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Aliyah Holds No Allure For Me

Aliyah Holds No Allure For Me Dr. Robert Philipson Shoga Films

  The young ulpanist in the rose greenhouse.  

Aliyah. In its Biblical context, “aliyah” is a Hebrew word meaning “to rise up” and specifically denotes ascending to Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish Feasts. In modern context, it now refers to the “return” of Jews to the Land of Israel. This subset of “immigration” automatically includes all Jews and excludes everybody else. In that regard, as an immigration policy reduced to one word, it is unique.
 
“How nice!” one might think, “that there is a place of refuge in the event that my own country turns fascist or encourages anti semitism to the extent that I no longer feel safe.” I’ve had Jewish friends who “made aliyah,” and many American Jews have relatives who emigrated. “Aliyah” is never an option I have considered or would consider. There are five principal reasons which I will cover in ascending order of importance.


1. I do not want to learn Hebrew

In 1969 I spent five months in Israel as part of a university-sponsored group to study living conditions in the kibbutz, an experiment in nation-building and socialist living that was unique in its time. In line with its nation-building mandate, the larger kibbutzim took in young people and gave them food and shelter in exchange for their labor. These programs were called ulpans, and the richer, more organized kibbutzim taught their ulpanists Hebrew. Hebrew, a dead liturgical language, had been resurrected by the Zionists as the language of Jews and as the official language of the State of Israel. It was a Quixotic choice, but the whole Zionist enterprise in its early days up to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was Quixotic. Our group had Hebrew classes all morning and worked in the kibbutz orchards, green houses, and meatpacking plant in the afternoon. 

 

By dint of study and immersion in the linguistic bath, I gained a rudimentary understanding of the simplified Hebrew that many Israelis pitched to the level of the foreigners. Reading and writing, however, were definitively closed to me. Had I had a Jewish education as a boy culminating in a bar mitzvah, I would have been familiar with the Hebrew alphabet and its prehistoric right-to-left orientation (because, you know, if you’re right-handed and chiseling on a tablet, that’s the only way you’re going to flow). But I had not had such an education, and, to compound the despair of the linguistic Gentile, Hebrew newspapers, books, and signs had dispensed with vowel dots, s tht th rdng xprnc wld lk lk ths!


Hopeless! I was not willing then, nor since, to cripple my participation in a new national life with a painful and insufficient mastery of its official language. I’ve seen how low English skills have blighted the lives of many immigrants to America. 


 2. I’m not desperate to emigrate

God knows the United States has its flaws, but I’ve experienced countries under dictatorship (the Central African Republic), with rampant crime and social unrest (Brazil), where antisemitism is so pervasive and ineradicable that it fucks with its Jewish citizens heads (France), and where recent apartheid policies have permanently sabotaged and distorted race relations (Namibia). We have serious inequalities and divisions in the United States, but I don’t think these will ever lead to civil war. 


 Furthermore, I was born and raised in the upper middle class, and due to the generational wealth which my parents of The Greatest Generation accumulated, my financial berth is secure. Life’s pretty good and always has been. 


3. I do not want to live in an apartheid state
The Six-Day War of 1969 brought more than one million Palestinians into the occupied territories under Israeli rule. Israeli citizenship was never conceived of as a possible resolution and in the ensuing decades, a two-state solution was eventually strangled by extremists on both sides of the conflict. The acquisition of Gaza and the West Bank has poisoned the Israeli body politic, and, for the same reason, I would not choose to live in Mississippi, I do not want to have even casual contact with racists, religious fanatics, and right-wing extremists.


4. I do not want to live in a country with a state-sponsored religion
Orthodox Jews have a stranglehold on Judaism and its rituals. You cannot have a Jewish wedding unless it’s officiated by an Orthodox Rabbi. Other modes of Jewish worship – Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist – are not only not recognized, but if religious Israeli Jews had their way, these “heresies” would be stamped out everywhere forever. Orthodox rabbis have an outsized influence on Israeli policy, have contributed to the hopeless tangle of the Palestinian problem with the belief that the occupied territories have been bestowed by God to be part of what they call Greater Israel, and are reproducing at such a rapid rate that they will gain the demographic (and therefore electoral) upper hand against secular (and Arab) Israelis. 


5. Why would I want to project myself into that mess? 
This should be self-explanatory. If I have to plan for a “safe room” in a house I build or acquire, shouldn’t that give me pause about my choice of residence? 


It’s been a year since Hamas – another extremist group – unleashed the Israeli-Gaza War with increasingly violent repercussions in Southern Lebanon and the West Bank. Benjamin Netanyahu, the most corrupt and disastrous Jewish leader of modern history, is still Prime Minister with no end of his reign or the war which keeps him in power in sight. Violence escalates; innocent Palestinians perish by the tens of thousands; fanatical rogue Israeli “settlers” terrorize and kill Palestinians with impunity; Israeli society drifts, lurches, or is driven rightwards.

 

Who in their right mind wants to “go up” into THAT!

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