- Israel, a nice country, lots and lots of history,
very technologically advanced,
some incredible scenery and the food out of this world.
But diversity, maybe not the first thing
that comes to mind for most people
when they think about Israel,
but that's a common misconception about this young country.
You see, Israel has welcomed a dizzying number of immigrants
from nearly every corner of the world,
religious and non-religious, Jewish and non-Jewish,
light skinned and dark skinned, babies to babies,
so how did this immigration nation come to be?
How did a young, poor and vulnerable country
cope with that influx?
And how has the diversity of that influx
shaped the Israel of today?
(upbeat music)
Israel is a multicultural democracy.
It's 20% Arab and it's nearly 80% Jewish.
That means there are really two big diversity stories here.
One story is about Jews
from all around the world coming together,
and the other story is about Jews and non-Jews
figuring out how to live together in the Jewish state.
But just as non-Jews in Israel include Muslims
and Christians, and Bedouins, and Druzes,
and even Circassians,
Israeli Jews are dizzyingly diverse too.
They come from over 100 countries,
meaning that most of them spoke
all kinds of different languages before learning Hebrew.
Only 600,000 Jews lived in Israel 1948,
remarkably and with lightning speed,
Israel absorbed 360,000 Holocaust survivors 1940s,
850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim countries,
mostly in the 1950s,
nearly 90,000 Ethiopian Jews since the 1980s,
and another 1 million Russians since the 1990s,
that's like a lot of people.
These refugees often running from antisemitism
were running towards a Jewish home,
making what is called Aliyah.
Aliyah means ascend, going up.
The term captures Jews longing for Zionism
for nearly 2000 years.
In the last 75 years, it describes the phenomenon
of Jews coming to Israel
and making the modern Jewish state their home.
Immigration isn't just something that Israel allows,
it's fundamental to what Israel is.
The philosopher Eliezer Schweid called Israel
an immigrant absorbing state.
And that's reflected in Israel's laws and policies.
The famous Law of Return, for example
offers every Jew born anywhere automatic citizenship.
Providing refuge in their ancient Homeland
after centuries of homelessness and oppression
is built into the very fabric of this country
and it goes beyond just welcoming immigrants.
Israel organizes economy, its education system,
its entire society to integrate these immigrants.
Of course, absorbing immigrants is stressful
and never seamless,
Holocaust survivors in the 40s were mocked
for not fighting back against the Natzis.
Jews from Arab lands in the 50s were mocked
for being too religious and not western enough.
And North American immigrants
were bullied for being too western.
Yet every immigrant who arise by a boat or by plane
reminds Israelis who they are
and what the Zionist project is all about.
For many Jews from Arab and Muslim lands
moving to Israel in the 1950s was hard.
It meant leaving countries some had lived in for centuries
and sometimes leaving great wealth behind.
We are Arab-Jews many of them still say.
Clumped together by Israelis as Mizrahi,
Jews from the east, some felt compelled
to establish their own political party in the 1980s,
SHAS to demand equality.
Nearly 40 years after the Jews arrived for Muslim lands,
Jews started arriving from the Soviet Union.
In February, 1986
after being imprisoned in the Soviet Union's prison system
the Gulag for nine years,
simply for speaking up
and demanding the right to move to Israel,
Natan Sharansky arrived in Jerusalem.
That night Ecstatic Israelis carried him
to the front of the Kotel, the Western Wall.
Sharansky recalled, "From an ocean of hatred
"I find myself in an ocean of love.
"Having left a country where only the government
"knows what must be done,
"I arrive in a society where everybody but the government
"knows what must be done."
Here, every taxi driver, every kibbutznik,
every shopkeeper is if not prime minister,
then at least foreign and defense ministers combined.
Finally, while some Ethiopian Jews have faced discrimination
and outright racism, more and more are proud Israelis
like Sharon Shalom an Ethiopian Jew born Zaude Tesfay.
Sharon Shalom walked over two months from Ethiopia to Sudan
and arrived in Israel in 1982
as one of 8,000 Jews operation Moses brought to Israel
on a massive airlift.
Today, Sharon Shalom is a rabbi for a congregation
of mostly European born Holocaust survivors.
As a child, he asked his grandfather one day,
"Grandfather, how old are you?"
His grandfather replied, "I'm eight years old."
Shalom was astonished, "Eight years old, how can that be?"
The grandfather explained
that when he arrived in the land of Israel,
he began counting the years of his life anew.
Today, more and more immigrants
come from free prosperous countries like me,
(indistinct) of choice from Western democracies,
not antisemitic autocracies.
That choice to move to the middle east
often leaving the relevant comforts of your home,
trust me can be tough.
The linguistic, social, professional,
and cultural adjustments can be very, very challenging
especially when dealing with the famous
or infamous Israeli bluntness.
With all this chaos and complexity,
with all this immigration and absorption,
diversity and difference,
it's hard to believe Israel functions at all,
let alone that it has grown economically,
socially and technologically.
So what's its secret?
First, frequent attacks from the outside often unite Israel.
So when terrorists attack or bombs fall
or natural disasters occur,
a tight knit society becomes even tighter.
Second, Israelis may have many different mother tongues
but there is one common Jewish language.
Beyond the words itself,
it's a language of a shared past,
a shared Bible, shared roots in the land,
shared holidays, shared values,
and the shared sense of family.
Finally, there is the Zionist idea, the Zionist dream,
"Lehiyot am chofshi b'artzenu"
the dream to be a free people in the Jewish homeland,
after 2000 years of exile.
Wave after wave of immigrants
has built Israel as a fulfillment of that dream,
persevering through whatever challenges arose along the way.
In many countries today, immigration is seen as a problem
yet Israel continues to be an immigrant absorbing state
and most Israelis know it is this remarkable diversity
that the country has stood for,
which has created such a successful,
multicultural democratic society.