From refugees to settlers: How the Ukraine war is helping Israel's demographic project

As soon as Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian borders on February 24, the Israeli government immediately called for Ukrainian Jews to make aliyah (immigration) to Israel. The Ministry of Aliyah and Integration rapidly formed an inter-ministerial team to remove all bureaucratic red tape on potential Ukrainian olim (immigrants).

Just as rapidly, the Jewish Agency set up six aliyah processing centres at the Ukrainian crossings with Poland, Moldova, Romania, and Hungary. This is in addition to a central aliyah station in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, the first departure point of many immigrants.

With donations - reaching $15m in the first week of March - from the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and other benefactors, and in coordination with the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Nativ (the National Centre for Identity and Conversion), the agency set out to provide the Ukrainian Jewish refugees with temporary housing in hotels until they could be processed and flown to Israel shortly after.

In Israel, the olim will be provided with temporary housing and absorbed into integration programmes, stated the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration on its website.

"Taking into account individuals descending from at least one Jewish grandparent pushes the number to about 200,000, which is effectively the number of Ukrainians who qualify for Israeli citizenship as per the Israeli 1950 Law of Return"

Dubbed “Operation Arvut Yisrael” (Israel Guarantees), thus far, around 5000 Ukrainian Jews have arrived in Israel since Russia’s invasion. This is compared to only 3000 who immigrated to Israel in all of 2021. 

The Jewish Agency expects that up to one hundred thousands of Jews from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus will apply for aliyah. A programme titled “Aliyah Express” was accordingly launched by the agency to accelerate their relocation and absorption process in Israel.

In recent figures, nearly 8,500 Ukrainians have already started the paperwork to make aliyah,  25,000 others since February 24 have called the Jewish Agency’s hotline to inquire about the process.

Ukraine’s core Jewish community is estimated at 50,000, 0.13% of the total population, according to figures by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. The enlarged Jewish community, including both those who self-identify as Jewish plus others living within their household, reaches around 140,000.

Taking into account individuals descending from at least one Jewish grandparent pushes the number to about 200,000, which is effectively the number of Ukrainians who qualify for Israeli citizenship as per the Israeli 1950 Law of Return.

Sustaining demographic superiority 

As clearly codified in the Law of Return and stated in the “Declaration of Independence,” Israel’s approach to immigration, strictly not migration, is based on a settler ethno-nationalist structure defined both ideologically and institutionally.

Within it, the Jewish state is deemed the final realisation of the Zionist dream, ending “two thousand years of wandering” and becoming the haven for diaspora Jews worldwide. For that to be fully realised, a Jewish majority between the Mediterranean Sea and River Jordan must be established and sustained. 

Palestinians have always presented the main challenge to Israel’s aspired demographic superiority, particularly those within Israel who represent 21% of the population. 

As such, the Palestinians who were not ethnically cleansed in the aftermath of the 1948 war are continuously subjected to laws and policies to curb their population growth. It starts but does not end with limiting their access to family reunification and residency, building settlements, and creating facts on the ground that inevitably limit Palestinian geographical expansion.  

The current wave of Ukrainian immigration represents a rare opportunity for the Israeli state to improve the demographic balance. Some see it as the fourth significant wave of immigration into Israel since its inception in 1948.

The first wave consisted mainly of European Jews who fled Nazism in Europe to Palestine in the 1930s. The second was mainly displaced persons from European and Muslim countries in the years immediately following Israel’s establishment. And the last wave took place in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR and saw the arrival of over one million post-Soviet immigrants over the next decade.

Others are sceptical. Even with the influx of tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews, it will not be enough to achieve demographic superiority in Israel and the occupied territories. If Israel’s Jewish population does secure a majority, it will only be by a small margin and temporary, thanks partly to a consistently higher Palestinian birth rate: 3.49 in the West Bank and Gaza versus 3.09 in Israel. For Israel’s Palestinian minority, the statistics remain contested, albeit a notable decline in their birth rate has been reported.

American political scientist Ian Lustick argues that the post-Soviet mass aliyah, coupled with the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip, temporarily alleviated Israel’s demographic problems, only to re-emerge a decade later as a concern. Today, Jewish and Palestinian populations have neared parity.

"Rarely, if ever, in modern times did threats to Jews in their home countries result in a significant wave of aliyah, despite repeated calls by the Israeli government(s) for them to do so"

Another critical factor in the demographic problem is the large portion of non-Jews among the post-USSR immigrants. Statistics vary, but there may be about 300-350,000 immigrants  from the former Soviet Union who now reside in Israel that are not Jewish, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics in 2003. Only about 5% of the non-Jews have converted.

Because most of the potential Ukrainian Jews qualified to make aliyah to Israel are part of “the enlarged Jewish community,” there is a good chance that the post-Soviet immigration scenario will be repeated, albeit on a smaller scale.

After the fall of the USSR, many post-Soviet Jews chose to immigrate instead to the United States and Europe. Nearly 200,000 went to Germany, currently making up the majority of German Jews.

There are those who believe, therefore, that most Ukrainian Jews prefer to move to Europe. Gideon Joffe, leader of the Jewish community in Berlin, notes that Ukrainian Jews, unlike their post-Soviet counterparts, are fleeing for their lives. “Many of them see Israel as another conflict zone, and when you leave one conflict zone, you don’t want to go to another one,” Joffe says.

Lashing out at Israel’s poor treatment of Ukrainian refugees at Ben-Gurion Airport, Ukrainian ambassador in Tel-Aviv, Yevgen Korniychuk, told journalists: “Israel is not an easy country to come to because it is so expensive…90% of the people who are coming either have relatives or friends here that are asking [these] Ukrainians to come.”

Rarely, if ever, in modern times did threats to Jews in their home countries result in a significant wave of aliyah, despite repeated calls by the Israeli government(s) for them to do so. Following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, in which a Jewish supermarket was targeted, former PM Netanyahu urged French Jews to immigrate to Israel. Around 7,000 moved to Israel that year, only 1,000 more than the year before. The number of French Jewish immigrants to Israel has declined since.

More settlers?

The implementation of the Law of Return is inextricably intertwined with the negation of the Palestinian right of return. Roughly 750,000 Palestinians were displaced and dispossessed in the wake of Israel’s inception and continue to be denied the right to return by the Israeli state. 

Jewish demographic superiority, inevitably translated into geographical domination, steers the law. Every new wave of immigration, therefore, only serves to further perpetuate the status quo.

Thirty years ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir evoked international criticism, including from Washington, when he linked the Soviet influx with Israel’s need to strengthen its grip on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. At the time, Moscow, then a close ally with many Arab countries, reportedly put on hold direct flights to Israel from the Soviet Union in protest.

"Jewish demographic superiority, inevitably translated into geographical domination, steers the law. Every new wave of immigration, therefore, only serves to further perpetuate the status quo"

The post-Soviet eastern European Israeli community has since grown to become Israel’s third demographic power. Its right-wing impact on Israel’s democracy and, by extension, on the Palestinians has been significant.

Avigdor Lieberman, a Moldova-born Israeli politician, and his party Yisrael Beiteinu have been instrumental in blocking concessions to Palestinians, supporting settlement expansion, and limiting the rights of Israel’s Palestinian minority. This, in fact, prompted former US President Bill Clinton to call Israel’s Russian-speaking community “an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.”

Palestinians fear that what was inflicted upon them by eastern European Israelis could only intensify with another wave of olim from Ukraine.

Many have pointed out the irony that Ukrainian immigrants coming to Israel to flee Russia’s aggression might themselves become part of Israel’s aggression. Others are particularly cynical, believing that the victim-turn-victimiser dynamic has been a defining characteristic of the Zionist enterprise from the outset.

Whether they accept it or not, goes the argument, many Ukrainian Jewish immigrants will eventually be sucked into the Israeli ideological framework and become representatives of it.

Dr Emad Moussa is a researcher and writer who specialises in the politics and political psychology of Palestine/Israel.

Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa