The following piece was written by Ariella Charny, an alumna of Tufts, former CAMERA Fellow, and current consultant for CAMERA. This piece was originally published in The Tufts Daily on Wednesday, March 12th:
My pharmacist is an Arab. My taxi driver is Uzbeki. I live with a Russian woman. The girl in the coffee shop is chatting away in French. That M-16-clad soldier in the olive uniform over there is a Bedouin. My friend’s mom is Moroccan, and her father is Japanese. Her friend’s grandfather is from Austria. The winner of the national 2013 beauty pageant I watch on my laptop is Ethiopian. Now, take a guess. What country am I in? That’s right, it’s Israel. All these people are Israelis.
But wait, isn’t Israel ruled by white supremacist racists from Europe? That’s what I learned last week in The Tufts Daily. The trio of Tufts Israel lovers, Sabrina Ghaus, Ramzi Babouder-Matta, and Lucas Koerner, published an illuminating op-ed entitled “Hand in Hand: Israel and White Supremacy” on March 4, which taught me all about the big, bad, white Zionists.
Except I can’t seem to find them. I also can’t seem to find evidence for many of the so-called facts that the trio mentioned in their op-ed.
I guess Israel went to great lengths to bring 688,000 North African Jewish refugees to safety and freedom in the 1950s, only to intentionally poison their children with radiation on the pretext of treating ringworm?
I surmise Israel went to great lengths over the past three decades to airlift more than 92,000 Ethiopian Jews to safety and freedom in Israel, only so that it could forcefully inject the women with contraceptives and stop them from having children?
I figure Israel continues to go to great lengths to treat over 700 Syrians horribly wounded from the ongoing conflict in neighboring Syria, because Israeli leaders are just so racist against non-Europeans?
I suppose Israel continues to go to great lengths to ensure its 1,658,000 Arab citizens can enjoy the best education and healthcare, lucrative jobs and democratic freedom in the Middle East, so that it can finally implement its Apartheid plan?
It is sad that some extremists at Tufts are so filled with hatred towards the Jewish state that they have become impervious to facts.
The North African Jewish children the trio refer to were treated for ringworm using x-ray machines the exact same way that children in Europe, the United States and in the Middle East were treated at the time. The claim that Ethiopian women were coerced into taking birth control by Israel has long been discredited as an abhorrent falsehood. The majority of Ethiopian women have reported a preference for Depo-Provera injections (which last three months) as a discrete form of birth control. The Yemenite children the authors of the op-ed claim were taken away from their parents in the 1950s in Israeli hospitals had, unfortunately, passed away because they were sick. In an investigation, 92 percent of the medical records for the children had been accounted for.
Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, never, as Ghaus, Babouder-Matta, and Koerner write, sought a Jewish establishment in Uganda before he “turned his gaze towards the Middle East.” Herzl had proposed the British Uganda Program as a temporary refuge for Jews in Russia who were in immediate danger due to pogroms (violent riots). Zionism has always been the Jewish peoples’ aspiration to live in a country they can truly call home in their ancestral land, Israel.
The quote the authors attribute to Israeli politician Eli Yishai is highly dishonest as well. Yishai never said, on the subject of the current influx of African migrants into Israel that the country “belongs to the white man.” What he did say, as translated from his speech in Hebrew, is that “Most of the people coming here are Moslems who think the land doesn’t belong to us at all, to the ‘white man.’ A number of them have said that openly on television.” Clearly, Yishai is quoting others. And the fact that Yishai’s parents immigrated to Israel from Tunisia also appears to be irrelevant for the authors of the Op-Ed. And to be clear, a Mizrachi Jew is not an Arab Jew, as the authors state. Mizrachi Jews include Jews from Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other regions, in addition to Arab countries.
Indeed, the op-ed by Ghaus, Babouder-Matta and Koerner serves one purpose, and one purpose only: to instill contempt for Israel and Jewish students on campus. I am shocked, as an alumna of Tufts University, that the Tufts Daily has so clearly breached its own code of ethics and published such a libelous op-ed.
Yityish Titi Aynaw, the Ethiopian-Israeli winner of the Miss Israel 2013 title, remarked that at the Miss Universe 2013 competition, “you could tell which countries the other women were from. But you can never guess which one is from Israel.” That’s because Israel is beautifully diverse, and her citizens will continue to enjoy freedom and equality under the law. After all, Israel and democracy go hand in hand.
