Assimilation threatens Israel's Nazi-like racial purity laws

The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.

The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as “scare tactics”, are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young diaspora Jews by encouraging them to move to Israel.

The campaign, which cost US$800,000 (Dh2.9 million), was created in response to reports that half of all Jews outside Israel marry non-Jews. It is just one of several initiatives by the Israeli state and private organisations to try to increase the size of Israel’s Jewish population.

According to one of the advertisements, voiced over by one of the country’s leading news anchors, assimilation is “a strategic national threat” and warns that “more than 50 per cent of Diaspora youth assimilate and are lost to us.”

Adam Keller, of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, said this was a reference both to a general fear in Israel that the Jewish people may one day disappear through assimilation and to a more specific concern that, if it is to survive, Israel must recruit more Jews to its “demographic war” against Palestinians.

The issue of assimilation has been thrust into the limelight by a series of surveys over several years carried out by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a think-tank established in Jerusalem in 2002 comprising leading Israeli and diaspora officials. More