A history of employing crises.. This is how Israel exploits the war in Ukraine to bring its Jews to Palestine

Occupied Jerusalem -

The Israeli government took advantage of the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis and the Russian invasion, and announced an "emergency plan" to bring Jews from there.

The implementation of this plan began with the arrival of 87 Jews from Kyiv to Tel Aviv, days before the Russian invasion.

The Jewish community there is estimated to be about 200,000.

The Israeli government announced the readiness of the various ministries, the army, and the agency responsible for bringing in Jews, to absorb the wave of immigration from Ukraine, and the evacuation of about 8,000 Israelis from Kyiv, and Tel Aviv requested Moscow's help to evacuate them after the closure of Ukraine's airspace.

According to the "emergency plan", the details of which were revealed by the Hebrew newspaper, Israel Hayom, when necessary, Israel will bring in 5,000 Jews from Ukraine in one week, which is a much larger number than the Ministry of Absorption and the responsible bodies in Israel are used to.

In 2020, the Jewish Agency transferred thousands of Ukrainian Jews to Israel (Al-Jazeera)

Continuous migrations

In the last decade, Jewish Agency data showed that from 2010 until December 2019, about 255,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from 150 countries, led by Russia, Ukraine, France, the United States and Ethiopia.

Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics showed that since the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 until 2020, about 3.4 million Jewish immigrants came to the country, 43.7 percent of whom immigrated to the country since 1990.

Jewish immigration to Israel increased by 31% in 2021, compared to the previous year, as 20,360 Jews were brought in, according to statistics from the Ministry of Immigration and the Jewish Agency.

According to the agency, the number of Jews in the world is about 14.5 million, including 6.8 million in Israel, about 5.4 million in the United States, and about 460,000 in France, and the rest are distributed in many countries, especially in Western Europe.

Zionism and ambitions in Palestine

The Zionist movement in the 19th century until the Nakba, and then successive Israeli governments, used wars and global crises to promote Jewish settlement at the expense of the Palestinian people, and to bring Jews to historic Palestine.

The British Mandate was a watershed for the settlement movement and the immigration of Jews to Palestine after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which represented the first lever for Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Until the Nakba (1948), the Zionist movement, in cooperation with the British Mandate, carried out 5 campaigns to bring Jews from all over the world and replace them with the Palestinian Arab population.

In 1882, the Zionist movement developed a road map for Jewish immigration and took advantage of global events and crises to initiate its implementation. About 10,000 Jews emigrated from Russia in the wake of the assassination of Tsar of Russia, Alexander II, and the subsequent incidents of persecution of Jews because of their role in the assassination of Tsar.

The Zionist movement took advantage of the case of Alfred Dreyfuss, a Jewish officer in the French army who was brought to trial in 1894 on charges of leaking and transferring military secrets from the French army to Germany, and this caused a wave of hostility to Jews in France, so about 30 thousand Jewish immigrants were transferred from Paris to Palestine.

The arrival of 87 Ukrainian Jews to Israel hours before the start of the Russian invasion (Al-Jazeera)

Since British colonialism

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of British colonialism, the movement of Jewish settlement and immigration to Palestine revived, which witnessed in 1923 the third wave of Jewish immigration, as the Bolshevik revolution in Russia took advantage of 35,000 immigrants, while the fourth wave of immigration continued until 1932 and was centered on America, where About 62,000 Jews immigrated.

In the fifth wave, which lasted until 1938, the Zionist movement employed the beginning of the Nazi era and Hitler's rule in Germany, and took the movement to Palestine by groups of Jews from all over the world in an unprecedented manner, which blew up the Palestinian revolution in 1936, in protest and rejection of land confiscation and Judaization projects and settlement and the recruitment of 174 thousand immigrants, bringing the number of Jews in Palestine to 370 thousand Jews.

The five waves before the Nakba were interspersed with clandestine immigration campaigns of Oriental Jews (Sephardic of European origin) and Jews of Arab origin, such as Yemen, Abyssinia, North Africa, Turkey and Iran, during the 1940s.

The outcome of Jewish immigration to Palestine until 1948 amounted to about 650 thousand Jews.

After the Nakba

After the occupation of Palestine during the Nakba, the series of Zionist massacres against the Palestinian people, their forced displacement, the theft of their land, real estate and property, and the destruction of 54 Palestinian villages and towns, until 1967, about 1.3 million Jews from all over the world were brought in, who formed the cornerstone of the Zionist project in Palestine.

Since the Nakba and the establishment of Israel in 1948 until the end of 2020, the number of Jews grew rapidly and doubled about 10 times. The balance of immigration in general contributed to half of the population increase of the Jews, and the natural increase in the other half, and the Jews now control 97% of the land surfaces within the line Al-Akhdar, and in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, they control about 60% of the land area.

Despite the passage of 74 years since the Nakba and the establishment of Israel on the ruins of Palestine, its land and its people, it is clear that the Jews are mostly immigrants and settlers, still about 41% of them were born outside the country, and about 38% of those born in the country but their fathers were born abroad, and only 21% of them are born abroad. The Jews and their parents were born in Palestine.

Bringing thousands of Falasha Jews during the conflicts and crises that afflicted Ethiopia (Al-Jazeera)

Recruiting the flash

Israel took advantage of the conflicts and wars in Africa, and in the early seventies it paid attention to Jews of African origin, and the Falasha (the Jews of Ethiopia) in particular, despite the questioning of some rabbis and Israeli figures of their Judaism and considering their Christian roots.

About 90,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel, of whom about 20,000 were born in the country, and reside in remote areas with a low socioeconomic level.

From 1997 to 2020, 30,000 Falashas were brought, of whom about 10,000 live in the waiting camp in the Ethiopian capital (Addis Ababa), where the Israeli government sought to exploit the conflict between government forces and Tigray rebels to bring in "Falasha" Jews.

The most prominent recruitment of the Falashas was in 1984, with a special campaign by the Mossad called “Moses campaign”, in which 8,000 of them were brought in, followed by small campaigns that brought in 4,000 from the Tigray region, and in 1991 15,000 of the Falashas were brought in under the auspices and support of the White House and the Jewish community in America .

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who was head of the Jewish Agency, contributed during his term to bringing more than 100,000 Jews from around the world to Israel (Al-Jazeera)

Soviet immigration to the West Bank

The recruitment of the Falasha was not enough to reduce Israel's demographic concerns, so it searched for other sources of Jewish immigration, so it took advantage of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency, opened the door to immigration from the countries of the Union, and the years between 1969-1975 witnessed the emigration of about 100,000 Soviet Jews to Israel.

In the years from 1989 to 2014, about one million and 100 thousand immigrated from the countries of the former Soviet Union to Israel, including 100 thousand engineers, 20 thousand doctors, 24 thousand nurses, 45 thousand teachers, and 20 thousand scientists, artists and musicians.

The Russian Jewish immigration contributed to the consolidation of the settlement project and the consolidation of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, as 160,000 Russian Jewish immigrants settled in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, and contributed to the Judaization of the West Bank and settlements and the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation.