Home-grown Nazis
Sep 13th 2007 | JERUSALEM
From The Economist print edition
A nasty surprise in Israel's midst
ISRAELIS were shocked, as was the rest of the world, by the news that police had arrested a gang of young neo-Nazis in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv. The eight, all immigrants from the former Soviet Union and all but one of them non-Jewish, had taken photos and videos of themselves giving Hitler salutes and beating up foreigners, drug addicts and skullcap-wearing religious men, and had swapped anti-Semitic e-mail messages.
Shocking—but not all that surprising. Israel's “law of return” allows not only Jews but their partners, children and grandchildren, who may not be technically Jewish, to claim Israeli citizenship. It drew immigrants from the former Soviet Union, causing many with only a tenuous Jewish link to move to Israel for a better life. But they often found it hard to get good jobs, so many of their children have grown up in poor towns with few opportunities. And non-Jews in Israel face various complications—from social exclusion to trouble getting married in a country where the rabbinate will not marry non-Jews but civil marriage does not exist. It was likely that a few disillusioned and susceptible youths would fall prey to extreme ideologies.
Nor is the phenomenon new. The past few years have seen a steady trickle of anti-Semitic attacks and swastika-daubings by Israelis, and several youths have been arrested. What grabbed attention this time was the videos they made. Dmir, an organisation that has campaigned for the past seven years for victims of anti-Semitism in Israel, reports hundreds of complaints a year.
Some politicians said the law of return should be more restrictive, which naturally infuriated Russian-Israeli leaders. Arab-Israelis, meanwhile, compare the fuss over the neo-Nazis with the indifference to another extremist minority—those among the right-wing Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories who have spread hate and carried out attacks against Palestinians but are rarely punished. Jamal Zahalka, an Arab member of parliament, put it succinctly: “You can't discriminate between racists.”