30 January 2010By
Jonathan Cook
The Israeli government is
reported to have quietly approved the fast-track
immigration of 7,000 members of a supposedly “lost
Jewish” tribe, known as the
Bnei Menashe,
currently living in a remote area of India.
Under the plan, the “lost
Jews” would be brought to Israel over the next two
years by right-wing and religious organisations who,
critics are concerned, will seek to place them in West
Bank settlements in a bid to foil Israel’s partial
agreement to a temporary freeze of settlement growth.
A previous attempt to bring
the Bnei Menashe to Israel was halted in 2003 by
Avraham
Poraz, the interior minister at the time, after it
became clear that most of the 1,500 who had arrived
were being sent to extremist settlements, including in
the Gaza Strip and next to
Hebron, the
large Palestinian city in the West Bank.
Dror Etkes, who monitors
settlement growth for Yesh Din, an Israeli human
rights group, said there were strong grounds for
suspecting that some of the new Bnei Menashe would end
up in the settlements, too.
“There is a mutual interest
being exploited here,” he said. “The Bnei Menashe get
help to make aliyah [immigration] while the
settlements get lots of new arrivals to bolster their
numbers, including in settlements close to Palestinian
areas where most Israelis would not want to venture.”
The government’s decision,
leaked this month to Ynet, Israel’s biggest news
website, was made possible by a ruling in 2005 by
Shlomo Amar,
one of Israel’s two
chief rabbis,
that the Bnei Menashe are one of 10 lost Jewish
tribes, supposedly exiled from the
Middle East
2,700 years ago.
He ordered a team of rabbis
to go to north-east India to begin preparing Bnei
Menashe who identified themselves as Jews for
conversion to the strictest stream of Judaism,
Orthodoxy, so they would qualify to immigrate to
Israel under the
Law of Return.
The Bnei Menashe belong to
an ethnic group called the Shinlung, who number more
than one million and live mainly in the states of
Manipur and Mizoram, close to the border with Myanmar.
They were converted from animism to Christianity by
British missionaries a century ago, but a small number
claim to have kept an ancient connection to Judaism.
DNA samples taken from the
Bnei Menashe have failed so far to establish any
common ancestry to Jews.
The immigration of the Bnei
Menashe following Mr Amar’s ruling was quickly halted
after the foreign minstry expressed concerns that it
was causing a diplomatic falling out with India, which
has laws against missionary activity.
Ophir
Pines-Paz,
the interior minister in 2005, who opposed what he
called the “clandestine” arrival of the Bnei Menashe,
said in an interview last week: “I was against a
policy that sends [Jewish] immigrants to the
settlements. I hope that could not be the case today
with a settlement freeze in place. I want to believe
that is the case.”
However, the Bnei Menashe
have won two powerful right-wing sponsors:
Shavei Israel,
led by
Michael Freund,
a former assistant to
Benjamin Netanyahu,
the
Israeli prime minister;
and a religious group known as the
International Fellowship of Christians and Jews,
which draws on wide support from evangelical
Christians in the United States.
Mr Freund began lobbying
for the immigration of the Bnei Menashe to Israel
while he was an adviser to Mr Netanyahu during his
previous premiership, in the late 1990s. Mr Freund is
believed to have used his connections in the current
government to push the group’s case again.
Arik Puder, a spokesman for
Shavei Israel, refused to comment, saying the
organisation had decided to keep “a low profile” on
the decision to bring the Bnei Menashe to Israel. It
is believed that Shavei Israel is concerned that the
government may come under pressure to reverse its
decision if there is too much public scrutiny.
According to Ynet, Israel
is planning to avoid diplomatic complications with
India by sending groups of Bnei Menashe to Nepal for a
fast-track conversion.
The brand of Judaism the
Bnei Menashe have been exposed to during their “Jewish
education” in
special camps in India was indicated by Rabbi Eliyahu
Avichail, who has worked closely with the tribe since
the early 1980s. He said he believed in the biblical
prophecy of a coming apocalypse – one shared by “End
of Days” evangelical Christians – in which “all the
world is against Israel” in a battle to be decided in
Jerusalem.
“I believe we are very
close to the time when the Messiah will arrive and we
must prepare by making sure that all the Jews are in
the
Land of Israel.
There are more than six million among the
lost tribes
and they must be brought to Israel as a matter of
urgency.”
Shimon Gangte, 33, who was
helped by Mr Avichail to come to Israel 13 years ago,
is among 500 Bnei Menashe living in
Kiryat Arba,
an extremist settlement whose armed inhabitants
regularly clash with Palestinians in neighbouring
Hebron. He said: “It is important that the 10 tribes
are brought here because the time of the Messiah is
near.”
Mr Gangte added that the
Bnei Menashe were attracted to the West Bank because
life was cheaper in the settlements than in Israel and
the settlers “give us help finding housing, jobs and
schools for our children”.
Mr Etkes of Yesh Din said
“past experience” fed suspicions that the Bnei Menashe
would be encouraged to settle deep in the West Bank,
adding that the so-called settlement freeze, insisted
on by the United States as a prelude to renewed peace
talks, was having little effect on the ground.
“There is no freeze because
it is being violated all the time. The settlers had
lots of time to prepare for the freeze and spent the
four to five months before it in a frenzy of
construction activity.”
Shavei Israel
lobbies
for other groups of Jews to be brought to Israel,
including communities in Spain, Portugal, Italy, South
America, Russia, Poland and China.
Israeli peace groups were
outraged in 2002 when Shavei Israel placed a group of
100 Peruvian immigrants, whose ancestors converted to
Judaism 50 years ago, in the Gush Etzion settlement
bloc in the West Bank.
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website
iswww.jkcook.net.
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