It wasn't until I got to Tel Aviv that I understood an issue that Israelis have been discussing for several years.
I see in the Jerusalem Post, which I read regularly, that there is a steady stream of legal cases about deporting Somalian refugees. I didn’t really grasp the issue.
I got off the airport rail line at the wrong station. We ended up near the old Tel Aviv central bus station which is a poor neighborhood. To my shock, the neighborhood is nearly all black now. Many of the women wear Muslim head scarves. It is a Somalian neighborhood.
Because of the Civil War in Somalia many refugees have set out to walk from Somalia to the only country they know is free and democratic with any hope of settling: Israel. Israel is 2000 miles away from Somalia across nearly all desert.
That is what I call the new Black Passover. These Somalian refugee are doing precisely what the Hebrews did as a group led by Moses. The holiday of Passover celebrates that story of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt across the Sinai desert.
The Somalian refugees do not have their own Moses. They come in small groups.
The Israelis have finally put up a fence across the Sinai desert to keep these refugees from entering. But there are already 200,000 in Israel. Mostly in Tel Aviv.
You see them everywhere because they are a hard-working, determined and conscientious people who get jobs at the bottom of the employment ladder.
How will Israel handled the assimilation of black muslims? I suspect that in a few generations they will be totally absorbed. Unlike the American slave population that has become a gigantic illiterate-innumerate criminal underclass, the Somalians were economic refugees who arrived in Israel with great determination and survival skills. Very few will remain unskilled in the next generation.
I think this absorption will be fairly rapid because there is already a generation or two of dark skinned people living in Israel, the Ethiopians. Ethiopians have already extensively assimilated into the population and the women were promptly married to Europeanized-Israelis because they were so beautiful.
(The photo is an Ethiopian girl. I couldn't find any photos of Somalis in Israel.)