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RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRE AND Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich arrived in Israel today after receiving citizenship of the Jewish state, local Channel 10 television reported.
“He landed today in his private aircraft at (Tel Aviv’s) Ben Gurion airport and was presented with an Israeli identity card,” the commercially-owned station said on its evening newscast.
An official at Nativ, a department of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office dealing with Jewish communities in the ex-Soviet Union, said Abramovich had applied for an immigration visa at Israel’s embassy in Moscow, the station said earlier on its website.
“His documents were examined under the ‘Law of Return’ and he was indeed entitled to immigrant status in Israel, and as a result he was issued an immigration visa,” it added.
Spokesmen for Netanyahu’s office contacted by AFP did not confirm or deny the report.
Israel’s Law of Return gives every Jew, or child or grandchild of a Jew, the right to Israeli citizenship on demand.
According to media reports, Abramovich’s British visa has run out and the application process for a new visa has been taking longer than usual.
Amid a spiralling diplomatic crisis between London and Moscow over the poisoning of a former Russian double agent, there have been calls in Britain for sanctions that would hurt super-rich Russians with homes in London.
Abramovich formally has residency in Jersey in the Channel Islands, a tax haven, but has never taken it up.
The Sunday Times put his wealth at £9.3 billion (€10.65 billion) on its Rich List this year. He has owned Chelsea since 2003.
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And yet, a Palestinian born there and ethnically cleansed, will never be allowed back in. If East Jerusalem Palestinians leave for 3 years straight (which Israel claims as its capital), they’re never allowed back in. Nothing apartheidy to see here. Democracy in action!
@Paul Devlin: Arab Jews (now living in Israel) who were expelled from Islamic states aren’t being allowed back to countries like Egypt or Syria, etc….
@Paul Devlin: and yet there’s not a word of Egypt and Jordan’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza in 1948… Not a word, which is strange considerin it was the only actual event of ethnic cleansing that took place; and the only people calling for it now are the Palestinians who demand that they won’t accept independence until every last Jew is removed… Now that’s real apartheid!
@Irish “Design”: 2 idiots who don’t appear to know what apartheid means. Scuttle back to your hasbara holes, lads. Anyone driven from ‘arab’ lands has as much right to go home as Palestinians but there’s no laws preventing them. Something like half the Palestinian population in Israel are ‘present absentees’, a legal term for Palestinians driven home from their homed but cant reclaim it by law because a Jewish person lives there. Can you imagine passing the home you were born in every day & not being able to even enter because an European Jew fancied it as war booty? Fascism in action
@Irish “Design”: Ironically the State of Isreal has now become the facicist state that once Sought to exterminate the Jewish race.
@Paul Devlin: It never takes long for the nastiness to leak out when someone dares to question the simplistic narrative. Ancient communities of 900,000 Arab Jews were expelled from almost every country from Morocco to Iraq in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. They settled mainly in Israel which looked after them and treated them as equal citizens, something that Arab countries have never done for their fellow Palestinian Arab Muslims. Does that make what was done to Arab Jews any less wrong? No one speaks of their right of return.
Look beyond the end of your nose, for God’s sake. Sometimes victims of injustice don’t even get to live near where they were once lived. Sometimes, they don’t even get called refugees.
@Ciarán Ó Raghallaigh: funny that thete are 300 thousand jews luving in Iran and thats the one country that the Isaraeli terrorists are hell bent on attacking. Makes a nonsense of your argument. Quick question, do you accept the Palestinian state or do you believe Israel should expand its borders past the 1967 internationally recognized borders?
@Cal Mooney: There aren’t 300,000 Jews living in Iran. A government census put the figure at roughly 9000 a few years ago. No sense telling lies.
@Paul Devlin: sure of course it’s hazzibaba, what else could it be.
When I see someone call hazzibaba these days I just stop reading because clearly they are intellectually bereft of they can’t even argue the point and have to resort to conspiracy theories.
@Paul Devlin: sorry I did read there that you said there are no laws preventing Jews from returning to Arab lands… You do realise that the Palestinian authority bans ALL Jews from living in its territory ie Gaza, West Bank areas A & B?
You probably don’t given your statement which means you’re either ill informed or intentionally misleading people.
@Cal Mooney: does anyone who argues for Palestine have any basic facts? There are 25,000 maximum Iranian Jews, completely collapsing every year because of the difficulties in living in Iran as a Jew.
There is no where near 300,000… Where do you get this rubbish
@Cal Mooney: I never mentioned Iran. This discussion is about Arab states and surely you know that Iran is not an Arab country. Others have questioned your 300,000 figure and I would too but things were/are a lot better for Jews there than in Arab countries. They haven’t suffered the pogroms and expulsions that they did elsewhere in the Middle East.
Why are relations so toxic? Because the Iranian regime has a stated intention to attack Israel and destroy the state. The Iranian foreign minister has recently been seen chanting “Death to Israel”. You can google that.
I’d like to see a Palestinian State based on the pre-1967 borders in Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank. The pre-1967 West Bank borders leave Israel too vulnerable along a long thin 15km wide coastal strip where its major cities are. In 2000, Ehud Barak offered territory in Israel itself in exchange for concessions by Arafat for the same amount of territory in the West Bank. This was a good solution and was certainly a basis for discussion.
Arafat shot it down, offered no alternatives, and went off to launch a violent suicidal intifada in which hundreds of Israelis were killed in suicide attacks. That’s when things went off the rails in Israeli politics and the nationalist has been ruling the roost since then.
@Ciarán Ó Raghallaigh: Israel refused to give back East Jerusalem in that offer. It was never a genuine offer. Reading your response, you are saying Israel occupying Palestinian land is ok. It is not ok, it is illegal and people occupied are allowed to resist by any means necessary.
@Cal Mooney: It was an opening position. Why didn’t Arafat engage with the process? Fundamentally, Israelis are not going to hand back strategically important territory that can be used to rain down death and destruction on major cities unless they can trust the Palestinian leadership. Neither Fatah or Hamas are trustworthy. They both preach anti-Jewish hatred in their media. And it’s not anti-Israel, it’s anti-Jewish. It’s all about al-Yahud, the Jews. I know enough Arabic to know that.
@Cal Mooney: not true cal. East Jerusalem was offered!
Please do the research
@Irish “Design”: PressTV. Where else?
@Ciarán Ó Raghallaigh: Syria, Jordan and Egypt are full off Palestinian refugee camps
Money talks, it don’t sing and dance and it can’t walk!
@Jarlath Murphy: money money money, must be funny, in a rich man’s world
@Jarlath Murphy: youd be suprised how many Isrealis actually have russian militart background.
@Jarlath Murphy: Reverend blue jeans
@Daniel O’Connor: Like the clickity clack of a train on a track its got rhythm and beat.
@Shawn O’Ceallaghan: also, if you’ve seen the Israeli army in action and at the their most brutal, there are no Israelis. It’s imported South African, Australian and other nationality hard men.
@Shawn O’Ceallaghan: Why is that? Are they really Russian who join the Israeli military? Or are Israeli’s sent to Russian army for training?
@Jarlath Murphy: Just keep beating man u. and keep spending your money to do so.
Surprised the Israelis didn’t give him an Irish passport
@Pauliebhoy: doubt it, all the pet food factories are burned down or owned by other people. alledgedly :P
@Pauliebhoy:
LOL
Instantly became the richest man in Israel at the same time , Interestingly enough,
As a new citizen, Abramovich is exempt from taxes in Israel on income earned abroad for 10 years, and need not declare the sources of that income for the same period.
@Pearse Mc Mullen: Cash Rules Everything Around Me
@Jamie McCormack: C.R.E.A.M. get the money, shekel, shekel bill y’all
@Pearse Mc Mullen: the WhatsApp dudes are richer.
Plus all the weapons industry dudes
Let his own kind take care of him – they’re very welcome to him and he will probably now help finance a few thousand more illegal settlements to further his and their supremacy.
@DrDucati: and long may it continue.
By the way settlements are not a legal entity, the prohibition is on a country forcibly moving its own population into a disputed area. Israel doesn’t force any of its own population to live in the West Bank and therefore cannot be breaking the Geneva conventions; which don’t even apply as Israel simply ended Jordan’s illegal occupation and has since signed a peace treaty with Jordan ending the Geneva conventions which only apply during war
@Irish “Design”: jibberish. Back to hasbara school
@DrDucati: “his own kind”, hmmm interesting.
@Damon16: Yes, Jewish
@Paul Devlin: calls hazzibaba but can’t argue the point, classic!
@Irish “Design”: honest to God that has to be the most pathetic excuse to attempt to justify Israel’s illegal settlements in Palestine. Absolute desperation. BTW, anybody see Honeybadger?
Hopefully the UK will ban him and his ”questionable legal money”
@Drive for show & putt for dough:
Like Hillary Clinton, Israel never met a dollar it didn’t like!
‘Israel’s Law of Return gives every Jew, or child or grandchild of a Jew, the right to Israeli citizenship on demand’
Hugely important now more than ever with the current rise in anti-Semitism across Europe.
‘ “Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your fathers.”
Aleichem Shalom.
Are you quoting some random book?
Here I’ll do the same,
“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” –The Goblet of Fire
@bopter:
“Random book”
LOL!
@Jack McGready: is it anti Semitic to call Israel out on their brutality? I’d like to stress, “Israel” not “Jews”.
Law of return only applies to white people. They took in Eritrean Jews, forced them to take contraceptive pills so they couldn’t increase numbers and then kicked them out.
@Rúairí O’ Sullivan: funny that, didn’t they launch a rescue mission for thousands of Yemeni Jews when they were at risk of slaughter? Doesn’t seem to fit your wee theory
@Rúairí O’ Sullivan: You do realise that almost half the population of Israel are middle eastern jews (i.e arab)? Ever hear of operation solomon and operation moses?
@Damon16: Damon, have you ever heard of the “operation kick the Palestinians out and treat those remaining like an untermenchen in their own country.”?
@Damon16: yeah, but they’re not the popular jews with the state – they want the nice, attractive, white Americans with ashkenazi or russian heritage, not the guys that look like Arabs!
@Rúairí O’ Sullivan: That’s complete nonsense. There’s a large and growing community of Jews (130,000) in Israel who moved in the last few decades from the Horn of Africa.
Most Israelis today are descendants of Arab Jews who were expelled from their countries by pogroms and discrimination.
What you said is a complete lie.
@Ciarán Ó Raghallaigh: li
@Ciarán Ó Raghallaigh: lies most Jews today are descendants from a kingdom in Eastern Europe.
@David Clarke: LOL! This just gets better and better. You’ll be saying next that they’re descendants of unicorns. Look up the term “Mizrachim” and explain to me how they come from Eastern Europe.
@Charles Williams: “untermenschen”, interesting that, it was actually an Arab Israeli judge who sentenced Israeli PM Ehud Olmert to prison for corruption. There are top arab-israeli doctors, lawyers, supreme court justices, politicians, cabinet ministers. Of course, informal discrimination exists as it does in any country but the reality is arab Israelis have many more rights that those living in surrounding arab countries But i suppose that doesn’t fit with your anti-israel narrative.
This “Law of Return” is like something straight out of the Third Reich’s handbook, putting someone of a specific race and religion above others of a different race and religion.
@Charles Williams: France, Greece, Turkey, Poland, Russia, Germany, Japan and many others all have similar laws.
Part of this propaganda piece states the attempted murder of a Russian spy… think he was caught spying for the British.. would that not make him a British spy. Theresa May must be panicking over the amount of Russian money in British banks. She should get advice from the Irish government concerning the gangsterism of banks. ..they had no problem in turning a blind eye.
Poor homeless man.
Why does he need a foreign citizenship? Would he have to pay higher tax in Russia? Is there a restriction on movement of his money if he stays at home?
What’s wrong with Russian citizenship?
A fake cold war on the Israeli murder machine, Anyone who supports The Apartheid State, should be subject to a boycott.
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