From India to Judean hills

According to media reports, the government is planning to bring to Israel several hundred members of the Bnei Menashe tribe whose origins can be traced to the area near India and Burma's eastern border. This large group is likely to join hundreds of others who have already converted and made Aliyah and who predominantly live in settlements throughout the Territories.

The Bnei Menashe group's expected Aliyah is yet another of Shavei Israel's achievements, an association that locates, converts and brings to Israel the descendents of the ten Lost Tribes.

The skeptics among you may wonder what this peculiar association has to do with Israel's state policies. It should be noted, however, that even the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar – a foremost civil servant – examined and approved that these people are indeed the descendents of the lost Menashe Tribe.

For those not familiar with the tribes' history I shall remind them that somewhere around 720-722 BC, the Jewish entity called the Kingdom of Israel, which united the majority of Israelite tribes at the time, was totally destroyed.

The mystery of the exiled peoples' disappearance has continued to occupy scholars throughout history, and this is how according to rabbinic literature, the Sambation River was invented. The Sambation is supposedly the river beyond which the ten Lost Tribes of Israel were exiled by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser; it supposedly raged with rapids and threw up stones six days a week.

For those six days the Sambation was impossible to cross, but it stopped flowing every Sabbath, the day Jews are not allowed to travel. Of course on the other side of the river banks, the sons of the 10 Tribes supposedly awaited better days when they could return to their homeland.

Demographic obsession

Israeli society's demographic obsession, also maintained by parts of the institutional Left, farcically leads all the way to India and Burma in its attempt to "rectify" Israel's Jewish demographic balance, even if by very little.

Subsequently, what was perceived during the late 19th century as a sarcastic parody by Mendele the Bookseller and others, has at the turn of the 21st century become an actual state policy. And even if we don't change the overall demographic balance, I suppose a few families here and there certainly won't harm the isolated settlements.

The good news is that there are still tens of millions of people (not only in India) who would welcome being called various biblical names - as long as they are granted entry into an economy of USD 18,000 a year per capita instead of USD 1,000-2,000 as in the countries in which they live. Indeed, Israel is not in need.

However, to be honest, the mystery of the ten missing tribes is not as great as it is made out to be by Jewish tradition. The first Assyrians, who established the policy of exile (namely, involuntary transfer) in the Middle East, exiled a major part of the Israelite kingdom's inhabitants as well as other peoples who settled in the area, in order to weaken the resistance of the people they ruled.

They dispersed the exiled peoples throughout their empire, which at the time spanned the northern part of the Fertile Crescent – from the Land of Israel to today's Iraq. To avoid any doubt I will clarify: East India was not part of the Assyrian Empire at the time.

Therefore, the descendents of the ten Tribes still exist. In order to reach them, however, a more serious decision is required than that of dispatching a delegation of rabbis who secretly convert hundreds of people bearing strange and exotic looks in the jungles of the Far East; we have to start talking with our Arab neighbors, and to do so we must fundamentally change our attitude towards the Palestinians, who may - who knows - also be descendents of the lost tribes…

It should be made perfectly clear that I have no objection whatsoever against the Aliyah of people from different religious and racial backgrounds. In fact, the contrary is true, and here is an example of how it can be done differently: In order to lower the number of non-Jews living in Israel, the State decided in 2002 to set up the Immigration Administration and earmarked significant funds to it.

As a result of the administration's activities, a dramatic drop came about in the number of foreign workers living in Israel. However, it raises a question: Wouldn't it have been easier and cheaper to improve Israel's demographic balance by determining that the Chinese are the sons of the Issachar Tribe, the Romanians the sons of the Zebulun Tribe and the Turks direct descendents of the Naphtali Tribe?

The writer monitors settlement construction for the Peace Now movement