Birthright, Except For Those With An Actual Birthright

There is an interesting program wherein young Jewish people from around the world receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel for 10 days. No strings attached. It really is a free trip for those who are eligible. Founded in 1999, the program is called Birthright (also known as Taglit) and is sponsored by the Birthright Israel Foundation.

Only Jewish people aged 18-26 are eligible, and they cannot be attending high school. This was not a random age selection. This is the time of life when young people are trying to figure out who they are and are still impressionable. Incidentally, they are also eligible to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at this age.

The participant must belong to a recognized Jewish denomination such as Orthodox, Sephardic, Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist. At least one of the parents must be Jewish. There could be other things that make a person ineligible for the free trip, such as a previous long-term trip to Israel.

It’s a very curated trip where the best side of Israel is shown. There are plenty of Instagram and TikTok opportunities during the trip. The West Bank and East Jerusalem, where apartheid and oppression of Palestinians is visible, are avoided. This is understandable, as it’s essentially a marketing campaign to win young Jewish people over and ideally get them to move to Israel permanently, which provides more reservists for the IDF and helps with the demographic goal of outnumbering Arabs. Some might even call it a propaganda trip. If participants choose not to relocate to Israel, at least they should go back home and be ambassadors for Israel.

Another goal of this program is to encourage Jews to marry other Jews and not assimilate, as stated by a Taglit employee named Gidi Mark in a 2006 interview with Salon. There is likely some matchmaking taking place during these trips. Perhaps the founders of the program were worried about the extinction of Judaism or global Jewry.

What’s more, participants of the Taglit program can receive full citizenship rights to Israel, even if they’ve never been to Israel prior to this trip and have no family or other connections there. They can then serve in the IDF and oppress people in the West Bank who were actually born on the land and have had generations of family having lived there. They can provide military protection to illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank. These youngsters can even help demolish Palestinian homes and agricultural land to make way for more settlements so Jewish people can eventually outnumber and push out Palestinians from this part of Palestine that they don’t even recognize as the West Bank; they call it Judea and Samaria.

This is a really nice perk for young Jews and I can’t blame them for taking advantage of it, but it’s odd that they are given birthright to a land they’ve potentially never visited before, and are promised full rights if they move there. Yet mere miles away there are millions of native people living as refugees in their own country, under military occupation, with limited human rights. People born in the land and whose ancestors have lived there for generations are forced to live under the yoke of Israeli oppression.