EDITOR: Yes, it it 45 years today to the 1967 War…
How time flies… to think that I have spent 45 years of my life demonstrating against this occupation it sobering all right. It is also 45 years to the international lack of action on this occupation, and 45 years of brutal inhumanities by Israel. How long can it go on like this? apparently, for over 3 centuries, like in Northern Ireland. It is a terrible thought.
In the meantime, there are more problems for the Zionist, white and racist entity called Israel, that Jewish democracy for white Jews. As we know, it is difficult to be racist only against the Palestinians, of course. So now the Jewish Ku Klux Klan is all fired up and ready yo go, with Netanyahu preparing to expel 25,000 migrants to Africa any day now, with minister Yisahi saying Israel is for the whites only, with Ethiopian Falashas being attacked ‘by mistake’ as migrants, and with pogroms and arson spreading like wildfire. Hurray to Jewish white democrats in the only democracy in the Middle East.
Israel: It’s called fascism: ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER (AIC)
TUESDAY, 29 MAY 2012 MICHAEL WARSCHAWSKI,
Our elders used to say that if something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck – then it’s a duck. Similarly, it is possible to say that if a state acts like a fascist state, legislates fascist laws, its spokespersons speak using fascist terms and some of the population responds in a fascist manner – then such a state is fascist.
For numerous years I warned against use of the word “fascist” in defining the state of Israel. The Israeli regime is first and foremost a colonial regime, moved by colonial considerations of excluding the indigenous population and taking over their country and lands. The use of the term fascism served to soften the colonial character of the Zionist project and of the state of Israel.
There exists no doubt, of course, that the Zionist state did not lose its colonial essence but on the contrary, deepened even further the character traits it shares with states such as Rhodesia, Australia of the 18th and 19th century and the United States in its conquest of the west. However, Israel underwent processes which today justify also defining it as a fascist state. Seemingly, the grandchildren of the victims of German fascism and the project to destroy Jews who lived under its rule were supposed to know how to identify the fascist characteristics which developed as a terminal illness during the last decade.
The use of the word “cancer” in relation to a group of human beings, for example. Knesset Member Miri Regev (Likud) recently used this word to define the African refugees seeking asylum in Israel. Our ancestors were defined as “cancer” by the Nazis, and even today this word stands at the centre of the international fascist discourse when speaking about foreigners…and Jews. Another characteristic is the increase in pogroms: a mob incited by right-wing politicians, but also by the official discourse and the media, which violently attacks a minority group under the slogan “death to…!” So familiar to those who listened to stories of our grandparents! An additional example from the fascist modus operandi: the incitement of one disempowered group against another.
A pogrom always leads to murder and this is just a matter of time. The clock has begun to tick. MK Michael Ben Ari began his path with pogroms in East Jerusalem under the slogan “death to Arabs”, and today he is inciting in south Tel Aviv under the slogan “death to Sudanese”…most of whom, by the way, are not Sudanese but Eritrean.
However, the fascist attack on asylum seekers has an additional aspect related to most of our national and personal histories: the state of Israel was founded as an asylum state for hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled persecution or who survived the genocide of Eastern Europe. This position as asylum state is what led to the 1947 United Nations decision, and it is doubtful whether the international community would have given its support to the establishment of the state of Israel without the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and survivors of the Nazi project of destruction. Who like us, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those same refugees and survivors, is supposed to feel empathy toward the refugees, whether they are escaping persecution or escaping hunger.
However, the asylum state has become a fascist state in which the discourse of power has completely replaced that of rights, and empathy has given way to hatred of foreigners. Here we have additional proof that the experience of persecution does not necessarily lead to empathy toward other persecuted persons. Last Thursday, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, we were less than fifty people demonstrating outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem, reminding everyone that the Jewish tradition is full of commandments concerning love of the foreigner. Not just to treat someone with dignity, but with actual love! However, for a society built on the dispossession of the indigenous population and its expulsion, it is doubtful whether it possesses the capacity to feel empathy toward a refugee from Africa, and Miri Regev is an example. Regev, more than any other Knesset member, incited against MK Hanin Zoabi and called for her deportation from the country following the May 2010 slaughter conducted by Israel’s navy against the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara. Today the same woman stands and incites using fascist language against asylum seekers from Africa. Indeed, the face of a generation is as the face of its leaders, and these days it is best not to look in the mirror.
Israel turns on its refugees: Guardian
Firebombing of house containing 10 Eritreans is latest example of growing racism stoked by politicians and media
Harriet Sherwood
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 June 2012
Behind the metal door and up a narrow, blackened stairwell, fear hung in the air along with the smell of smoke. No one wanted to talk. A young woman scrubbing clothes in a plastic basin mutely shook her head. A man sweeping the floor with a toddler clinging to his legs said one word: “No.” Another, bringing bags of food from the nearby market, brushed past without making eye contact.
As for the 10 Eritreans who had been trapped in a ground-floor apartment when the blaze began at 3am, they had gone. Four were in hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation; the rest had fled.
The overnight firebombing of a downtown Jerusalem building which houses refugees from sub-Saharan Africa was the latest in a string of attacks set against the backdrop of rising anti-migrant sentiment in Israel, fuelled by inflammatory comments by prominent politicians. Often described as infiltrators by ministers, the media, the army and government officials, migrants have also had labels such as “cancer”, “garbage”, “plague” and “rapists” applied to them by Israeli politicians.
The arsonists who struck the Jerusalem apartment, located in a religious neighbourhood of the city, scrawled “get out of our neighbourhood” on its outside wall. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said: “This was a targeted attack which we believe was racially motivated.” The foreign ministry condemned the “heinous crime”.
But on the street outside the building, the official response had little resonance with a man who arrived in Israel from Eritrea 14 years ago but was too scared to give his name. “People look at you, they curse you. They say, ‘Go back to your country.’ We are very afraid,” he said.
Tensions were inevitable, according to Moshe Cohen, the owner of a nearby jeweller’s shop. “They drink, they fight among themselves, they play African music on shabbat [the Jewish sabbath] when people want to pray. What started in Tel Aviv happens here now.”
He was referring to a series of firebombings of apartments and a nursery over the past month in southern Tel Aviv, an area in which African migrants are concentrated. Shops run by or serving migrants were smashed up and looted in a violent demonstration last month in which Africans were attacked. Many Israelis were shocked at the display of aggressive racism in their most liberal city.
Political leaders did not allow the violence to temper their verbal onslaught against the migrants. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel’s national identity was at risk from the flood of “illegal infiltrators”. Interior minister Eli Yishai suggested that Aids-infected migrants were raping Israeli women, and all, “without exception”, should be locked up pending deportation. They do not believe “this country belongs to us, to the white man”, he said in an interview.
And, while touring the fence that Israel is building along its border with Egypt to deter migrants, MP Aryeh Eldad said: “Anyone that penetrates Israel’s border should be shot – a Swedish tourist, Sudanese from Eritrea, Eritreans from Sudan, Asians from Sinai. Whoever touches Israel’s border – shot.” He later conceded that such a policy may not be feasible “because bleeding hearts groups will immediately begin to shriek and turn to the courts”.
According to the immigration authority, there are 62,000 migrants in Israel, where the population is 7.8m. Over 2,000 migrants entered Israel via Egypt last month, compared with 637 last May. The construction of the 150-mile (240km) southern border fence, due to be completed later this year, is thought to be increasing in the short term the numbers attempting to cross into Israel .
Nearly all are given temporary permits to stay in Israel which must be renewed every three or four months and specifically exclude permission to work. Many end up being employed on a casual basis for a pittance, living in overcrowded, rundown apartments and confined to the fringes of society. In desperation, some turn to petty crime.
On Sunday, a law came into effect allowing the Israeli authorities to jail migrants for up to three years. People helping or sheltering migrants could face prison sentences of between five and 15 years.
Netanyahu also ordered ministers to accelerate efforts to deport 25,000 migrants from countries with which Israel has diplomatic relations, principally South Sudan, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Ethiopia.
He conceded it was not possible to deport around 35,000 migrants from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia. Eritreans and Sudanese make up more than 90% of those who have illegally crossed the Israel-Egypt border in recent months.
One out of 4,603 applicants was granted asylum status last year.
Although some commentators and community activists have said that Israel, a state founded by and for refugees from persecution, should be sympathetic and welcoming to those fleeing violence and oppression, the prevailing mood is one of intolerance.
“This phenomenon is getting bigger and bigger,” said Poriya Gets of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, based in Tel Aviv. It was being stoked by politicians and rightwing organisations, she added. “We now see hotspots of tension between refugees and local people in many towns.”
Her organisation had also been targeted. “We’ve had phone calls, people cursing and saying ugly things, like, ‘We hope you will be raped and we are coming to burn you.’ The politicians must take responsibility. They are trying to make the fire bigger.”
Living in dread in south Tel Aviv, young African migrants feel the hate: Haaretz
Children of African migrants open up about their feelings, and their fears, since they became the subjects of protests in their own neighborhood.
By Tamar Rotem Jun.05, 2012
“For quite a while now it’s been scary on the streets, but on the day of the riots, we felt it even more. On our way home from school, people looked at us in a racist way. They also said things to us. We didn’t react.”
Ashol Jhon, a 9th-grader at the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, of South Sudanese origin, describes the day, nearly two weeks ago, that south Tel Aviv residents took to the streets to demonstrate against the presence of African migrants. “When we got home, our mother wasn’t home. And then we heard sounds outside of people running, shouting, cursing. I was really scared to be home alone. I’m the eldest. I have three small brothers. Our mother had gone to visit a friend. I called her, because she had gone out alone with the baby. I called her lots of times. She came back at about 12:00, because it wasn’t safe to go out. My brothers and I didn’t go to sleep. We waited for her.”
It is difficult for the restrained, noble-looking Jhon to talk about that day, and her feelings about living in the Hatikva neighborhood since the riots broke out. She refrains from giving too many details about the difficult hours she experienced, as cries of incitement and the sounds of breaking glass were heard outside. But it is not hard to sense the fear that for her, and for her friends, is gradually turning into bleak despair.
Jhon arrived in Israel, via Egypt, about four years ago, after a difficult journey with her parents. She prefers not to give details of those travails, either. The Hebrew she speaks sounds natural, as though she were born here. She says that up until a few weeks ago, she felt at home in south Tel Aviv. But that feeling of security is now gone.
Once South Sudan declared its independence last July, and talk of deporting the refugees began, the community began its struggle against forced deportation, Jhon relates. And she has taken an active role in that struggle. Not long ago she was one of the spokespersons at a demonstration.
Jhon is, of course, not the only one feeling scared. A sense of fear and dread has long been hovering over many of the migrant workers’ children, big and small, in south Tel Aviv. However, the situation escalated recently, as the riots began.
“Their fear is palpable,” says Dr. Gal Harmat of the Critical Pedagogy program at Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College in Tel Aviv. Harmat instructs students who are studying early childhood education; they do in-service training at kindergartens in south Tel Aviv and also serve as aides in the kindergartens (this a joint project of the nonprofit Mesila organization, which aids migrants, and the Tel Aviv municipality ). “The parents of these students,” says Harmat, “are really afraid there will be grenades or Molotov cocktails thrown at their homes, and they are afraid for their children.”
According to Harmat, the students themselves have also begun to express fear, since the first demonstration in the Hatikva neighborhood. They are scared they will be marked as working for aid organizations that help the foreign residents, and that the fury will be directed at them. “The press is drumming it into them that they have to be afraid of the Africans, that they will rape them.”
Growing up too fast
In a conversation with a group of junior high and high school students at Bialik-Rogozin, among them children of refugees and labor migrants from Africa and other places, as well as of veteran Israelis, the teens and pre-teens spoke a lot about what might be called the banality of racism, being marked out by the masses simply because of skin color. Throughout the conversation it became clear that these children are being forced to grow up too quickly. There were not many giggles or high-fives in the room. Instead, these children radiated suppressed pain and silence.
Some of the African children complained that the Israelis – not all of them, they clarified, but rather those who point at them, call them mean names and call for their deportation – cannot even tell them apart. “It doesn’t make any difference to them,” said one boy, “for them we are all Sudanese. All of us are criminals, rapists, because of one Sudanese who made a mistake.”
“It annoys me that they say ‘the Sudanese’ did it,” says 12th-grader Muhammad Hassin, whose family came from North Sudan. “You go on Facebook and you see statuses: ‘A Sudanese did it.’ They don’t distinguish among us – Sudanese, Congolese, Eritrean. If one [African] did something, we all did it.”
“I’m sick and tired of always hearing people say, as we walk by, that we are smelly, and other racist comments like that,” says Jhon. “When I walk down the street, I always hear about the Sudanese. Sometimes I say to myself that I will answer but in the end I don’t because I am afraid,” she admits. “I ignore them but inside I am angry at the way they think and at the way they look at me.”
Ben Ben-David, an 11th-grader from a veteran Israeli family in the Hatikva neighborhood, notes that this type of thinking and behavior is exactly the type of racist behavior they teach students about in history class. “You don’t look at every individual person but you generalize because of color and race, and you discriminate against all. The demonstration against the migrants was not very sophisticated; it was simply filled with hate speech.”
The demonstration spread the fears of Africans, he observes. “To my regret, even my mother, my own flesh and blood, now says, ‘I am afraid of them.’ And friends my age are also afraid to go to certain places because they are scared of the Sudanese, which is not rational.”
Ben-David says he tries to be realistic and practical. “The only possible way to stop the hatred is to get to know the people; to see that they have a face, that they have feelings. But because of the fear I don’t see a situation where anyone can convince an Israeli with prejudices. They are too afraid of them now.”
Others, too, connect the violent events to their civics and history lessons. Eleventh-grader Hailav Arega, whose father is from Eritrea and whose mother is from Ethiopia, finds it shocking that there is graffiti on store windows saying “Death to the Sudanese.”
“That kind of thing happened during World War II. The last thing you’d expect is that it would happen at the hands of someone who went through it himself, in Europe. I don’t understand. How can a person forget his own history?” exclaims Arega in shock.
B. is a 12th-grader who came to Israel through Egypt, but is originally from Turkey. (She asks not to be identified by name because her status is problematic.) “I understand there is a debate here,” she says, “and there are Israelis who say there is no room for the migrants and that the country belongs to the Jews. But why the violence? They had no right to break windows or beat people up, or curse at them.”
“In 11th grade, when we began to learn about the Holocaust, I started crying. I really wanted to convert (to Judaism). When I saw what they did in the Hatikva neighborhood, I remembered Kristallnacht. The next morning I came [to school] wearing a shirt with the date of Kristallnacht on it and the date of the demonstration.”
“The newcomers are always guilty of everything,” she adds. “That’s how it’s been in every era. There was once an period when the Jews suffered from this.”
B. says he understands what racism is. “It’s difficult for me that dark-skinned people are marked as different from Jews because of their color. They don’t stop me in the street because I am white and they think I am Russian. I have a friend who has dark skin and I see how they look at her. It’s embarrassing. My friend wanted to go to a lecture by [writer] Aharon Appelfeld at Tel Aviv University but she couldn’t because it was the evening and she is afraid to come home in the dark.”
Arega, who lives in Beit Hashanti, a shelter for at-risk children, and is receivng his matriculation certificate this year, with impressive grades, finds it hard to understand the Israelis’ insensitivity. “I’m not passing judgment and I don’t blame all of them. In everything there are the bad people and the good people. But I thought the Jewish people could understand what it is to be refugees who have come from places where things are bad for them. It’s absolutely clear that if we go back to our own countries, it’s either prison or death, or life in the army until you die. My father was in the army his whole life. From the time I was very small I never saw him. He looked for a new life and that’s how we ended up here.”
“We merely want a future, want to realize our dreams. I can’t understand it. Why does it bother anyone that we’re living here and want to build our future? Why do they want to throw us into the garbage? The refugees aren’t even asking for all that much. I would like to do a lot of significant things for society and I want to serve the country because my parents and siblings are here. After all, if Iran fires a missile it won’t distinguish between the refugees and the Israelis.”
Jhon says the South Sudanese community is now split by a dilemma: go back to Sudan willingly or stay in Israel and fight to be recognized as refugees? She herself, however, has decided. “I still feel Israel is a good place but I am afraid. I feel like my life and my friends’ lives are in danger here. I don’t hate and I still respect the people who are here, but there is a limit. No one can stand this racism. The message I want to transmit is that we want to leave here. But we can’t go back there.”
No need to suffer like this
Jhon says her parents feel the opposite way, and for now they prefer to remain here, because even though South Sudan has obtained independence, it is still a very dangerous place. There are no hospitals and conditions for raising children are not good. “But,” she says, “I told my mother, ‘Let’s take our things and leave. We don’t need to suffer like this.”
Her friend, who is sitting next to her, 8th-grader Aluk Banong adds, “I would rather go back there because in the end everyone will die, here or there.”
Throughout out this difficult conversation one girl, a 9th-grader named Victoria James, sits silently, staring at the floor. Every now and then she and her friend talk quietly between themselves. When James finally raises her head it’s obvious her eyes are full of tears. She asks to speak to me privately.
“My feeling,” she says, “is that when I walk down the street everyone is looking at me as though I am a big disaster.” Her voice trembles and she bursts out crying. “They say that they are afraid of us but I am afraid of them. I am afraid they will do something to me on the way, or they will hurt me because I am a black African. While the demonstration was happening my father was at work and I didn’t stop thinking about him, about whether he’d come home.
“Today anyone can curse us. Anyone can say he is looking for African girls, or that we have come here to take over. We are fed up. We are still young. We want to live happily like other children in this country, to realize dreams. When I was little my dream was to be a singer. When I grew up I realized I want to be a doctor to help the children in Sudan who are dying of diseases. That’s what I want to do.”
Arega intends to study economics and become a politician. “The only chance I have is here,” he says quietly.
Muffling the protests of the real victims: Haaretz
We will all have to pay the costs of the Ulpana affair, even as the police investigation has yet to yield a single arrest or indictment.
By Akiva Eldar | Jun.05, 2012 | 1:14 AM
For years to come, the Ulpana affair will be grist for the mill in law schools around the world. This is a rare instance in which innumerable criminals are being exonerated despite a preponderance of incriminating evidence. The raucous cries emitted by the settlers and their patrons bear a resemblance to the withdrawal symptoms experienced by a junkie. The loud moaning of the offended oppressors from the settlements and the Knesset has muffled the protests of the real victims.
This sad farce raises two important questions: Who has passed judgment on this duplicitous affair, and who will have to pay for the damage it has caused?
The truth is that this is not a dispute between the State of Israel and Palestinian land owners on whose plots the Jewish settlement was erected (and the owners’ allies, activists from the Yesh Din human rights group ). In his reply to the High Court, the State Prosecutor’s Office categorically rejected claims about a legitimate land sale transacted between the landowners and Amana, the land agent for the Yesha Council of settlements.
The Civil Administration has confirmed that the sales contract is fraudulent. The name of the land seller cited in Amana’s transaction documents is nowhere to be found on land registry records; the seller never owned the land. In fact, more than two years ago, a land affairs officer in the Civil Administration wrote that Amana knew that the “seller” was not a legal owner of the property, since his name did not match the name listed in land registry documents. In fact, he was 7 years old at the time the land was registered, according to these authoritative documents.
In addition, the Amana transaction agreement was not approved by any official agency. Despite the fact that the land in question is listed properly in the registry, the settler transaction was never noted in the registry books, nor did the Civil Administration authorize the sale. Haaretz’s Chaim Levinson reported two weeks ago that documents submitted by area residents to the High Court of Justice indicate that the development company that built Beit El’s yeshiva complex and the Ulpana neighborhood submitted fraudulent documents to Bank Tefahot that clumsily attempted to prove the neighborhood was built on state-owned land, rather than on plots owned by Palestinians.
Questioned by the police, development company CEO Yoel Tsur conceded that he built the Ulpana homes even though his request for construction permits had been rejected. Asked why he built without permits, Tsur replied that since the Housing and Construction Ministry was involved in planning the neighborhood and financing its infrastructure, he sincerely believed that there was no reason not to build the homes.
Hence Tsur accused ministry officials of complicity in the transfer of public money in a completely illegal construction scheme. Yet the police investigation, which began five years ago, has yet to yield a single arrest or indictment.
Two weeks ago, when I asked the Justice Ministry’s spokesman who will be punished for this illegal land grab at Ulpana, the spokesman replied: “We are waiting for the relevant authorities to comment on this matter.” Last week, I received another statement from the spokesman, declaring that “on the basis of our examination of the matter, it appears that we cannot comment on it.”
Perhaps such obfuscation is what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had in mind when he pledged that lawsuits would not be used to undermine settlement. Is the Ulpana affair an exception to the rule?
There are hundreds of houses built on land obtained fraudulently that litter the West Bank. In some rare instances, the High Court has ordered that the plundered assets be returned to their owners.
But so far, not a single person has been penalized by the courts for fraud, forgery or illegal construction in such cases. And what about the issue of who will have to pay for the legal expenses and moving costs entailed in the removal of the Ulpana settlers’ homes to a new location? The answer is that we will all have to pay for this relocation – including the social justice activists, who appear to view justice as something that should be applied only to Israelis.
Fig leaf
All the disclosures about the first Lebanon war that have been surfacing on the 30th anniversary of the tragedy have shoved to the background the 30th anniversary of the Palestinian autonomy talks between Israel and Egypt, with the United States acting as mediator. These talks ended when the Lebanon war erupted.
More than a decade ago, Yitzhak Rabin gravitated toward principles embedded in the Palestinian section of the 1978 Camp David Accords signed by Menachem Begin; Rabin essentially incorporated these principles into the Oslo Accords.
Retired IDF Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, who served as director of Military Intelligence from 1974-1979, wrote in his online column last week that Begin believed that the Egyptians viewed the Camp David Accords’ multilateral section as a “fig leaf” whose purpose was to make it look like Egypt was not neglecting the Palestinian issue.
“In Military Intelligence, we believed that bilateral peace with Egypt would not lead to normalization between the two states in the absence of a solution to the Palestinian problem,” Gazit wrote.
“Israel is not responsible for the dramatic developments which occurred in Egypt over the past year and a half, and we did not bring about the downfall of the Mubarak regime,” he added. “Nonetheless, in the foreseeable future we will deal with the legacy of the seeds we planted over the past 35 years: Israel did not allow Palestinian autonomy to take root; Israel adopted a massive settlement policy which precludes any option of the establishment of an independent Palestinian state; and even 15 years after the Oslo Accords, we have maintained this same policy” of rejecting Palestinian autonomy.
Should Israel fail to grasp the implications of its policy, Gazit warned, the Egyptian people will resolve the dispute between Begin and Military Intelligence that erupted decades ago. The Egyptians will prove that their concerns about the Palestinians were not, nor are they now, a fig leaf.
Mass imprisonment: Haaretz Editorial: Haaretz
Israel can’t ignore the refugees from war who are knocking at its gates, and certainly not those who are already living here. Incitement, hate-mongering and mass detentions won’t solve anything.
Jun.05, 2012
On Sunday, the Population and Immigration Authority began enforcing an amendment to the anti-infiltration law, approved by the Knesset in January. From now on, any African migrant who infiltrates into Israel will be imprisoned without trial for up to three years.
This draconian measure won’t solve the problem of migration to Israel, but it will further erode Israel’s image as a humane country that abides by international law. It’s also not clear how it would even be possible to imprison tens of thousands of migrants here: The Saharonim facility in the south has space for 2,000 people, and even after it is expanded to accommodate 5,400, it will soon be fully occupied. As for the new facility now being built, it is still in the earliest stages of construction.
But the problem isn’t one of logistics. Mass imprisonment without trial, for a lengthy period of time, of tens of thousands of migrants innocent of any crime, including women and children – people whose sole desire is to find a refuge from the terrors of their own governments or from wars in their countries, or even to find employment because of economic distress back home – is a cruel, benighted policy. Organizations that help migrants even say it is a violation of the UN Refugee Convention.
Instead of examining each migrant’s status and eligibility, Israel is planning to jail them all. Instead of finally formulating a policy on immigration, Israel is throwing the migrants in jail without giving any of them, and especially the refugees among them, a reasonable chance of gaining asylum.
The flood of migrants from Africa is a worldwide problem. Israel should participate in solving it – and not merely by brutal, sweeping measures. Even as politicians vie with one another over who can inflame anti-migrant sentiment more, and as acts of violence, like yesterday’s arson attack on an apartment full of migrants in Jerusalem, grow steadily more severe, the government isn’t taking a single positive step to solve the problem.
A portion of these migrants to Israel should be given basic rights and allowed to work and live a decent life until the situation in their own countries improves. Israel is capable of absorbing them.
Of course, Israel must also control the flow of migrants over its borders. But even so, the state can’t ignore the refugees from war who are knocking at its gates, and certainly not those who are already living here. Incitement, hate-mongering and mass detentions won’t solve anything.
Israel is the most naive and racist country in the West: Haaretz
The migrants are less of a danger than what people think. The real danger is the way they are being treated.
By Gideon Levy May.31, 2012
Israel is both the most racist and most naive country in the West. Racist, because in no other country can politicians make remarks about migrants as they do here and still remain in office another day; naive, because only now has Israel discovered the problem that has been facing the “first world” for years. Only in Israel can a parliamentarian from the ruling party describe the migrants as a “cancer,” and, far worse, it is only in Israel that she could do so knowing that her contemptible racism would merely gain her support.
It is only Israel that does not have a migration policy; it is only in Israel that the migrants are still officially known as “infiltrators”; it is only in Israel that the government incites the weaker classes against them and after violence breaks out, the prime minister makes do with a weak remark that “there is no place for this.” In fact, there is place for violence against the migrants: After all, what did we think? That when they are described as a cancer and called out for their diseases, threats, and dangers that there would not be an outbreak of violent crimes against them? That after all the intimidation and incitement, fear would not emerge in the poor neighborhoods and give rise to violence?
The residents of the neighborhoods are scared because there was someone who frightened them. They show hatred because there was someone who sowed hatred in their hearts for foreigners, and in particular black people. These black people are less dangerous than the residents were told but it is too late now because the seeds of hatred have already sprouted.
The government is conducting this fear campaign like it conducted other fear campaigns because this is the way it diverts public attention and anger from its failures. In this manner, it adopts the bad old ways of dark regimes, inciting against foreigners and frightening people about imaginary or exaggerated dangers so it can evade responsibility. Just as with other fateful issues, so it is with the subject of migration: The government’s policy is a non-policy, it is a case of burying one’s head in the sand and then screaming hysterically when everything explodes in one’s face.
After Israel carries out this mass experiment with human beings – allowing then to stay here but not allowing them to work, while showing no regard for their fundamental rights – it pretends to be surprised at a few criminal acts. When dealing with migrants, all the masks are pulled off. Racism has become the new political correctness in Israel.
Some 1 million Russians came here, about half of them non-Jews, and Israel knew how to absorb them. They are white. Tens of thousands of Africans came here and they are the new enemy. They are black.
However, in this new world, Israel can no longer avoid contributing its part to the absorption of migrants and refugees, even if they entered the country without permission. Millions of migrants have flooded numerous countries and they knew how to deal with them. Tens of thousands of Jews “infiltrated” countries of refuge during the years of darkness; in 1948, Palestinian refugees flooded the surrounding countries, and since then the flow has not stopped. Jordan is swamped not only with Palestinian refugees from then but also with Iraqi and Syrian refugees of today, and Turkey, too, has absorbed thousands of refugees from Syria. France’s population is becoming blacker and Britain’s is becoming more Muslim. This is the rough way of the world and Israel is part of it.
The incitement against the migrants not only ignores Jewish history and global reality, it ignores the reality of the future as well. And what will happen if one day the government’s campaigns of fear turn out to be true, heaven forbid, and Israel indeed faces an existential threat and tens of thousands of Israelis try to escape from here? What shall we say then to the world if it closes its doors to Israelis just as the doors are now being closed in the faces of the African migrants, many of whom are fleeing for their lives? How long will this perverse claim go on – that “Israel’s situation is different.” No one believes Israel must open its doors to all those who are knocking at them. No country has such an obligation. The influx of refugees here must be regulated, the migrants who have already arrived must be classified according to their distress and the dangers they would face if they returned to their homeland. Those who have the right to remain, must be taken care of – not with violence and not with hatred, which will not solve a thing, but by giving them the possibility of a decent life. Meanwhile the migrants are less of a danger than what people think. The real danger is the way they are being treated.
Down and out in south Tel Aviv: Haaretz
Overwhelmingly it is Israelis, not African migrants, who are responsible for the crime and drugs that permeate already dilapidated south Tel Aviv neighbourhoods. Some of those migrants would make better Israelis than the legally Israeli criminals hanging out there.
By Brett Kline | May.30, 2012 | 10:54 PM
Crime, violence and overcrowding in south Tel Aviv….you may not like the living conditions of the African refugees here, even less if you live among them, but they are not responsible for most of the crime-oriented degradation of these neighbourhoods. Certain marginal Israelis are responsible, but Minister Eli Yishai would be very uncomfortable with that information. It is easier to blame the Africans for everything going wrong in south Tel Aviv and perhaps all over Israel.
People from Eritrea, South Sudan, Darfur, Ghana, Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire are not only refugees, they are often illegal, they are black, and best of all, they are not Jewish. For Yishai and other religious right-wingers, this is a no-brainer.
I spent some time in Neve Sha’anan embarking on various misadventures in the area between the old decrepit abandoned bus station and the frenetically busy new one, a center of Third World activity.
This is what I saw. The Africans and Asians have food and clothing stores, and work in central and north Tel Aviv restaurants. In Neve Sha’anan they have small table and chair-filled spaces where they drink beer and smoke nargilahs and listen to twangy East African guitar and percussion music, what we call “bouis-bouis” in French. This music should be an opportunity for Israeli musicians and world music lovers because it is so cool, and it is the real thing, like the North and West African music in Paris and world music in London. But there’s little chance it will be the music of people from Eritrea, South Sudan, Darfur, Ghana, Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire that will connect them if ever with Israeli culture.
The Eritreans and Ghanaians, and the Filipinos and Thais, have small Pentecostal and Evangelist church spaces, while the Sudanese men walk arm in arm, kissing each other’s cheeks and bumping their foreheads in earnest greetings. It is another world. Many work in the fruit and vegetable markets.
Some Africans smoke hash, some sell it, and a few steal bicycles. Occasionally, there are high-profile crimes such as the recent rape in a south Tel Aviv parking garage, for which three Eritreans were arrested. But on the edges of this African world, almost all the crime throughout Tel Aviv, from bicycle thefts to apartment break-ins to muggings on the street, is being committed by other people, all Israelis and legal, involved in the consumption of crack-cocaine and poor quality heroin. The expression on the street for the two drugs is leh-malah and leh-matah respectively, or in New York street English, uptown and downtown.
Take a walk from 4pm onwards through the old bus station cement field, with its small, somber cave-like enclosures at the north end and the shadowy corners all around filled with dozens of shabbily-dressed people who all seem to be in a hurry and threatening someone. Many go in and out of prison and hospitals for drug-related thefts and violence. Crime is the main component of their lives, after using narcotics. And 99.5% of them are Israelis, either Russian, Arab or Jewish or some mysterious mix there-of. The remaining 1% at most are African.
There are indeed a small number of Eritrean girls, staggering on high heels, running to catch a hit on a crack pipe in between turning tricks in sordid rooms nearby. But mostly you see highly aggressive people sniffing and shooting heroin and smoking crack in the garbage-filled, broken-up enclosures, yelling in Hebrew, Arabic and Russian and hitting each other, or pounding the sidewalks looking for ways to get other people’s money. They are all Israelis, and are mostly unemployable.
In a horribly dirty and dilapidated third-floor apartment near the end of the Neve Sha’anan walkway, off the corner of Rosh Pina street, members of all three Israeli tribes gathered to smoke crack and buy heroin from a guy who lived there for years with his wife. A visitor spoke with Nissim in French, as he had lived 20 years in France, mostly in jail for heroin trafficking and armed robbery.
He grew up in nearby Jaffa in an Egyptian-Jewish family, he is not stupid at all, but he was always involved in petty crime and today has permanently swollen legs and walks with crutches. His Israeli wife is deformed, her backbone twisted sideways, all from years of crack and heroin abuse. The talk is of crime, the drug products and the neighbourhood. No African men have ever entered this apartment, says Nissim, because they don’t use hard drugs. Their son, currently in the IDF, visits occasionally. He is a nice, clean, shy kid. He is also courageous. The whole scene is frightening.
Nissim speaks good Arabic, but not Russian. He does not like too many Russians there. They are violent and dangerous, he says. Outside, there is a loud argument going on between two Russians in the hallway. An African couple passes delicately to get into their apartment, apparently home after work. The looks on their faces at the crack pipes and drug refuse are of disgust and fear, but they say nothing.
The Africans work or want to work but if you approach the groups of men sitting in Levinsky Park, they will not talk to you about any of this. They are suspicious and afraid of the police.
Underneath the stern, tired faces, perhaps many of them are good people, though there are certainly exceptions. Some have been tortured and held as slaves by Bedouin in the Sinai, with women raped regularly.
And now they understand that their situation does not move right wing Israeli lawmakers, especially not the Interior Minister, because they are not Jews, so for religious Israelis, they can only be a threat. They are no good simply because they are here. On the other hand, the legal Israelis in the criminal world of leh-malah and leh-matah are a real problem because of what they do, even with police patrols all over the neighbourhood.
Police statistics as reported in Haaretz show that the crime figures of the African subgroup are in fact a good deal lower than those of the general population. Do Israeli law-makers and local residents know that? Do they care?
Should the demonstrations not be against the insecurity brought on by violent crime and the small groups of addicts, and not by the Africans? Do the Israelis leaving work and waiting for buses on Salomon Eliasberg and Yesod Ha’amala streets feel more threatened by the groups of Africans strolling through the night to the noisy music spots or all the drug activity, which in fact they might not see at all?
Maybe there is a way to find the best and brightest among the Africans, and to integrate them into Israeli society. Some of them would make better Israelis than the criminals hanging out in Neve Sha’anan. But that would take a re-think of Israeli identity at the highest levels.
So far, certain Likud MKs are running the “Deportation Now” movement and getting all the good press. Maybe the comfortable Ashkenazi center-left crowd in Tel Aviv, the “smolanim b’misada”, what we would call “café latte Democrats” in the States, could come up with a counter movement, to find the best and brightest among African refugees. Maybe that twangy African guitar vibrating in the “bouis-bouis” in Neve Sha’anan could be a real Israeli hit. It would sound so much better than the crack-pipes being crushed in dirty hallways nearby.
Brett Kline is a journalist based in Paris who visits Israel frequently
Yishai forms task force to deal with Israel’s ‘infiltrator problem’: Haaretz
Interior Minister gives task force two months to present ways to stop the influx of African migrants into Israel.
Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced Tuesday the formation of a special task force to deal with African migrant workers in Israel, saying it will “make sure Israel is free of infiltrators.”
During the past few days, Yishai has been holding consultations with officials in the military, police, and the legal system, and studying different aspects of the issue. “I’ve placed the subject at the top of my priorities for the upcoming year, and I plan to do everything I can to resolve Israel’s infiltrator problem.”
The team has been assigned with the task of coming up with ways to stop the influx of African migrants, as well as expelling those illegally residing in Israel. Due to the urgency of the issue, Yishai assigned the task force a two-month deadline to present him with their findings. He plans to present these at an emergency government meeting.
The task force will be headed by Professor Arnon Soffer, a professor of geography and environmental studies and one of the founders of Haifa University. Soffer is a natural choice for Yishai as research he published in 2009 states that most African migrants in Israel are migrant workers, not refugees, views congruent with Yishai’s own.
Other members assigned to the task force are Major General Yom Tov Samia, formerly Head of the IDF’s Southern Command; Prof. Yochanan Shtessman of the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and formerly head of the National Insurance Institute; Sara Frisch, formerly a senior official in the State Attorney’s Office and former head of the Shaarei Mishpat college; Major General Berty Ohayon formerly a senior police officer and head of the Population and Immigration Authority; Arye Sharabi a former judge; and Ron Roguin an attorney.
Israel has tried out a number of different strategies designed to curb the phenomenon of illegal immigration by African migrants since 2007, when the number of African migrants arriving in Israel spiked (to 5,000, as compared to 1,000 in 2006).
In that year, the Saharonim facility, a detention center for African migrants entering Israel through its border with Egypt, was opened. Migrants arriving at the facility went through a process of registration and identification, and given a medical exam.
If they could not be deported – under international law, people fleeing from certain African countries, including Sudan and Eritrea, cannot be sent back to their homelands – they were eventually released and given a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv.
In January of 2010, the state opened up a new front in its war against illegal migration when the government decided to build a fence along its border with Egypt. Eight months later, the Defense Ministry began to implement the decision.
The government is pinning great hopes on the fence, which will be 230 km long and is estimated to cost some NIS 1.3 billion.