Start-up Nation

Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is the son of an Iraqi immigrant. His father, Reuven Agassi, was forced to flee the southern Iraqi city of Basra, along with his family, when he was nine years old. The Iraqi government had fired all its Jewish employees, confiscated Jewish property, and arbitrarily arrested members of the community. In Baghdad, the government even carried out public hangings. “My father [Shai’s grandfather], an accountant for the Basra port authority, was out of a job. We were very scared for our lives,” Reuven told us.⁹ With nowhere else to go, the Agassis joined a flood of 150,000 Iraqi refugees arriving in Israel in 1950.

In addition to the sheer numbers of immigrants in Israel, one other element makes the role of Israel’s immigration waves unique: the policies the Israeli government has implemented to assimilate newcomers.

There is a direct connection between the history of immigration policies of Western countries and what would become the approach adopted by Israel’s founders. During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, immigration to the United States was essentially open, and, at times, immigrants were even recruited to come to America to help with the settlement of undeveloped areas of the country. Until the 1920s, no numerical limits on immigration existed in America, although health restrictions applied and a literacy test was administered.

But as racial theories started to influence U.S. immigration policy, this liberal approach began to tighten. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee employed a eugenics consultant, Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, who asserted that certain races were inferior. Another leader of the eugenics movement, author Madison Grant, argued in a widely selling book that Jews, Italians, and others were inferior because of their supposedly different skull size.

The Immigration Act of 1924 set new numerical limits on immigration based on “national origin.” Taking effect in 1929, the law imposed annual immigration quotas that were specifically designed to prevent entrance of eastern and southern Europeans, such as Italians, Greeks, and Polish Jews. Generally no more than one hundred of the proscribed nationals were permitted to immigrate each year.¹⁰

When Franklin Roosevelt became president, he did little to change the policy. “Looking at Roosevelt’s reactions over the full sweep of 1938 to 1945, one can trace a pattern of decreasing sensitivity toward the plight of the European Jews,” says historian David Wyman. “In 1942, the year he learned that the extermination of the Jews was under way, Roosevelt completely abandoned the issue to the State Department. He never again dealt really positively with the problem, even though he knew the State Department’s policy was one of avoidance—indeed, obstruction—of rescue.”¹¹

With the onset of World War II, America’s gates remained barred to Jews. But the chief problem that faced Jews seeking refuge in the 1930s and the early 1940s was that America did not stand alone. Latin American countries opened their doors in only limited ways, while European countries, at best, tolerated only for a time the many thousands who arrived “in transit” as part of unrealized plans for permanent settlement elsewhere.¹²

Even after World War II ended and the Holocaust became widely known, Western countries were still unwilling to welcome surviving Jews. The Canadian government captured the mood of many governments when one of its officials declared, “None is too many!” British quotas on immigration to Palestine became increasingly tight during this period, as well. For many Jews, there literally was no place to go.¹³

Deeply aware of this history, when Britain’s colonial term in Palestine expired, on May 14, 1948, “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” was issued by the Jewish People’s Council. It stated, “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness. . . . THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration.”¹⁴

Israel became the only nation in history to explicitly address in its founding documents the need for a liberal immigration policy. In 1950, Israel’s new government made good on that declaration with the Law of Return, which to this day guarantees that “every Jew has the right to come to this country.” There are no numerical quotas.