Soviet Immigration Deprives Israelis of Housing and Arabs of Jobs

By Dr. Israel Shahak

The number of Soviet Jews arriving in Israel increases each month. The official figure for October 1990 was 22,000 new arrivals, with a two-month total of 75,000 for November and December. There are reasons to suspect that the actual figures are even higher than the official ones.

Although there is no official total of Soviet Jews who have arrived since the beginning of 1989, it can be estimated that by the end of 1990 that figure will have reached the vicinity of 300,000 during the two years. Many more are expected in 1991.

An influx so huge is bound to cause grave social problems, especially when additional funds to deal with them are lacking.

An immediate consequence is the housing shortage. According to official statements from the beginning of November, no more housing is available for the coming immigrants. Accordingly, the Israeli authorities began to rent, at great expense, rooms in hotels in order to house them. The current crisis in tourism makes this possible.

The authorities now are frequently ignoring the commitment to grant each immigrant family a separate apartment, which they observed until about September. Instead, two, three, or even four families are forced to share the same apartment. Some of the affected immigrants have made their complaints public. Under a Nov. 5 headline reading "Immigrants not granted separate apartments protest: Why have we been brought here?" Davar reports a demonstration of 200 such families in Upper Nazareth. That protest focused upon a new town rule precluding separate apartments for childless families. "True, I am old and I have heart failure, and my wife is old as well," one elderly immigrant complained, "The two of us will not contribute anything to the state. But my daughter is a technician, my son-in-law is an engineer and my grandson has just been drafted into the army. All of them will surely contribute to the state. So why shouldn't we be granted an apartment?"

With both the hotels and abandoned army camps being used to house the immigrants soon to be filled to capacity, an idea of purchasing from Holland some "high quality tents which can be heated in winter" has cropped up. Another proposal is to accommodate the immigrants on old boats.

Some organizations of Soviet Jews, accustomed to think in Stalinist terms, demand that in apartments of native Israelis, rooms "determined by the authorities as superfluous " be confiscated from their owners by invoking the Emergency Regulations, and transferred to new immigrants. The proposal, however, would further exacerbate rapidly deteriorating relations between native Israelis and the new immigrants.

Deteriorating Relations

Two factors fuel this deterioration. The new immigrants, most of whom are unemployed, are entitled to a one-year cost-of living allowance, which is renewable. Native unemployed, including the demobilized conscript soldiers among them, are entitled to no comparable benefits. The second factor was the fact that housing accommodations allotted to the new immigrants who arrived before the summer of 1990 were often of much higher quality than housing available to native Israeli poor.

As economic conditions in Israel deteriorate, rivalry between the two populations mounts, as attested by increasingly frequent violent incidents. In fact, relationships between the native poor and the new immigrants resemble these between rival tribes. The custom of exacting blood revenge has even made its appearance.

Yediot Ahronot, under the Nov. 12 headline "The natives against new immigrants and vice-versa, " described one such incident in Tel-Kabir, a poor Tel Aviv neighborhood, "where a boy stabbed a new immigrant from the USSR, to be the next day stabbed by another new immigrant. " Journalist Tamar Trablasi was told by the neighborhood residents with whom she spoke that such stabbings were a common occurrence in this neighborhood.

"Those knifings reveal a whole edifice of bad relations, " she wrote, between two groups now occupying a neighborhood originally built to relocate Oriental Jews from subsequently demolished slums. "The new immigrants receive an apartment and an allowance, whereas we don't, " local resident Malka Cohen complained to the journalist. "This causes much tension and bad blood here. We try to understand that they are not to be blamed, but, naturally, our wrath is aimed at people due to whom we suffer discrimination. Take my case. I have to live with my family in two rooms for which we previously paid $250 per month. Now the owner has raised the rent to $350, because of the new immigrants.

"Had Israel granted the same rights to all Jews, native and new immigrants alike, there would have been no problems. But in this way, all of us are furious at the new immigrants."

"All of us are furious at the new immigrants."

The tension erupts mainly between young members of both groups, who attend the same school but always play separately. The grownups, by contrast, usually simply ignore each other. Native teenagers taunt their new immigrant counterparts by shouting Russians go home" or "You are Goyim" (Gentiles, a pejorative term in Israel, especially among the poorer classes).

Formal and informal fringe benefits, like free bus rides and waivers of payment for school trips, granted selectively to new immigrant children, evoke particular resentment. Malka Cohen reminisces, quite correctly, that her immigrant parents received no such benefits upon their arrival in Israel, because most immigrants at that time were Oriental Jews.

Graver Impacts on the Palestinians

There are even graver impacts on the Palestinians, both in Israel and in the occupied territories. Since the Israeli government pays a premium of 300 to 500 shekels per month to every employer hiring a new immigrant instead of a Palestinian (but not instead of another Jew!) many employers, especially factory owners, are now laying off their Palestinian employees, massively. The cases of discharged Palestinians who live in Israel have come to the attention of the press, since unlike the inhabitants of the territories, they are capable of organizing protests.

For example, members of the Druze community are permitted to enlist in the Israeli army and often subsequently serve for years in the police, border guards, as prison guards and the like. Nevertheless, many of them were recently fired by employers seeking premiums for hiring new Jewish immigrants in place of non-Jews. Articles published on Nov. 9 in Haaretz and Hadashot describe Druze reaction to this discrimination, and the conclusions to which it leads concerning their real status and the forms of protest available to them.

Because a very high proportion of Druze males are employed in the "Security System," the firings caused more bitterness than real hardship. This contrasts with the situation of other Palestinians. In many of their villages, no less than 90 percent of the work force is employed in the Jewish sector, often in factories, where they are being fired without prospects of finding alternative jobs. Hadashot described one case on Nov. 15 under the headline ... They brought new immigrants in our place, firing us like dogs,' said the Arab employees of 'Tempo'. " A soft-drink manufacturer fired 15 workers, all Arab, some of them highly specialized technicians employed for years in the factory, to make room for new Jewish immigrants.

The Arab workers subsequently appealed the decision to Histadrut through the workers' council in their village, Tirah. The appeals to higher echelons of the Histadrut hierarchy have had no results to date. The Palestinian community is now considering a boycott of "Tempo" products.

A Request to Halt Emigration

One of the most interesting reactions to the present tensions is the Nov. 18 visit of a delegation of Oriental Jews to Moscow to request the Soviet government to halt further Jewish emigration to Israel. The delegation was headed by Kochavi Shemesh, an Oriental Jewish activist in Jerusalem. The delegation's Moscow visit was financed by Moroccan Jewish radicals living in France, and possibly in Morocco, and it benefits, according to its organizers, from some French diplomatic support as well.

Kochavi Shemesh stated to Kol Hair that he broke his political silence of the last few years to halt the "coming disaster" in Israel resulting from the immigration of Soviet Jews. "In order to absorb those immigrants Israel will need $100 billion, " Shemesh said, a figure it cannot possibly obtain. "The missiles of Saddam Hussain do not frighten me as much as this immigration. Saddam's missiles can kill [in Israel] 5,000 at most. But the immigration can wreck the entire state."

Shemesh denied that the Soviet Jews lived in distress: "There is less anti-Semitism in Russia than in France. What is their problem, then?" He attributed the immigration to the contrast between the bad economic conditions in the USSR and the benefits granted them in Israel.

Dr. Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and retired professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is chairman of the Israeli League of Human and Civil Rights. His monthly translations From the Hebrew Press are available to Washington Report readers for $25 a year from the American Educational Trust.