It’s 1951. A young woman, maybe 19, a newcomer from Iran, gives birth to her first daughter. The daughter is taken away and the woman is told she had died.
“Where is the dead daughter?” asks the young woman.
“There is no daughter, go home.”
She went home with no daughter. She went home with no funeral and no grave.
A year goes by, the same young woman gives birth to a son at the same hospital. The son is taken. Where is my son, the woman asked. He’s dead, they say to her. Your son in dead, there is no son.
“Give him to me dead,” the woman said.
“There is no dead, go home.”
She went home with no son, she went home with no funeral, with no grave.
She had no more children. They remained alone, just she and her husband. Three years ago her husband died and she was left all alone – no husband and no children, 82 years old, sick and lonely, with no family or friends left.
I met this woman an hour ago. She was sitting on a bench on Zamenhof Street in Tel Aviv asking for help. She held a hospital bill of 909 shekels for calling for an ambulance for her husband over three years ago. Not only she does she lack the ability to pay, she doesn’t know how to do it. When I offered her something, she determinedly said no, saying she only wanted to find out what she can do, before bursting into tears. Then she spoke of her children who may be alive today, and cried again. One woman, two children.
God, how efficient they were back then, in 1951.
- Kair Atlan, Yemeni Children Affair: Families of the Kidnapped Speak Out
“A baby disappeared from one out of every eight Yemenite families. One out of eight.”
“Efficient”? So many of the families of vanished children got draft notices when they would have been the right age - that’s not “efficient.” That’s dumb, clumsy, and thoughtless. Which is exactly how this whole nightmare happened in the first place.
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and the U.S. government botched the response because it was run by idiots who didn’t believe in science and didn’t care about black people, some of the victims started to swear up and down that the government had actively bombed the levees to drown them on purpose. The mind needs a cause, needs agency, needs an intelligent designer to all the chaos and cruelty in the world. “It happened because dumb racists weren’t paying attention” is too horrible for people to handle. “You are step 6 in Doctor Evil’s conquest plan” at least means SOMEBODY thought SOMETHING about you.
50,000+ Yemenite Mizrahim immigrated to late 40s-early 50s Israel more or less all at once, when the country had very crude and rudimentary infrastructure, power grid, and healthcare, and was under constant attack by terrorists. The newcomers lived side by side in tented refugee camps, near-perfect recipe for kids getting sick and dying. At all stages, during and after their care, both the kids and their families are victimized by Ashkenazi racism / colorism. The hospital staff look down on the Mizrahim as primitive, resent then for looking and dressing and speaking like Arabs, can’t actually communicate with them, probably thought they “all look alike,” and between the general chaos of mass immigration amidst continuous terror attacks, when the kids die the parents aren’t told, not in any way they can understand anyway. There was no return of the bodies, no graves or funerals. And no documentation of exactly who had died and, thus, who shouldn’t get draft notices.
It was heartbreaking, horrifying, unforgivable negligence.
What it WASN’T: Racist Ashkenazim stopped being racist just long enough to want to raise Mizrahi babies, got all their racist Ashkenazi friends to accept their having MIzrahi babies, staged a mass kidnapping of hundreds or thousands of children with no eyewitnesses or material evidence even when they all were apparently just taken down the street in a country the size of New Jersey, escaped attention as an enormous new population demographic segment of “Ashkenazi couples raising Mizrahi babies” in a country the size of New Jersey, and also made sure that absolutely nobody would ever ever confess or be willing to be bribed into confessing and that the children would all be raised to never ever question their life circumstances or ever take a DNA test forever and ever world without end.
The truth is awful enough. Cartoonifying it lets the actual villain - everyday mundane racism - off the hook. It lets average people think they’re better than they actually are, because as long as they DON’T engage in giant sordid international conspiracies they have some claim to virtue. When in reality, the world is full of people who can barely remember to take their own children out of the carseat on a hot summer day, much less give proper care to thousands of desperately sick refugees across cultural prejudice and a language gap during a life-or-death crisis.
Many people SHOULD have gone to jail for leaving Yemenite families in ruins. Just as many SHOULD have gone to jail for not responding to Katrina in a more competent and humane fashion.
But there wouldn’t be any mastermind, any leader, going to jail with them. Not because he successfully hid out for 68+ years but because there wasn’t one. There was no plan. And there sure was no “efficiency.”
(This is what it looks like when you can get past blood libel and “pinkwashing” Harry Potter spellcasting long enough to treat Israel like a real country and confront its real horrible fuckups)
Same thing for the whole “sterilized Ethiopian women” thing, from what I understand.
(via stupidjewishwhiteboy)
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