THE RECENT bizarre report of several Israeli Jewish families seeking political asylum in the Palestine Authority is a graphic illustration of Israeli discrimination against non-Western Jews.
Some twenty Moroccan Jews from the Jerusalem satellite town of Mevasseret Zion fled to Jericho in September, after armed police evicted them from their homes and a court order barred them from entering both Mevasseret Zion and Jerusalem.
Until the mass immigration of Jews from the former USSR, in the early 1990s, approximately half a million Moroccan Jews constitured Israel's largest Jewish community. However, they have been consistently economically disadvantaged and under-represented in Israeli politics.
East European Jewish culture and tradition have been considered normative, and Jews from Arab countries such as Morocco and Yemen, as well as Ethiopians and Indians, have faced official racism, with even their Jewishness (key to civil rights in Israel) considered doubtful.
Following the establishment of An early lesson in Zionism for an uprooted West Bank Palestinian Israel and the expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, the new government urgently sought Jewish immigrants to repopulate the abandoned homes, villages and TOMAS. European Jewry had been seriously depleted by Nazi murder, and. although a number of Holocaust survivors reached in Israel, it was clear that Europe would not providé the mass immigration needed. Since most American Jews showed no inclination to leave for the Middle East, Israel was forced to look to the Jewish communities of North Africa and the Middle East. Relatively well integrated, these Jews had never experienced the horrors of European-style racism. Few of them had been attracted to the Zionist movement. Israel determined to "rescue" these Jews from their "exile".
The experience of the Iraqi Jews has been confirmed by an Israeli court: Israel sent agentsprovocateur to carry out bomb attacks on Jewish community centres, while Britain's client ruler in Iraq, Nuri Said, imposed restrictions on Jewish civil rights Not surprisingly, within a few months the bulk of this ancient, prosperous and influential community had fled to Israel.
Similar stratagems, though less well documented, are known to have been applied in Morocco and Yemen. On arrival in Israel, these Jews - many of them professionals, academics or rich merchants - were treated as backward and ignorant children.
For many, their first experience of Israel was a compulsory spraying with DDT - an indignity never accorded to immigrants from the west. They were then resettled in former Palestinian areas, such as Lydda and Ramleh, or in "development towns" - newly-built slums in the middle of nowhere, often in exposed border areas.
Israeli political prisoner Mordechai Vanunu, who came to Israel from Morocco with his family in 1963, told a researcher in an interview in 1986: "We came from paradise to the desert".
This process was carried out by a government of the Israeli Labour Party, which thus earned the undying hatred of generations of North African and Middle Eastern Jews.
Mevasseret Zion was one such isolated borderslum built for North African immigrants. Until the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, Israeli-held Jerusalem was a small and remote part of the country.
However, in the past thirty years it has been encouraged to develop into Israel's largest city. Mevasseret Zion, no longer on the border, has become a fashionable dormitory suburb for wealthy Jerusalemites who do not want to live in the city.
As a result, many children of the immigrants forcibly placed there forty to fifty years ago can no longer afford the spiralling cost of housing, ana are forcea to move to mnner-cily slums.
This was the background to the squatting movement in Mevasseret Zion, which led to the evictions of the Avivi, Dahan and Buzit families and their flight to Jericho. Now, with the help of Yasser Arafat, they have contacted King Hassan and asked to return to Morocco.
Although it is unlikely that many. others will follow their example in the near future, the entire story shows how freedom, security an d prosperity for Israeli Jews, no less than for Palestinian Arabs, cannot be obtained while Israel remains a racist state, wedded to a Zionist ideology of separation and apartheid. Aiding partition? McAleese. couldn't blot out the memory of Labour's participation in the Rainbow coalition with the conservatives of Fine Gael.
From a historically high vote of 19% and 33 seats, Labour are back in opposition with 10% and 17 seats. To make things worse, the de. feat in the Presidential election has ruined their hopes of supplanting Fianna Fail as the main opposition party.
The impact of the "peace" talks, whatever their outcome, is likely to be highly destabilising on politics in the South of Ireland, and to Fianna Fail in particular.
In this situation there is undoubtedly room for a socialist party with a aarrao line on the nationa question. It is to this possibility that Irish socialists must bend all their efforts.