Thread by @shevereshtus

Debunking anti-Israel lies and the use of Sefaradim & Mizrachim as tokens in antizionist propaganda, a thread

1) Ethiopians were sterilized

Claims were made in the early 2000s that, unkowningly, hundreds of Ethiopian women had been given Depo-Provera, a contraceptive that lasts only for 2 to 3 months. So, no, that's not forced sterilization to begin with.

Women who were given the injection were asked by if they were able to give birth after the injection. All of them answered yes. In 2016, the State Controller did a long inquiry in the matter & found that no woman had been forced.

What happened is that some women were given shots by non-Israeli workers in camps and, based on their medical records, were given other shots in Israel. Others didn't understanding Hebrew, they said yes without knowing what they said yes to.

It makes no sense to claim that Israel wanted to prevent Ethiopian Jews to reproduce, because if that's the case, why even go through the trouble of spending tens of millions of dollars and bringing them to Israel in the first place?

blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-big-lie-in…

2) Mizrachim were put in tent cities and sprayed with pesticides.

For someone complaining about Israeli racism, way to erase Sefaradim. Let's deal with the pesticide claim: It wasn't random/to humiliate, it was to avoid lice & other diseases

It's true DDT is now banned & we know that it's in fact harmful, but from the second half of WWII all the way to the late 60s it was widely use on people to avoid the spread of lice, typhus, malaria, etc.

That's why it was used on refugees

Now, why were there refugees to spray DDT on, and why were so many Mizrachim and Sefaradim sent to live in Ma'abarot, temporary tent cities and eventually placed in development tents, you might ask?

Well, here's the answer:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ex…

From 1948 to the 1970s, almost a million Jews had to flee Arab countries, often with only the clothes on their back & without notice, & made their way to Israel. Between 1948 to 1951 it absorbed more than nearly 300,000 refugees.

Think about this:

Israel had just finished fighting a war with an army made of barely trained soldiers, often Holocaust survivors, in 1948 against the combined forces of 7 different Arab armies, on top of others who joined in from all over the Middle-East. Then, it had to start building itself up

On top of having to rebuild after the war and create state institutions, Israel had to deal with absorbing all of those refugees, an influx of refugees the equivalent of half its Jewish population.

It would be the equivalent of America accepting over 150m refugees in 4 years.

I'm not gonna whitewash what happened, there were plenty of secular leftist Europeans who said & did disgusting things about & to Mizrachim/Sefaradim then.

Yet you don't see any of us pining to go back to the countries that kicked us out.

In Israel, the most patriotic, most right-wing, most politically zionistic, most likely to be part of the army segment of the population are Sefaradim and Mizrachim.

We know what the alternative is like, and we don't want to go back to that.

3) The 1950-1951 Baghdad bombings

The "people" who think that the 'Israeli agents' who killed those Iraqi Jews are the same ones responsible for the Farhud progroms and intense persecution of Iraqi Jews under their Nazi supporting government.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud

Jews were violently persecuted by the Iraqi government, and Iraqi population as a whole. There were bombings perpetrated against Jewish targets, and the government decided the best thing to do to save face was to blame Israeli/Iraqi Zionists and to hang them after torturing them.

Not a surprise, considering the fact that the Iraqi army had been deeply humiliated by the 1948 Independence War, the high level of antisemitic hatred in the country, how much it benefitted them to blame Jews, hang them then get their property on top of the turbulent times

If you don't know much about the history of Jews in Iraq there are many books that'll describe the absolutely horrible conditions that Jews went through. The Wiki article doesn't do justice to the scores of Jews martyred by the government and the population backed by it.

4) Ashkenazim think they're genetically superior to sefaradim mizrachim and ethiopians

Considering the high rate of intermarriage between both this is a ridiculous & baseless claim. Some people might, but it's not a common thing.

Israeli society has advanced from 70 years ago.

5) Checking Indian Jews for non-Jewish heritage

This has nothing to do with racism, the same thing was done to Russian Jews, etc

Asking someone if they're Jewish is not enough, they need to be Jewish according to Halacha in order to get married so we have to make sure it's true

This has obviously nothing to do with race.

There are tons of reasons why someone might claim 'I am an Indian Jew' and in fact not being Jewish at all.

It's important to verify who is truly Jewish in order not to allow imposters in the Jewish people.

6) Yemenite Children disappeared

Again, another baseless conspiracy theory.

No, 1,000 to 5,000 Yemenite children didn't disappear, they died and their families were treated carelessly during the absorption of refugees from 1948 to 1951.

It's a heartbreaking story. Some people didn't bother writing death certificates/notify the parents their child had died, but there is absolutely no proof that they were sold for adoption to Holocaust survivors unable to have children.

There is no proof of this whatsoever.

It's very easy to hate on Jews and Israelis if you want to believe every single rumor and made up story out there. There are definitely plenty of sins in Israel's history, and non-Ashkenazim certainly faced discrimination.

However, don't tokenize us or lie about our history.

Israel is the safest place for a Jew to live in.

It's definitely much safer for a Sefaradi or Mizrachi Jew than the countries we came from. That's why we're at the forefront when it comes to defending our State. It's not perfect, but look at everything we achieved.

עם ישראל חי

All this in response to this series of tokenizing lies: