Audio of the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak speaking to Jeffrey Epstein, the now deceased convicted sex offender, has shone a light on Israel’s efforts to alter demographics by diluting the Palestinian population it occupies and also revealed ingrained racism within Jewish circles.
Barak told Epstein that he had told Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israel needs one million Russian-speaking immigrants to absorb, as the authorities can be more “selective” and “can control the quality much more effectively” compared to the past.
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The recording was released last week in a huge tranche of files by the United States Department of Justice.
The former Israeli leader, speaking in an undated meeting with Epstein, says that his country could “easily absorb another million” Russian-speaking immigrants, a clear reference to white Slavic peoples.
Before Israel’s creation in May 1948 and in its early years, the main source of immigration was Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, as well as Sephardi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.
Barak, in the audio, seems to disparage Sephardi Jews, saying the country did what they could by taking Jews “from North Africa, from the Arabs, from whatever.”
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 started a massive immigration flow into Israel from various parts of the country.
According to the official data, 996,059 immigrants from former Soviet republics arrived in Israel after its collapse up until 2009.
Their politics have tended to be aligned with the right wing.
Barak also underscores the deep divisions between religious and secular Jews, a dynamic which continues to eat away at the country.
“I believe we have to break the monopoly of the Orthodox rabbinate on marriage and funerals and whatever, and on the definition of a Jew,” he said, referring to the strict religious rules in the religion.
“[This would], in a sophistica