THE EDITOR, Sir:THERE WAS a recent case of reparations and repatriation, Israeli-style, when defiant Israeli President Ariel Sharon issued the invitation: "Come home to Israel" to French Jews, at news of an upsurge in anti-Semitism in France.
This invitation for the repatriation of Diaspora Jews is one that Israel can extend with magnanimity. The State of Israel was established as a "homeland" for all members of the Jewish Diaspora, who have a constitutional "Right of Return" that gives them instant citizenship and rights on arrival.
Israel has received billions of dollars annually since the late 1940s as reparations for the attempted extermination of their ethnic/religious group by German Christian Aryans during World War II. With these reparations, Israel has been able to construct a western-style civilisation with modern housing complexes known as settlements, to house repatriated Jews. These settlements that resemble some of Jamaica's most upscale gated communities with modern health, recreation and education facilities, are funded by reparations paid for decades to Israel by Germany, Russia, France and the USA. According to a 1990s report in TIME Magazine, these reparations amounted to US$7 billion annually.
ARMS INDUSTRY
With these sums, Israel was also able to build a modern arms industry, which in its time not only defended the nation but also equipped South Africa's apartheid army. With the precedent set by the state of Israel's repatriation with reparations policy under which it has thrived infrastructurally if not peacefully, what could be wrong if the descendants of the Africans Transatlantic slave trade (whose horrors of human barbarity were increased by the untold numbers of slavery's African victims), call for reparations and repatriation to a country which would at least give them a warmer welcome than the Israeli Jews have received in Palestine?
Is repatriation and reparations OK for the Israeli Jews, but not for the Rastafari Africans?
I am, etc.,
BARBARA MAKEDA
BLAKE HANNAH
i_makeda@yahoo.com
Kingston
