Human Mass

We’re From Europe

In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Israel opened its doors fast. Within weeks, over 12,000 Ukrainians arrived. The processing was swift, the tone was sympathetic, the coverage was warm. This was framed as a humanitarian response — a nation built by refugees welcoming refugees.

In a cabinet meeting discussing the policy, Pnina Tamano-Shata — the Minister of Immigration and Absorption, the first Ethiopian-born minister in Israeli history — pointed out the disparity. Ethiopian Jews fleeing the Tigray war faced bureaucratic resistance and legal challenges. Ukrainians were fast-tracked. She called it what it was: “the hypocrisy of white people.”

Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai responded: “We’re from Europe.”

It was received as a joke. It was not a joke. It was the most honest sentence spoken in Israeli politics that year.

Bodies, Not People

The humanitarian framing was a courtesy. The logic underneath was demographic.

Israel has a population problem. Not a fertility problem — the ultra-Orthodox and Arab birth rates are high — but a composition problem. Emigration among secular, educated Israelis has been ticking upward for years. The economic base is narrowing. The military reserves were stretched before October 7th and shattered after it. Settlement expansion in the West Bank requires physical human presence — bodies in apartment blocks, families in contested zones, warm mass that turns a territorial claim from a line on a map into a fact on the ground.

You need population volume. Not citizens, necessarily. Not even Jews. Just people. People who fill housing units in areas that need to be demographically claimed. People who work the elder care jobs and the agricultural shifts that Israelis won’t do. People whose physical presence in a contested geography is itself a strategic asset.

The tourist visa makes perfect sense in this frame. You don’t give them citizenship because you don’t actually want them as people. You want them as volume. Present enough to count. Precarious enough to control. Grateful enough not to complain. And if rockets fall, they are in the apartment blocks too.

Plant People Like Flags

This is not new. It is, in fact, the oldest imperial strategy for holding contested territory. You do not need an army in every village if you can put a population in every village. Civilians are cheaper than soldiers, more permanent than garrisons, and harder to condemn internationally.

The Romans did it. When they conquered territory, they planted coloniae — settlements of Roman citizens, often retired legionaries — throughout the new provinces. The colonists were the claim. Their presence was the infrastructure of control. The word “colony” itself comes from this practice.

The British did it. That is literally how Jamaica got its demographic structure — enslaved Africans imported as labour mass, indentured Indians brought after abolition, a population engineered not for its own benefit but for the economic and strategic needs of the empire. Plant people in the ground like flags. Their bodies are the argument.

The Chinese government does it now — the mass settlement of Han Chinese in Tibet and Xinjiang is demographic engineering on an industrial scale. Outnumber the indigenous population and the territory is yours by arithmetic, not by law.

And Israel has done it since 1967. The settlement enterprise in the West Bank is not a housing programme. It is a demographic weapon. Every apartment block in East Jerusalem, every hilltop outpost in the Jordan Valley, every bypass road connecting settlements to each other while cutting Palestinian villages apart — these are strategic placements of human mass. The settlers are not incidental to the occupation. They are the occupation.

The Ukrainians fit this logic. Twenty thousand people on tourist visas, no citizenship, no political voice, no safety net, placed in a country that needs warm bodies in contested space. They are not refugees who were rescued. They are population units that were acquired.

“We’re From Europe”

Minister Shai’s four words carry at least three meanings, and all of them are true simultaneously.

Reading one: racial affinity. Ukrainians look like us. They are white, European, culturally familiar. Of course we sympathise with them more than with Ethiopians. This is the surface reading — honest, ugly, and sufficient to explain the double standard on its own.

Reading two: cultural preference. Israel was built by European Jews — Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking, steeped in the intellectual traditions of Warsaw and Vienna and Berlin. The Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who came from the Middle East and North Africa were treated as second-class citizens for decades. Ethiopian Jews were treated as third-class. The hierarchy has always been: European first, Middle Eastern second, African last. “We’re from Europe” is a statement of caste.

Reading three: demographic strategy. We need European bodies because they are white bodies in a demographic contest, and nobody in the West will object to their presence the way they would object to twenty thousand Africans. Ukrainian refugees in Israeli apartment blocks are invisible to international scrutiny. Ethiopian Jews in the same blocks would be a story. The racial composition of the imported population is itself a strategic calculation — you import the bodies that generate the least friction.

The Destination Was Also a War Zone

There is a final absurdity that deserves its own silence.

Twenty thousand Ukrainians fled Russian missiles, crossed borders, processed paperwork, boarded flights, and landed in Israel. They were escaping a war. They arrived in a country that, within two years of their arrival, would experience the deadliest attack on its soil in its history, followed by a military campaign that drew rocket fire from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran simultaneously.

They fled one bunker and found another.

And because they are on tourist visas — not citizens, not permanent residents — their existence in Israel runs on discretion, not rights. Their employment is technically illegal; the government simply chooses not to enforce the law. Their health insurance, initially provided free, was cut in July 2024 — mid-war, as a cost-saving measure. Now they pay out of pocket: 320 shekels a month if you’re over sixty. Their welfare comes not from the state but from NGOs — ASSAF handing out food packages and baby supplies, Mesila offering counselling. Charity, not entitlement. When the rockets fell, they were present enough to be hit but not present enough to be fully caught. The insurance, the compensation, the rebuilding support, the system that catches you after the blast — all of it calibrated to citizens.

This is what it means to be human mass. You are there for the counting. You are there for the filling of space. You are there because a country needed volume and you were available and you were the right colour and you had nowhere else to go. And when the thing you fled follows you to the place you fled to, you discover that the welcome was conditional, the safety was theoretical, and the visa was always the tell.

A tourist in a war zone. That is the status. That is the sentence.

The Bunker Is the Class System

It turns out the bomb shelter does check your papers. Not at the door — but long before the siren sounds, in the planning office, the building code, the municipal budget, and the Supreme Court ruling that decided whose life was worth reinforced concrete.

One in three Israelis does not have access to adequate shelter. Fifty per cent of non-Jewish Israelis have no shelter access at all. Fifty-six per cent of Israeli homes — 1.67 million of 2.96 million — do not have a mamad, the private safe room built into newer construction. If your building is old, if your neighbourhood is poor, if your town is Arab or Bedouin or simply not a priority — there is no room. When the siren goes, you crouch in a stairwell and hope.

The numbers are not subtle. In the Galilee, along Highway 85, Arab communities have one bomb shelter for every 26,000 residents. The nearby Jewish city of Karmiel has one for every 440. That is not a gap. That is a sixty-fold disparity. In the Bedouin town of Rahat — population 80,000 — there is one shelter for every 16,600 people. In the unrecognised Bedouin villages scattered across the Negev — communities the state refuses to acknowledge on its own planning maps — there are no shelters. No infrastructure at all. No electricity. No running water. No gas. And no concrete room to hide in when the missiles arrive.

Twenty-six per cent of Arab schools lack protective infrastructure. Thirteen per cent of Jewish schools do. Your child’s chance of surviving a direct hit during the school day is, measurably, a function of their ethnicity.

In 2024, a lawsuit reached the Israeli Supreme Court arguing that the state’s failure to build shelters in Arab communities was a civil rights violation. The court ruled that the state is not obligated to build public shelters. The responsibility falls on private homeowners. If you cannot afford to build a reinforced room, that is your problem. If your village is “unrecognised” and you are legally prohibited from building at all, that is also your problem. The law requires a mamad in every new building — but if thousands of citizens are prevented from building legally, or live in areas excluded from state planning, then the legal standard itself produces the inequality. Protection is not a right. It is a purchase. And the price is denominated in ethnicity, geography, and municipal status.

There is a logic here that nobody will say out loud, so we will. The missiles that fall on Israeli territory are overwhelmingly fired in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Arab populations — in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria. The retaliatory rockets do not distinguish between an Arab in Gaza and an Arab in the Galilee. They land where they land. And when they land in northern Israel, in the Negev, in mixed cities — the Arab citizens who absorb the blast are absorbing the consequences of a war waged against their own ethnic group, without the protection afforded to the people who launched the strikes. The state bombs Arabs across the border and declines to shelter Arabs within it. This is not a contradiction. It is, from the planning perspective, entirely consistent. Why build shelters for a population you are structurally indifferent to losing?

This is where “we’re from Europe” meets physics. Racial affinity, cultural sympathy, the warmth of shared whiteness — none of it stops a Katyusha. In the bunker, everyone is equal for the ninety seconds it takes the interception to succeed or fail. But the bunker itself is not equal. Who has one, how thick the walls are, how close it is to your door, whether it exists at all — that was decided years ago, in a planning meeting, by people who knew exactly which postcodes mattered and which did not.

And here is the detail that completes the absurdity. In Kyiv — the city many of these Ukrainians fled — the bomb shelter network is the metro system. The Soviets began planning it in 1944, the year they retook Kyiv from the Nazis. They had just liberated a bombed city and their first thought was survival infrastructure. Construction started in 1949. The first line opened in 1960. Arsenalna station sits 105.5 metres below ground — until recently the deepest metro station on earth. Five minutes on the escalator just to reach the platform. That is not a subway. That is a nuclear bunker that happens to have trains. When the Russian sirens sounded eighty years later, the entire city funnelled into these stations. It was terrifying, it was chaotic, but it was there — public infrastructure, universally accessible, that did not ask who you were or what you could afford. A totalitarian regime that killed millions of its own people still built survival infrastructure for everyone.

Those same people then flew to Israel — the country with arguably the most active missile threat on earth — and discovered that its shelter system is essentially privatised. Build your own mamad or hope your landlord did. If you are on a tourist visa, living in cheap housing, in a neighbourhood that was never a planning priority — you get a stairwell. They went from a country with better public shelter access to one with worse. The Ukrainians on tourist visas live where the cheap housing is. The cheap housing is where it is because the people who live there are the people the state values least. The shelters reflect the housing. The housing reflects the hierarchy. The hierarchy is “we’re from Europe” translated into concrete — or the absence of it.