Start-up Nation

CHAPTER 7.

Immigration: The Google Guys  Challenge

1. Interview with Shlomo Molla, member of Knesset, Kadima Party, March 2009.

2. This covert rescue effort was aided by the Central Intelligence Agency, local mercenaries, and even Sudanese security officials. It was kept a secret largely for political reasons—in order to shield Sudan from any blowback from the Arab countries that would criticize the government for ostensibly aiding Israel. When the story of the airlift broke prematurely, the Arab countries pressured Sudan to stop the airlift, which it did. This left one thousand Ethiopian Jews stranded until U.S.-led Operation Joshua evacuated them to Israel a few months later.

3. Leon Wieseltier, “Brothers and Keepers: Black Jews and the Meaning of Zionism.”

4. Joel Brinkley, “Ethiopian Jews and Israelis Exult as Airlift Is Completed,” New York Times, May 26, 1991.

5. David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story (New York: Delacorte, 2005), p. 15.

6. Interview with Natan Sharansky, chairman and distinguished fellow, Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, Shalem Center, and founder of Yisrael B’Aliya, May 2008.

7. Interview with David McWilliams, Irish economist and author of The Pope’s Children, March 2009.

8. Interview with Erel Margalit, founder of Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), May 2008.

9. Interview with Reuven Agassi, December 2008.

10. While the new law was already rigid, the U.S. State Department directed consular officers overseas to become even stricter in their application of the “public charge” provision of immigration law. A public charge is someone unable to support himself or his family. At the beginning of the Great Depression, in response to a public outcry for tougher immigration laws, overseas consuls were told to expand the interpretation of the “public charge clause” to prohibit admission to immigrants who just might become public charges. The designation became a completely speculative process.

11. David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. x.

12. Some scholars now believe that the lack of a safe haven for Jews seeking to leave Germany and other soon-to-be-occupied Nazi territories became an important factor in Nazi plans to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. “The overall picture clearly shows that the original [Nazi] policy was to force the Jews to leave,” says David Wyman. “The shift to extermination came only after the emigration method had failed, a failure in large part due to lack of countries open to refugees.” From Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 35.

13. In 1939, the British government created a ceiling of 10,000 Jewish immigrants per year into Palestine, with an additional allotment of 25,000 possible entries. It is true that in 1945, President Harry Truman requested a U.S. government investigation of treatment of Jewish displaced persons, many of whom were in facilities overseen by the U.S. Army. “The resulting report chronicled shocking mistreatment of the already abused refugees and recommended that the gates of Palestine be opened wide for resettlement,” writes Leonard Dinnerstein in America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). After several unsuccessful attempts to persuade Great Britain to admit the Jews into Palestine, Truman asked Congress to pass a law to bring a number of these refugees to the States.

While Truman’s bill became law in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding, a group of legislators, led by Nevada senator Pat McCarran, manipulated the drafting of the bill’s language so that it actually had the effect of discriminating against Eastern European Jews. Ultimately, historian Leonard Dinnerstein estimates, only about 16 percent of those issued visas as displaced persons between July 1948 and June 1952 were Jewish. “Thus McCarran’s numerous tricks and ploys were effective,” notes Dinnerstein. “Jews who might otherwise have chosen the United States as their place of resettlement went to Israel.”

14. The document can be found at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary .org/jsource/History/Dec_of_Indep.html.

15. Interview with David McWilliams, Irish economist and author of The Pope’s Children, March 2009.

16. This is not to suggest that there are not ethnic tensions among this very diverse country. Deep friction erupted between European Holocaust refugees and Jews from the Arab world as far back as the state’s founding. Sammy Smooha, today a world-renowned sociologist at the University of Haifa, was, like Reuven Agassi, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant who spent part of his childhood in a transit tent. “We were told not to speak Arabic, but we didn’t know Hebrew. Everything was strange. My father went from