On May 5, this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel and the 60th anniversary of the Nazi defeat, Israeli police made a startling discovery—a Russian immigrant inducted into the Israeli army was found to be not only a drug user but a neo-Nazi.

I wondered about the timing, but I shouldn't have. According to Reuters,

"It is pure coincidence," the police official said.

Now, according to MosNews (via the Jurist), the situation is worse than had been thought. The police have turned up a covey of neo-Nazis. (A covey is about 20 here at Simply Appalling.)

Police tracked down the group after the recent arrest of a 20-year-old serviceman from the West Bank settlement of Ariel suspected of drug use. During a search in his house a large cache of neo-Nazi material downloaded from the Internet was seized. At the detention center policemen noticed a swastika tattoo on his arm.

The testimony of the detainee helped to identify other suspects of taking part in anti-Semitic Internet chat rooms and performing secret ceremonies with swastika banners and other neo-Nazi regalia.

“We cannot disclose details of the inquiry, but it’s chilling,” a police investigator Haim Fadlon was quoted by the paper as saying. “It appears there are people living in this country who are talking among themselves about extermination of the Jews.”

So what is this remarkably timed discovery about? My guess would be Israeli immigration law.

The presence of neo-Nazis in Israel is not as unknown as the current press accounts would suggest. Eugene Girin wrote last year in Israel National News,

In the years 2000-2003, at least 500 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded (with many more unrecorded) in which Russians were arrested for spraying anti-Jewish graffiti, desecrating synagogues and attacking Jews. Synagogues were defaced in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox town in central Israel, cemeteries were vandalized in another religious town, Ramat Beit Shemesh, and Jews were attacked all over the country (Netivot, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, northern Israel), some by openly neo-Nazi bandits.

The problem, from a certain perspective, is that Israeli immigration law allows anyone to immigrate to Israel who has at least one Jewish grandparent. This was actually based upon the Nazi recognition of who was to be considered a Jew.

Girin has some thoughts on this—

In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of people left the dying Evil Empire for Israel and are continuing to leave the post-Soviet republics. This aliyah (return to Zion) was the biggest yet in the history of Israel. However, because of the misguided policies of the Israeli government and institutions such as the Jewish Agency, an ever-growing number of the Soviet immigrants are not even Jewish.

And what might it mean if you're not Jewish?

The behavior of many of the non-Jewish immigrants to Israel is chillingly similar to the disrespectful and disorderly behavior of illegal Mexican immigrants to the United States and Muslim immigrants to Western Europe. Russian thugs in Israel have perpetrated dozens of anti-Jewish incidents.

These Russians and Ukrainians flock to Israel to escape the lawlessness and poverty of their homelands. This of course, contradicts the whole purpose of the Law of Return and the immigration policy of the Jewish State - to allow Jews to come to their historic and cultural homeland. Israel was not established to be a haven for the world's wretched masses. Israel is not meant to be a multicultural conglomeration, but a nation-state, a sovereign government representing a particular national people.
....

Just like the Mexican invasion of the American Southwest and the Muslim takeover of French and Belgian cities, the mass influx of hostile aliens into Israel will have ever more detrimental effects. Prime Minister Sharon would be well advised to read Jean Raspail and Michelle Malkin before he opens Israel's doors to a mass Russian invasion.

It would appear that Israel is having a problem with ethnic purity. Fascists everywhere can only hope this shocking arrest on Holocaust Memorial Day will sensitize Israeli Jewry to the problem.

Follow-up post
Israel and domestic terrorism on the eve of 9/11 (9/11/07)