In April of this year, in response to the journalist Yael Zadok's inquiry regarding the children of Yemen, the Ministry of Finance wrote in its letter a sentence that clarifies the cultural context of the entire kidnapping affair: "In relation to about 80 children, it was determined that no findings were found that could testify to their fate" (by the investigative committees, out of 1060 children whose matter was investigated, M.C.).
Without drama, formulated in a letter from the Israeli government, a sentence that in a social sense could move mountains. 80 Yemeni children disappeared from their parents, and there is no finding that can testify to their fate. Why is there no finding? Because Israel do not know of a such. very simple.
80 children who are public figures, did not make the state do what was necessary to locate them, and return them to their family members, alive or dead or kidnapped. This is the heart of modern Israeli culture. Israeli is a whole world. And her/he must be returned. On one condition of course, that he/her is Israeli.
Take for example one child who disappeared during the period of the Yemeni children, Yossle Shuchmacher, he also became a public figure when he disappeared, as would happen to any child who is part of Israeli culture. As soon as the affair became known in 1962, when the boy's grandfather refused to return him to his parents because he believed that they might return him to Russia with them, where his religious faith would be destroyed, the Mossad was recruited to bring the boy, and he did. No Mossad was mobilized for the Israeli children of Yemen. A possible reason for this is that, in the eyes of Israeli culture, these children were not fully Israeli, and therefore they are not public figures. After all, for the sake of an Israeli, who without his will became a public Israeli, from Shuchmacher to Gilad Shalit, Israel is ready to turn worlds upside down. Abduction of Israelis in the Israeli cultural context could even be a reason for war. Therefore, if Israel does not go to war for a child, or does not mobilize its systems for his sake, the child is not Israeli. And certainly, this is true for the sake of 80 children.
Only when the recognition that these children who disappeared were our brothers began to seep into the Israeli public, with the establishment of the first commission of inquiry, and especially after the struggle of Uzi Meshulam, only then did the most common reaction in Israel regarding cultural changes that threaten the dominant culture begin: denial. There were no kidnappings, there is no proof of kidnappings, these are interests of the sectarian demon and other nonsense. But now the Ministry of Finance has perhaps put an end to the cultural question, because it writes in black and white, that for 80 children there is no finding to indicate their fate. any finding. zero. is nothing. 80 children were swallowed up by the earth. In a country where Naama Issachar is driving a political process. This letter and its meanings should be studied in citizenship classes in Israel.
The story of the kidnapped Yemeni children is cultural and philosophical, only in the case that an Israeli state organization is not involved in these kidnappings. But the assessment that this is a story that is only cultural and philosophical does not correspond to what Agudath Israel chairman Menachem Parosh told me in September 1997. According to his words, criminal acts were also committed on the ground of cultural beliefs in the case of the kidnapped children, by a state body, the Aliyat Anowar organization. This story that I published while I was a Channel 2 news reporter, was and remains the most important exclusive story that was published in the Israeli press since the dawn of the establishment of the State of Israel: in the fact that Parosh was a member of the political establishment that founded the state and testified about an organization of the State of Israel that is involved in the kidnapping of Israeli children. But despite this, even if the story had an impact when it was broadcast for the first time in 1997, and for the second time in 2017, it did not change our cultural orders: The spoiled Israeli cultural reality according to which a story must conform to the prevailing cultural view, and in which the degree of public interest is also derived from the prevailing cultural view, also left a mark on it and the story was buried in the archives for 20 years until it appeared and was broadcast again (and it will appear again). But 80 children whose fate is unknown, is too big and strong for the abnormal Israeli cultural reality to last forever.
One more thing: if the Aliyat Anowar organization is involved in the kidnappings, as Parosh said, then the Shin Bet and the Mossad may have information about it. This is an opportunity to mobilize them to solve the story of the abduction of Yemeni children as the Mossad was mobilized for the case of the kidnapping of the child Yossle Shuchmacher.
See the words of Parosh about the Youth Aliyah organization in the attached video.