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`We Told You So'

The lesson of the L.A. quake was that expatriate Israelis
should return home — or so says the Israeli media.

LARRY DERFNER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

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sraelis in Los Angeles: We
Want To Go Home." "That's
It! Now We're Definitely Go-
ing Back to Israel." "The
American Dream and Its De-
struction."
Those headlines ran atop sto-
ries in Israel's two most popu-
lar newspapers — Yediot
Aharonot and Ma'ariv — about
how ex-Israelis in L.A. suffered
through the earthquake.
The point of the stories was
familiar. It was essentially the
same coverage that is repeated
in Israel after every disaster in
a city with a large community
of yordim, the pejorative He-
brew term for Israelis who have
moved abroad.
The stories are like little
Zionist morality plays: Israelis
leave the Jewish homeland to
get rich in America, and they
succeed — only to have their
fortunes wiped out by earth-
quake, fire, riot, crime or any of
the other diseases rampant be-
yond Israel's borders. Chas-
tened, they realize their mis-
take and now want only to re-
turn to the humble but safe and
warm Israeli home they so fool-
ishly and greedily left behind.
"Now we're definitely going
back to Israel," read one inter-
view with an Israeli survivor in
Santa Monica. "I put out a half-
million dollars for this house,
and it was all lost in an instant.
So what did I achieve? I worked
and worked, and for what?...In
Israel, even though there's all
the craziness, these kinds of
things don't happen. There are

■

wars, but you have control
over the situation."
"It was a night-
( mare; there's no other
word for it," read an-
other interview with an
Israeli ex-patriot de-
, scribing how her San
Fernando Valley
home
was
wrecked. "That
night it became clear
to me that the safest
place in the world is
Israel."
These tales
are like the old
Tudor Turtle car-
toons, where the
dreamy little turtle
tells the Wizard to
, --_- turn him into a pi-
rate, a soldier, or
_
some other kind of ad-
venturer -- only to find that
it's a miserable, perilous life, so
he begs the Wizard to make
him a turtle again. In the end,
Tudor has learned his lesson.
The Israeli news media are a
cynical bunch, ripping into
politicians and public figures
and just about everybody and
everything else Israeli. But
when it comes to yerida, emi-
gration from Israel, they be-
come solemn propagandists for
the Zionist cause.
The hundreds of thousands
of ex-Israelis living aborad are
an invisible community as far
as Israeli news media is con-
cerned. Yordim are not report-
ed on unless they get involved
in murder, drug dealing or some
other crime or scandal. The
point of the story has to be that
no good can come of leaving Is-
rael. Stories about the masses
of Israelis who have chosen to
live in Los Angeles or New York
and are happy and have no in-
tention of "going home" rarely
show up in an Israeli newspa-
per.
Because the L.A. earthquake
hit ex-Israelis like no other for-
eign disaster — there are an es-
timated 100,000-150,000 of
them in the L.A. area, and
many if not most live in the San
Fernando Valley where the
quake was centered — the Is-
raeli media was stuffed like nev-
er before rags-to-riches-to-rags
stories about yordim.
All the gaudy details were
played up — the big houses, the
swimming pools the yordim had
bought — and the stories
seemed to relish describing how
it had all crumbled in less than

a minute. It goes to show, the
coverage implied, what happens
when you forsake Israel for the
illusory promise of America.
`They sit in the San Fernan-
do Valley," concluded a long fea-
ture in Yediot, lamenting over
the American Dream that per-
haps never existed, and think-
ing more than ever about the
alternative on the Mediter-
ranean shore. They remind
themselves that they are lucky
because, after all, the Israeli
Dream is still there..."
Added Ma'ariv: "The push to
leave en masse and return to Is-
rael is coming mainly from Is-
raeli wives in Los Angeles.
Many of them are now pressing
their husbands to sell every-
thing and leave, and are even
threatening to split up their
families and divorce.. The hys-
teria in the Israeli community
is growing with each passage of
time."
"Ridiculous," said Uri Gor-
don, head of the Jewish
Agency's Immigration and Ab-
sorption Department, about
such reports. "There is no con-
nection whatsoever between an
earthquake and people return-
ing to Israel. If there was an
earthquake in Israel, would
everybody pick up and leave?"
In fact, there has been a
sharp upswing in the number
of yordim leaving America for
Israel in the last couple of years,
but this is because of the eco-
nomic recession in the United
States. There were reports that
yordim were heading for the air-
port after the Los Angeles riots
and fires, but they were no more
true than the current, hysteri-
cal accounts of how the Los An-
geles yored community, almost
as one, is preparing to uproot it-
self because of the earthquake.
Still, these stories seem to
strike a responsive note in the
Israeli public. U.S. recession or
no, the image of America as the
goldene medina, the golden
country, where life is rich and
easy, still exists in the minds of
many Israelis.
When their countrymen ac-
tually go off and live in this
mythical land, and make their
fortunes or something ap-
proaching that, people back
home, especially those who are
struggling, are bound to be en-
vious. When the yordim get hit
by disaster, Israelis can't help
saying what they love saying
best: "I told you so." ❑