shio said: Israeli-Arabs, who make up about 20% of the population of Israel, say they are facing increasing racism and discrimination. |
From the look of it, there're people of even Jewish decent or considered Jewish outside of Israel feel opressed due to their nationality. Here's quote from "The Invention of the Jewish People" by Shlomo Sand:
The other student, whose name was Larissa, was born in 1984 in a small town in Siberia. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early 1990s, her parents migrated to Israel, where they were sent to a so-called development town in the Upper Galilee. There Larissa was brought up amid a balance of immigrant and Israeli children, and appeared to integrate well. She began to speak Hebrew like a Sabra and was content with herself and with daily life in Israel. Sometimes she was upset when called a Russian and teased because of her golden hair, but that was how local youngsters treated newly arrived children. In the year 2000, at age sixteen, she went to the Ministry of the Interior office to obtain her first identity card. She was received cordially by a woman clerk and given an application form to complete. When it came to the question of nationality, she asked, naively, if she could write "Jewish." The clerk looked through the information she had already entered and explained, apologetically, that she could not. She would be in the same category as her mother, and thus bear the taunting title "Russian." Later she would say at that moment she felt the same pain as when she began to menstruate—something that occurs in nature and can never be got rid of. Larissa was not the only girl in the town who bore this mark of Cain. At school they even formed a sorority of non-Jewish girls. They shielded each other and tried to smudge the nationality information on their identity cards to make it illegible, but that didn't work and they had to continue to carry the incriminating document. At seventeen they all hastened to get a driver's license, as that did not detail nationality and could substitute for an identity card. Then came the school's "Roots" trip to the death camps in Poland. A problem arose. To obtain a passport, Larissa had to bring her identity card to school. Fear that the entire class would discover her secret, as well as her parents' limited means, made her forgo the trip. So she didn't get to see Auschwitz, which has gradually been replacing Masada as the site of formative memory in modern Jewish identity. She was, however, conscripted into national military service, and although she tried to use her Russian national status to avoid the draft—even writing a long letter to the recruiting office about it—her request was turned down. Military service actually did Larissa some good. Fumbling for the Bible during the swearing-in ceremony, she trembled and even shed tears. For a moment she forgot the little cross she had received from her maternal grandmother upon leaving Russia as a little girl. Once in uniform, she felt she belonged, and was convinced that from now on she would be taken for an Israeli in every way. She turned her back on the detested, faltering Russian culture of her parents, choosing to date only Sabras and avoiding Russian men. Nothing pleased her more than to be told she did not look Russian, despite the suspicious color of her hair.