I'm absolutely in despair now. Today, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Netanyahu government has decided to deport hundreds of migrant workers' children, all born in Israel, all of whom speak Hebrew, to maintain the "Jewish character" of Israel. On the one hand, thank heaven we have the Fourteenth Amendment, but on the other hand, if Lindsay Graham wants to revise it, where are we?
So the front page at latimes.com presents the headline, "Israel to deport hundreds of migrant workers' children." Further investigation finds this is to stem illegal immigration:
"On the one hand, this problem is a humanitarian problem,'' Netanyahu said during a meeting Sunday of the Cabinet, which had debated the move for nearly a year. "We all feel and understand the hearts of children. But on the other hand, there are Zionist considerations and ensuring the Jewish character of the state of Israel."
"We don't want to create an incentive for the inflow of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrant workers,'' he said.
Israel, of course, has no clear policy concerning migrant workers from places like the Philippines or China, who of course came to Israel to replace the Palestinian workers. If you have a Jewish mother, of course, you can make aliyah and Israel will welcome you; whether you can then get married is subject to the Orthodox rabbinate, but that's another issue.
The problems this presents are several. First, there's the humanitarian problem, which is obvious. Second, there's the AIPAC issue, and this is where it gets complicated. If our past experience tells us anything, criticism of this will be seen as somehow anti-semitic and decidedly anti-Israel. I'm also concerned that the neocons will get it in their heads that this is something the United States should do, and with all the calls to gut the Fourteenth Amendment to strip the children born to undocumented migrants of automatic citizenship, the drumbeat will get louder.
Israel has proved under its non-Labor governments, by way of its treatment of Gaza and the West Bank, that it should never be considered a model for the treatment of the "others' within its borders, and that itself is painful for someone whose grandfather was a committed Zionist, and knew Yitzhak Ben-Zvi well in New York during the 1920s. It's finally time to uncouple the religion from the country that has it as its state religion.
There are no comments at the Times yet, but I have a feeling they'll be even viler than the usual anti-immigrant stuff. I'm glad I'm as secular as they come, because this is the last straw for me.