To build a new nation

A series of experiments developed by German psychologist Dietrich Dorner casts light on the prevalent modern myth that rational planning holds the solution to all social and environmental problems.

Employing computer simulations, Dorner presents his subjects with real life problems and possible solutions. Few participants find the correct solutions. Even the most highly trained and intelligent almost invariably focus too narrowly on the specific problem at hand and fail to anticipate the system-wide effects of their cures.

Would-be social engineers in the real world fare as poorly. Their disasters range from the farcical - Brasilia, the Brazilian capital city built from scratch according to Le Corbusier's grand design, in which no one wanted to live - to the catastrophic - the starvation of millions as a direct result of Lenin's collectivization of Soviet agriculture.

Whole books could be filled with the man-made ecological disasters caused by attempts to improve the ecosystem or get rid of pests. The African 'killer" bee introduced into Brazil to increase pollination levels is today a major menace as far north as Palm Springs. Cane toads introduced into Australia to eat the cane beetle turned into a plague of near biblical proportions, as the huge toads ate absolutely everything besides the beetle.

Israel boasts one of the highest per capita hubris ratios in the world, so it is not surprising that we should be witness to some of the wackiest schemes in social engineering. Take current efforts to deal with the chareidi menace.

As nearly every right-thinking person realizes, the greatest threat facing us today is not the Palestinians but the haredim. They multiply like bugs. Not content with unnatural population growth, they lure unsuspecting children to their schools and trick their unwitting parents.

Like locusts, they gobble up all the national wealth until everyone else in the country is left hovering on the brink of starvation. And worst of all, they seek to impose their way of life on the entire population. Should their political power grow any greater, every woman in Israel will soon be wearing a sheitel.

Clearly something must be done before it is too late. Fortunately, Israeli ingenuity has contrived a solution: Import hundreds of thousands of non-Jews from Russia.

Even Absorption Minister Yuli Edelstein admits that 40 percent of current immigrants from the former Soviet Union are not Jewish by anybody's definition. And close to 70% are not halachically Jewish.

And with every new wave of immigration, the percentage of non-Jews grows, since there are fewer and fewer people left in Russia with any natural ties to Israel. Economics alone drives today's immigration. If the current economic chaos persists in Russia, hundreds of thousands more new immigrants will come to Israel, the vast majority of whom are not Jewish.

Ironically, it is the Law of Return, the secular state's expression of the responsibility of Jews for one another and of the Jewish dream of the ingathering of the exiles, that has become the instrument of de-Judaizing Israel. Under the law, anyone with one Jewish grandparent is automatically entitled to citizenship and full immigrant rights. So too are their non-Jewish spouses and all the spouses' relatives. One long dead Jew can thus enable dozens of people with not a drop of Jewish blood to become Israeli citizens.

Far from viewing this situation as a disaster, many in the cultural elite view it as the greatest opportunity to remake Israel in their own image.

A Yediot Aharonot editorial this year sharply attacked Ha'aretz for pointing out how porous is the Law of Return. 'From a true Zionist perspective,' opined the Yediot editorialist, 'the time has come to stop with all these distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. That distinction belongs to galut. The only relevant distinction here is between Israeli and Palestinian. Everything else is irrelevant rabbinic bull.'

The culmination of the Zionist project of removing the exile from the Jew is thus achieved, but only bysevering the connection between Israeli and Jew. An eyebrow is not even raised anymore when the 'Jewish' Agency organizes a tour of Christian holy places for new immigrants from Russia.

The 70 Jewish Agency emissaries currently fanning out over the former Soviet Union and gleefully rubbing their hands over the prospect of large-scale aliya fueled by economic panic treat the Law of Return as if its goal was the maximization of Israel's population. Those emissaries have, according to Dov Kontorer, a senior editor at Vesti, 'fully internalized the ideology of creating a new Israeli nation, for which Slavs are preferable to haredim and Moroccans.'

As one emissary told Makor Rishon earlier this year, 'Israel lacks sane, non-religious, leftist people. There are several ways to solve the problem. One is to bring in goyim and create a new nation.'

From the point of view of its proponents, the wholesale importation of non-Jews has been a smashing success. In 1980, Shabbat observers constituted 20% of the non-Arab population. Today they constitute 15%, and that number is projected to decline to 10% by 2005. So much for the ominous haredization of Israeli society.

What yet remains to be seen is whether a situation in which non-Jews from Russia are the third largest ethnic group in the country will yet plague Israel in ways not foreseen by our enlightened social engineers. Stay tuned until next week.