Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has set the task of attracting a million Jews to the country over the next few years. As Gazeta.Ru reports, the deadline for submitting the plan to increase the population by 20% is set for June, but it is already clear that there is nowhere to get such a multitude of Jews.
The Israeli prime minister held a meeting with representatives of the country's immigration authorities, at which the problem of encouraging Jews to immigrate for permanent residence was discussed. He stated that the Ministry of Absorption and the Jewish Agency (the main body for resettling Jews to their historical homeland) must make maximum efforts to stimulate the next wave of repatriation to Israel of Jews from the CIS countries, Europe, and North America.
Ariel Sharon has set the task of attracting a million Jews to Israel over the next few years, that is, a fifth of the country's current Jewish population. Sharon was pushed to such measures by the huge decline in immigration in recent times. According to the Israel Bureau of Statistics, 2003 saw the lowest inflow of immigrants since 1989. During the past year, 23,300 new repatriates arrived, almost a third (31%) less than in 2002. Moreover, the number of people returning to Russia and Ukraine exceeded the number of residents entering Israel.
No specific plan for changing the situation has yet been formulated. To boost immigration, Sharon instructed the Ministry of Absorption and the Jewish Agency to develop a program, which should be submitted for consideration to the head of government in June of this year. But already at the meeting itself, the prime minister was made to understand that there could be no question of any million. It was stated that, according to the most optimistic scenario, by 2010 the number of immigrants would be 70,000 per year, of which 20,000 would be citizens of the former Soviet republics, 20,000 citizens of France, and 15,000 from North American countries. Thus, even by the most optimistic forecasts, the influx of a million Jews would occur no earlier than in 14 years. The largest reservoir of immigration remains the United States (5.2 million Jews), followed by France (500,000), Canada (370,000), Great Britain (270,000), Russia (220,000), Argentina (180,000), Germany (130,000), Australia (100,000), Brazil and Ukraine (90,000 each).
There is also some hope for immigration from Ethiopia. In early January of this year, the Israeli government announced the resumption of the program for resettling Ethiopian Jews of the Falasha community in Israel. The announcement was made by Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who had traveled to Addis Ababa. Currently, the number of Falasha in Ethiopia is estimated at 18,000 people.
In the 1980s–1990s, the transport of Falasha to Israel, called repatriation by Tel Aviv (ethnographers, of course, do not recognize Falasha as Jews), caused many major international scandals. The first export of Falasha to Israel was conceived in the early 1980s, during a period of aggravation of the internal political situation in Ethiopia. Some of the black Jews were taken out in agreement with Addis Ababa in exchange for Israeli arms supplies. For a long time, Tel Aviv did not acknowledge the existence of such a deal. Another part of the Falasha was taken out of Sudan, where they had fled on foot from Ethiopia. At first, they were secretly transported by Israeli ships from the Red Sea coast (the Ethiopians were documented as amateur divers). In 1984, Operation Moses was carried out — secretly from the Sudanese authorities, the Falasha were repatriated from the Sudanese desert by Israeli planes. After rumors about this operation reached the press, the Soviet Union and the Sudanese government made sharp anti-Israeli statements. Newspapers wrote about the plight of immigrants and the hardships of refugees in the Sudanese desert. The Israelis later admitted that they really had evacuated the Falasha hastily and roughly. They were loaded into planes in crowds; so as not to lose the blacks at night, white marks were stuck on their foreheads.
However, forcing all the Jews scattered around the world to go to the historical homeland, which is at war with the Arabs, is not an easy task. The ongoing economic crisis, a consequence of the war with the Palestinian Authority, makes it impossible even for native Israelis to find work.
Oddly enough, on the one hand, the war in Palestine hinders, but on the other hand, it helps Jewish immigration to Israel. European anti-Semitism, which has unfolded against the background of condemnation of Israel's policies, forces people to leave their European homeland. France leads in the number of Jewish immigrants. According to the Israeli Ministry of Absorption, five thousand people have left the country over the past two years. Over the previous ten years, only eight thousand. And the more Israel hardens its policy in Palestine, the more Jewish refugees there will be in the EU, driven by anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiments.