PERSPECTIVE ON ISRAEL : Zionism Is Racism, Right? : In 30 hours, Israel conducts history’s largest single migration of black Africans to freedom. It’s the stuff of legends.

Z ionism is racism?

Ben Gurion Airport: 14,087 Ethiopian Jewish refugees. It’s as if the United States had airlifted 860,000 Kurds to Vermont and was putting them up in hotels. Or Egypt had transferred 200,000 Palestinians from the refugee camps to the Cairo Hilton. Beginning now. Forever.

According to Lou Rudolph, producer of “Roots,” the Israeli airlift is the largest single migration of black Africans to freedom in history. In 30 hours. At peak “efficiency” Auschwitz could dispose of 14,000 Jews in that time period.

Irving Howe, in his book on Jewish immigration to America, tells of the American doctor stationed in Europe, on the docks, to examine prospective immigrants. He tells of one family whose sixth and youngest child had an eye disease. She can’t go. We have tickets! No . The ship will leave! Next . The dream of America, freedom, opportunity. What could they do? Sacrifice everything. The future of their other children? No other hope or future. They had to leave her on the dock. Wailing. They had to.

Seven babies born on Friday en route to Israel. Sickly, frail little black babies. Wailing. Shalom. Here’s a blanket. And diapers. And food. And shelter. And safety. And love. Shalom. There was the young Ethiopian wearing a yarmulke who, as a 1984 arrival, volunteered at an absorption center to help the new ones. The network camera followed him to a bed where he found his old, blind mother. No, they didn’t leave her at the dock.

What of the cost? Jewish law says that in order to ransom captive Jews, even the town’s only sacred Torah scroll must be sold to raise the scratch. Regardless of things like skin color. Or TB, or blindness. And, without hesitation, on the Sabbath. No question about it.

Israeli author David Grossman movingly described his experience meeting one of the planes. Their first tentative steps into the Western 20th Century. Their diffidence. Their tentativeness. Their hope. And suddenly the crowd was transfixed by a little boy who stood in the plane’s doorway and played a tiny wooden shepherd’s flute.

And I thought of the old Jewish legend of the farm community praying in their synagogue on Yom Kippur. A little shepherd boy, not able to read the prayers, did the only thing he knew. He took out his flute and began to play. The members of the congregation, shocked at this breach of synagogue decorum, started to push him out the door. But the rabbi stopped them. He told them of his vision of the Gates of Heaven being closed to their prayers and then suddenly opening to the shepherd boy’s devout melody.

The Gates of Heaven must have opened this week. And 6 million souls who never got a chance in Nazi Germany must have heard the melody.

Zionism is what?