What people don’t talk about when mentioning the “forced Yemenite children” who were taken away

First of all, I want to acknowledge that the Yemenite children affair is one of the darkest stories of Israel since 1948. It is true that the Israeli government took away thousands of children from their parents under the fake excuse of death and sold some of them to the US. It is awful. No question.<br><br>But what everyone forgets to mention is the fact that it is the Yemenite parents who wanted to emigrate, out of their own free will. They were dying to emigrate to Israel, since the 1920s. And when they arrived here as immigrants, they were treated awfully. They were thrown to camps which were the worst possible place to be at. They became sick, and out of the 50,000 who arrived, 15,000 died, half of them children. In total, out of the 50,000 Yemenite who arrived, *almost 20,000 were children.* <br><br>In the transit camps, the conditions were horrible. There were lack of food, shelter, and medicine. The Yemenites were put in crowded tents. There was a lack of food and water. Toilets were rare. There was a lack of medicine, and doctors. <br><br><br>The conditions were so harsh and the situation so bad that the head of the Ezra movement Rabbi Yitzhak Rappaport went to the Israeli government (and begged) to take away the Yemenite children and put them in special places where they could be treated better and receive the attention they deserved. <br><br><br>This is the famous radio transcript betweenRabbi Yitzhak Rappaport, and Golda Meir, who was the Minister of Labor back then. The transcript was discovered in 2019 by Haim Saar, a historian who did his PhD on the Yemenites in Israel. He got access to the state archives and could read it: "They're dying with a weird disease called dysentery, and we have to take care of them or else we'll all be dead". Then Meir says "Why can't you accommodate some of them", and Rappaport says "But where? There's no place, they're in the mud, it's raining, they're in the mud until the neck. There's no place, we put them in the stables, the synagogues, anywhere, sometimes in the mud, in the middle of the shelters. We're ashamed to look at them". <br><br>Golda Meir answers: "We're going to take care of them. How many are there?" <br><br>"Almost 20,000, sir" answers Rappaport. <br><br>"And what are you doing with them? Tell me", asks Meir, then Rappaport answers "You can't believe how many are sick, how many died. There are hundreds of sick children. They're dying because we didn't treat them. They just die for nothing. I told you, I'm ashamed of the situation. We're not doing anything regarding the children, sir. You can't believe the children's situation. They're dying as animals. They're dying on the roads, in the mud, the stables, in the synagogues. <br><br><br>And then Golda Meir answers "I'll do everything in my hands regarding the children" and ends by saying "just say it, should we take the children?", then Rappaport says "you have to. There's no other solution". <br><br><br>This is what led to the children being taken away, and out of the 20,000 children that were taken, 1,000 - 2,000 were sold to the US. <br><br><br>Of course, the Israeli government fucked up. The fact that they took the children without informing the parents is awful, and they should pay for it. But people forget to mention that we were poor, we were in a civil war, and we had 600,000 refugees who showed up in a very short period of time. It was a catastrophe. We were facing a very harsh situation. <br><br><br>People also forget to mention that it wasn’t a conspiracy that the government had planned. The Yemenites wanted to come here, and the government tried to do their best. It was a mistake, a big one, but not the genocidal act that people claim it was.