Saturday, June 29, 2013

Israel: A great place to be white!

Not everyone who lives in Israel is of pasty white European heritage, but you wouldn't know it from the Israeli government's outreach. For reasons only fully understood by the gods and the person trolling me, I was recently subscribed to the newsletter of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a quasi-governmental organization that seeks to replace brown people in Israel with Jews and trees.

An explicitly racist organization (Israel's second largest property owner, it refuses to rent land to Arabs), it was not surprising to find that JNF's printed propaganda featured almost exclusively smiling white people. On one page, smiling white college kids whose trip to the Holy Land totally rocked. On another page, a smiling white foodie dishing the inside scoop on Israeli cuisine. Here a white person; there a white person; everywhere a white person. The reader at home's takeaway: Go to Israel and you won't have to mix with the coloreds, unless of course you book the 4 day / 3 night Ethnic Immersion tour package.

What's a little weird is that when I tweeted something snarky about the awful lot of white folk in JNF's newsletter, the CEO of JNF, seemingly awful white person Russell Robinson, saw fit to retweet it. Judging by the rest of his tweets -- yes, older friends, I too find my generation's language insufferable -- it does not appear this was an act of passive aggression, though I probably shouldn't jump to any conclusions. Perhaps he was just distracted by how pasty white I am and hit the wrong button.

PREVIOUSLY: In 2012, Israel's Interior Minister Eli Yishai said, "Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man."

8 comments:

  1. "The JNF has a specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens".

    http://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/iopt0308/4.htm

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  2. I'm actually not against the trees thing. In fact, I think we should replace more people with trees. Washington DC in particular has far too much concrete.

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  3. "Spotlighting exposes public figures who incite, demonize and slander Israel and Jews., one at a time."

    Because an entire nation-state needs a twitter troll to fight its battles.

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  4. Hilarious. Prescribing chemical birth control agents to African-looking mothers might also be part of this white push in Israel.

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  5. Anonymous5:40 PM

    You are clearly a victim of the Anti-Israel crowd who easily infect and feed those with an Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic agenda. For years now, there are no restrictions on renting land to anyone

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  6. Thank you for leaving the exact same comment as "Spotlighting."

    Repeat after me: the Jewish National Fund refuses to rent land to Arabs. It in fact hates ARabs so much that, when it was pressured to do rent to them by an Israeli court, it instead worked out a deal whereby it gets land in the Negev (i.e., more native land) for every time its forced to rent to an Arab, with the land used by the latter administered by the state of Israel so JNF need not sully its white hands by renting to brown people.

    Again: JNF does not rent land to Arabs. Cheers.

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  7. Anonymous2:59 AM

    About half of Israeli Jews aren't of European heritage. Are you saying the JNF is biased against them, or do you reserve the term "brown" only for Arabs since it fits in with your racist dichotomy?
    And btw, Israel's beauty queen is a black Ethiopian.

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