“The desire to see the world as we wish it to be rather than the way it truly is, if not dealt with, will inevitably lead to discontent, unhappiness and confusion.” (The Tao Teh Ching)

Israel has always been always perceived as a miracle in the eyes of the other nations. Friends and foes together looked upon the rising nation, which spent 2000 years on an exile, with caution, admiration and amazement, as Jews from all over the world gathered on this small piece of land and managed to build a western society in the Middle East, which exists among many fundamentalist societies.

The embodiment of the Zionist dream is beautiful – a nation that was rootless, battered and beaten throughout history, and blamed for all the world’s maladies has found its base and has a homeland, rising from the ashes of the holocaust and attempting to build a society which will be the refuge for all Jewish people who will ever need it. The idea was excellent but the path to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Jews from all over the world gathered in our small country due to the waves of immigration, or shall I say repatriation, which is the correct wording for such immigration in Israel. There is no other country in the whole wide world which grants citizenship so easily to a person who was not born within its borders. There is no other nation in the world which takes the same law, in the name of which millions of its own were killed, and uses it to determine the criteria for citizenship within its borders. This criteria has brought into Israel over the last 20 years two major waves of immigration. One from the former countries of the Soviet Union and the other from Ethiopia.

In spite of a beautiful wrap of Zionist values and an immediate package of citizen rights, which the Jewish agency sells to its prospect costumers all over the world, nothing prepares the future Israeli for the first encounter with the society they are about to enter. In fact, there is no warning about the fact that repatriation, although sounding idealistic and honorable, is immigration for better and for worse. Those who repatriate to Israel experience the same exact hardships – socially, mentally and physically — as any immigrant in any other country with one major difference. If all Israelis are brothers and sisters, it is much more painful to have your own family stabbing you in the back from time after time than a stranger.

Both Ethiopean and Russian-speaking immigrants brought to Israel skilled workers, academics and youth who will be useful in the future as soldiers and leaders who will have to decide as to the future of our country. When we promised their parents they could come Israel and be among brothers, we committed to make them feel like the sons who returned home from an exile, but this never happened. What we provided instead was an immigration process that none of them was really prepared to deal with.

The Israeli notion that our culture is the best and everybody else just has to fit in meant forcing the immigrants to abandon what they were used to so they could be assimilated. As with all immigrations, the new is always treated with suspicion and will not be fully accepted until it proves itself. We let the parents of this new youth bang their heads against the glass ceiling, we let them struggle because “that is how it was for the first settlers who came here …”; they live in the periphery of the country, in the worse neighborhoods and in terrible conditions. We don’t bother helping this youth get educated and we expect them to serve the army under the motto “the country gave you so much and you must give some back to the country”.

Let us all face it – we are a bunch of hypocrites. The so called repatriation to Israel is immigration like all immigrations. People suffer and are scarred for life by their own people. I choose to us ‘we’ as a pronoun, including myself in the group because I see myself as Israeli after all, but I feel, at the same time, I should shed some light on the situation, to bring the change, both for people who plan to repatriate to be prepared and for us to be more acceptant.

Some weeks ago I have listened to a fellow of mine telling about a project she participates in. The idea of it was to take teenagers who repatriated from the former Soviet Union and keep them in a special club with activities, preventing them from being on the streets at the same time and being involved in criminal activity. The rationale behind it was also to get them closer to Hebrew speaking adults in order to reduce the antagonism created through years of them growing up and being looked upon as the “other”.

As she spoke of the project I felt happy that something is being done until she told about what she is really doing there. She said she was working with them on their “Jewish identity”; that is, she was taking for granted that what they need is more ideology rather than mental help. As she spoke her eyes were glowing with joy and as she described her mission she had a pious sound in her voice. It reminded me of stories about nuns, who went to help the orphans in Africa. Did they really go to help the orphans or did they go there to promote Christianity? Even the immigrant youth is seen as a vessel to pour ideology into. These children need help to deal with the stress of our demanding society and sometimes also with food in their stomach, maybe then will they see this country is a country worth fighting for.

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Anna moved to Israel from the Soviet Union at the age of 5.

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