian minority lives under institutional persecution, and must confront the constant threat of bombings, violent pogroms and destruction of churches from both the military and the general population
• In Jordan, more than half of the population identify as ‘Palestinian,’ while the monarchy descends from a small Arabian tribe alien to the area; the ‘Palestinians’ live under state-sponsored apartheid laws that deny them access to work, education and health services
• In all three countries, tens or hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees from the 1948 and 1967 genocidal wars against Israel have been held in squalid ‘refugee’ camps for decades, with no opportunity to work or become citizens in the countries they, and in many cases their parents and grandparents, were born in

Israel is not a racist state.  It is an oasis of religious and ethnic tolerance in a region plagued by mass slaughter and apartheid.