20 dec 2013
African asylum seekers are arrested and put onto a bus in Israel, where authorities have not granted them refugee status in 2013, Jewish asylum seekers in the port of Havana where they were denied asylum in 1939.
The past two Israeli governments successfully turned the issue of African asylum seekers into a threat posed by infiltrators, who were subsequently criminalized. A short examination of the country’s history with infiltrators, however, can give us some important insights.
Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who’s in favor of expelling refugees from Africa, devised a catchy slogan – “A country of all its infiltrators” – in order to condemn those who defend asylum seekers in Israel. By using that concept he is trying to show the absurdity of those who support giving refugees asylum and rights – because nobody wants us to become a country of infiltrators. An historical examination of those who previously knocked at the gates of this the country, however, can give us some important and surprising insights.
The first illegal infiltrators were the ma’apilim – the illegal immigrants who had to evade the British Mandate police trying to prevent illegal immigration. It’s worth noting that those infiltrators were welcomed with open arms by the pre-state Jewish community.
Read +972′s full coverage of refugees in Israel
Some of them were Jews who managed to flee and infiltrate across the borders of countries under a Nazi regime or Nazi occupation in order to reach this country and after an agonizing journey, become legal citizens.
The next infiltrators Israel received, not necessarily welcomingly, were Jews from Arab states who slipped through their countries’ borders after Zionism brought the pot of nationalism to a boil. Hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews found refuge in Israel and became its citizens.
During those same years other infiltrators tried to return to their homes in Israel. Palestinian refugees, who Israel expelled to establish a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, tried to return to their homes – but violence prevented them from doing so. Thousands of destitute refugees tried to return to work their fields or obtain food for their families but Israel fought them as if they had all been Fedayeen. Marco Rosio, one of the first settlers in Moshav Kerem Ben Zimra, whose members moved into the homes of Palestinians from Ras al-Ahmar, said it accurately: “They tried to return to steal what belonged to them. So we shot them.”
Not all Israeli Jews at the time wanted to prevent the refugees’ return. In 1956, Rabbi Binyamin, one of the founders of Brit Shalom, issued a compassionate plea: “To our infiltrating brother… From now on, don’t call him an infiltrator; call him an illegal immigrant, because you unknowingly bore redemption in your own illegal immigration. You are not hated, not an enemy, not a foe, but a brother and comrade. Thus shall you be treated: we shall rehabilitate you among us, as one of us, among your people, wherever you choose.” If only we could believe it.
The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law created the legal framework to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees. It was updated a week ago in order to criminalize the African refugees in Israel today. This law daringly leaped across and bridged decades to reflect the state’s consistent approach to the non-Jewish infiltrator. The law that made Palestinian infiltrators threatening and dangerous has also transformed African refugees into criminals.
The tone of Sa’ar’s slogan recalls – perhaps intentionally – “a country of all its citizens,” the phrase by former Balad party chairman Azmi Bishara, who aimed to advance civil equality and challenge the Jewish character of the state. It’s as if Sa’ar is saying he’ll have “neither a country of all its infiltrators nor of all its citizens.” Sa’ar isn’t opposed to Israel taking in infiltrators, but he wants to filter them, to sort them into Jews and non-Jews, according to his Zionist ideology. The Jews should be accepted and the non-Jews should be left on the outside. It doesn’t matter whether they are natives of this land or refugees from wars in Africa.
Had we been true to the legacy of Rabbi Binyamin and accepted both the Jews and non-Jews, we would have been able build something better, even if were to fall short of full redemption.
Eitan Bronstein Aparicio is the founder of Zochrot.
The past two Israeli governments successfully turned the issue of African asylum seekers into a threat posed by infiltrators, who were subsequently criminalized. A short examination of the country’s history with infiltrators, however, can give us some important insights.
Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who’s in favor of expelling refugees from Africa, devised a catchy slogan – “A country of all its infiltrators” – in order to condemn those who defend asylum seekers in Israel. By using that concept he is trying to show the absurdity of those who support giving refugees asylum and rights – because nobody wants us to become a country of infiltrators. An historical examination of those who previously knocked at the gates of this the country, however, can give us some important and surprising insights.
The first illegal infiltrators were the ma’apilim – the illegal immigrants who had to evade the British Mandate police trying to prevent illegal immigration. It’s worth noting that those infiltrators were welcomed with open arms by the pre-state Jewish community.
Read +972′s full coverage of refugees in Israel
Some of them were Jews who managed to flee and infiltrate across the borders of countries under a Nazi regime or Nazi occupation in order to reach this country and after an agonizing journey, become legal citizens.
The next infiltrators Israel received, not necessarily welcomingly, were Jews from Arab states who slipped through their countries’ borders after Zionism brought the pot of nationalism to a boil. Hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews found refuge in Israel and became its citizens.
During those same years other infiltrators tried to return to their homes in Israel. Palestinian refugees, who Israel expelled to establish a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, tried to return to their homes – but violence prevented them from doing so. Thousands of destitute refugees tried to return to work their fields or obtain food for their families but Israel fought them as if they had all been Fedayeen. Marco Rosio, one of the first settlers in Moshav Kerem Ben Zimra, whose members moved into the homes of Palestinians from Ras al-Ahmar, said it accurately: “They tried to return to steal what belonged to them. So we shot them.”
Not all Israeli Jews at the time wanted to prevent the refugees’ return. In 1956, Rabbi Binyamin, one of the founders of Brit Shalom, issued a compassionate plea: “To our infiltrating brother… From now on, don’t call him an infiltrator; call him an illegal immigrant, because you unknowingly bore redemption in your own illegal immigration. You are not hated, not an enemy, not a foe, but a brother and comrade. Thus shall you be treated: we shall rehabilitate you among us, as one of us, among your people, wherever you choose.” If only we could believe it.
The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law created the legal framework to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees. It was updated a week ago in order to criminalize the African refugees in Israel today. This law daringly leaped across and bridged decades to reflect the state’s consistent approach to the non-Jewish infiltrator. The law that made Palestinian infiltrators threatening and dangerous has also transformed African refugees into criminals.
The tone of Sa’ar’s slogan recalls – perhaps intentionally – “a country of all its citizens,” the phrase by former Balad party chairman Azmi Bishara, who aimed to advance civil equality and challenge the Jewish character of the state. It’s as if Sa’ar is saying he’ll have “neither a country of all its infiltrators nor of all its citizens.” Sa’ar isn’t opposed to Israel taking in infiltrators, but he wants to filter them, to sort them into Jews and non-Jews, according to his Zionist ideology. The Jews should be accepted and the non-Jews should be left on the outside. It doesn’t matter whether they are natives of this land or refugees from wars in Africa.
Had we been true to the legacy of Rabbi Binyamin and accepted both the Jews and non-Jews, we would have been able build something better, even if were to fall short of full redemption.
Eitan Bronstein Aparicio is the founder of Zochrot.
19 dec 2013
Israel’s war on African asylum-seekers did not let up in 2013
Twelve months have passed since The Electronic Intifada published “The dirty dozen: Israel’s racist ringleaders.” My article was a catalogue of the Israeli officials and cultural figures most responsible for the persecution of the country’s non-Jewish African population.
Over the course of 2013, the war Israel is waging against African asylum-seekers has not abated. Sadly, in many respects, it has ramped up in intensity.
However, some who have led the charge to expel Africans from the country have been replaced by fresh faces. National elections in January and the resultant makeup of the government pushed two of Israel’s biggest racists out of the limelight.
Michael Ben Ari started his own splinter party, Strong Israel, which failed to garner enough votes to secure him a seat in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, from which he could rail against Africans. And Eli Yishai’s Shas party was not invited to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new ruling coalition, leaving Yishai without the interior ministry, which wields great power over the lives of asylum-seekers.
But Ben Ari passed the torch to a young acolyte who has carried on his incitement campaign and forged an alliance with the new interior minister. The man who replaced Eli Yishai has continued his quest to drive all African asylum-seekers out of the country, with the same fervor, and greater media savvy.
10. Yehuda Bauer — academic
After leading Israeli politicians riled a south Tel Aviv crowd of thousands into a frenzy of hatred, igniting an anti-African pogrom on 23 May 2012, the international media finally took note of the government’s war on asylum-seekers. The plight of African asylum-seekers in Israel popped onto the radar of human rights advocates outside Israel and the world began to wonder why a country ostensibly created to provide a safe haven to refugees was so determined to expel a new group of asylum-seekers.
To quell this line of questioning, Professor Yehuda Bauer spearheaded a group of public figures who issued a petition calling upon the world to relieve Israel of its obligations to the approximately 60,000 African asylum-seekers living in the country.
As a professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an academic adviser to Israel’s national Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and a winner of the Israel Prize in 1998, Bauer commands a great deal of respect. In December 2012, Bauer leveraged this prestige to defend Israel’s treatment of asylum-seekers, saying that it has “an impressive record … sheltering refugees from around the world” and to admonish “the nations of the world to accept their responsibility to share the burden.”
Bauer’s efforts to whitewash history and blame every country other than Israel for the crimes being committed by the Netanyahu government is particularly pernicious when one considers the actual facts.
Twelve months have passed since The Electronic Intifada published “The dirty dozen: Israel’s racist ringleaders.” My article was a catalogue of the Israeli officials and cultural figures most responsible for the persecution of the country’s non-Jewish African population.
Over the course of 2013, the war Israel is waging against African asylum-seekers has not abated. Sadly, in many respects, it has ramped up in intensity.
However, some who have led the charge to expel Africans from the country have been replaced by fresh faces. National elections in January and the resultant makeup of the government pushed two of Israel’s biggest racists out of the limelight.
Michael Ben Ari started his own splinter party, Strong Israel, which failed to garner enough votes to secure him a seat in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, from which he could rail against Africans. And Eli Yishai’s Shas party was not invited to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new ruling coalition, leaving Yishai without the interior ministry, which wields great power over the lives of asylum-seekers.
But Ben Ari passed the torch to a young acolyte who has carried on his incitement campaign and forged an alliance with the new interior minister. The man who replaced Eli Yishai has continued his quest to drive all African asylum-seekers out of the country, with the same fervor, and greater media savvy.
10. Yehuda Bauer — academic
After leading Israeli politicians riled a south Tel Aviv crowd of thousands into a frenzy of hatred, igniting an anti-African pogrom on 23 May 2012, the international media finally took note of the government’s war on asylum-seekers. The plight of African asylum-seekers in Israel popped onto the radar of human rights advocates outside Israel and the world began to wonder why a country ostensibly created to provide a safe haven to refugees was so determined to expel a new group of asylum-seekers.
To quell this line of questioning, Professor Yehuda Bauer spearheaded a group of public figures who issued a petition calling upon the world to relieve Israel of its obligations to the approximately 60,000 African asylum-seekers living in the country.
As a professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an academic adviser to Israel’s national Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and a winner of the Israel Prize in 1998, Bauer commands a great deal of respect. In December 2012, Bauer leveraged this prestige to defend Israel’s treatment of asylum-seekers, saying that it has “an impressive record … sheltering refugees from around the world” and to admonish “the nations of the world to accept their responsibility to share the burden.”
Bauer’s efforts to whitewash history and blame every country other than Israel for the crimes being committed by the Netanyahu government is particularly pernicious when one considers the actual facts.
An Israeli immigration officer checks the documents of an African refugee near the central bus station in south Tel Aviv, 12 June 2012.
In its entire 65-year history, Israel has granted refugee status to less than 200 persons, according to Member of Knesset Zehava Galon writing in Israel Hayom. Only 8 of the 990 who submitted asylum applications to Israel in 2011 were recognized as refugees, according to Haaretz — less than one precent.
Of the Africans that have arrived in recent years seeking asylum, less than one percent have received refugee status. In the rest of the world, 43 percent of Sudanese and 81 percent of Eritreans that request asylum receive refugee status — the vast majority of Africans in Israel hail from Sudan and Eritrea — according to the Israel Knesset Research and Information Center’s own report from last month (see pages 52-53 [PDF]). Also, the Middle Eastern countries have done much for asylum-seekers as a whole, taking in millions of refugees (Annex to UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2012, Table 3, page 79).
But Israel leads the world — by far — in the ratio between the number of asylum-seekers living in the country that are recognized by the United Nations, to the number of asylum-seekers living in the country that are recognized as refugees by the country itself.
In other words, Israel refuses to grant refugee status to almost any asylum seeker.
Bauer’s petition references the Evian Conference of July 1938, castigating those countries that “ ‘failed the test of civilization’ by refusing to help Europe’s Jewish refugees” on the eve of the Nazi Holocaust. Bauer’s words became especially ironic on 14 July 2013, when Israel began to deport asylum-seekers back to the repressive regime they fled from in Eritrea — 75 years after the original Evian conference.
9. Gaby Barabash — hospital director
During a meeting held in the Knesset in April, Gary Barabash, director of the Ichilov Medical Center (the largest hospital in Tel Aviv), complained that African asylum-seekers in Israel were having babies.
Although no new African asylum-seekers entered Israel in 2013, Barabash said, “The problem is that they closed down the fence, but they did not close down the natural growth, and the number of Eritreans born here rises from year to year.”
In July 2012, Barabash forbade African asylum-seekers from entering Ichilov to visit their friends and relatives receiving medical attention there. That decision was later rescinded after doctors called it “patient-care apartheid” and a health ministry official called the policy “racist,” saying, “a country that went through the Holocaust cannot possibly use discriminatory policies against migrants.”
Unfortunately, Barabash’s anti-African policies are not the exception, but the rule in Israel.
After many years in which the Israeli government would not allow asylum-seekers access to any public health care services except in absolute emergencies, it opened a clinic in south Tel Aviv so that they could receive treatment without having to come into proximity with the rest of the population. As soon as it was set up in January, Israeli immigration police began to “ambush” asylum-seekers there, according to Israel’s health ministry.
Israeli social worker Bracha Shapiro noted in August that asylum-seekers are often refused medical services at Israeli hospitals because they are not Jewish or because they come from Africa. Their only option is to turn to institutions operated by communities of Christians and Messianic Jews.
8. Danny Adino Abebe — journalist
There is no shortage of Israeli journalists who couch their reporting on African asylum-seekers in derogatory terms, vilifying them in the eyes of the Israeli public.
In June, top Israel Army Radio reporter Hadas Steif employed racist tropes traditionally used to dehumanize Africans, saying that an African man suspected of snatching the wallet of an Israeli man “thought that he was in the jungle” and that Africans “tend to crawl.”
But the Israeli journalist who has superseded all of his colleagues in attempts to smear asylum-seekers is actually an African man himself: Ethiopian-Israeli reporter for Yediot Ahronot Danny Adino Abebe.
Just days after Steif’s racist report, Adino Abebe published a scandalous accusation: at least 1,000 Ethiopian-Israeli Jewish women had been kidnapped in Israel and were being held against their will by non-Jewish African asylum-seekers.
Adino Abebe did not produce even one piece of evidence to back up this calumny. Adino Abebe ignored all my requests for just a single source that would lend credence to this claim.
After Muftah published my report on his accusation, I sought out Adino Abebe again in October to ask for his reaction, and this time he personally responded to my query. In that exchange, he stood by his claims, but still refused to provide even a scintilla of evidence.
Adino Abebe’s attack on African asylum-seekers neatly mirrored a nearly identical slander made against Palestinian citizens of Israel. At a Knesset committee meeting in February 2012, Danny Danon (now the deputy defense minister) accused Bedouins of kidnapping 1,000 Jewish Israeli women.
High-ranking Israeli police officials at the meeting said they had no evidence that even one of these alleged kidnappings had ever occurred.
7. May Golan — rising political star
When Michael Ben-Ari failed to receive enough votes in January’s national elections to retain his Knesset seat, some naive analysts suggested anti-African racism in Israel was waning.
Ben-Ari, more than any other Israeli legislator, was adept at riling up a crowd with calls to ethnically cleanse the country of non-Jews. But his performance at the polls, just short of an electoral mandate, was in all likelihood not a sign that the voting public had rejected his views.
Rather it showed that most mainstream political parties had actually adopted his views on African asylum-seekers. There was no need to vote for a splinter faction when the ruling party campaigned on the same racist platform.
In the run-up to the national elections, Ben-Ari welcomed May Golan under his wing. She shared Ben-Ari’s desire to deport all African asylum-seekers, as well as his penchant for fiery — and racist — rhetoric.
But while Ben-Ari now lives in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank and only visits south Tel Aviv on occasion to stir up anti-African sentiment, Golan continues to live in south Tel Aviv, an area that has seen the largest influx of African asylum-seekers. She is seen as having more street credibility.
What’s more, Golan is young, secular and photogenic, which gives her the potential to influence more Israelis than Ben-Ari could have hoped to. In the run-up to municipal elections in October, Golan scored political points that her mentor Ben-Ari could never claim.
In an effort to harness the anti-African sentiment simmering in south Tel Aviv, Israel’s ruling Likud party announced a pact with Golan. In exchange for Golan’s endorsement of the Likud list for the Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council, Likud promised to appoint Golan to head a steering committee of south Tel Aviv residents that would deal with the issue of African asylum-seekers. The deal was sealed with a warm hug from the Likud party’s number two Gideon Saar, Israel’s new interior minister.
Golan has expressed hope that the Israelis who come to the aid of African asylum-seekers be raped.
In its entire 65-year history, Israel has granted refugee status to less than 200 persons, according to Member of Knesset Zehava Galon writing in Israel Hayom. Only 8 of the 990 who submitted asylum applications to Israel in 2011 were recognized as refugees, according to Haaretz — less than one precent.
Of the Africans that have arrived in recent years seeking asylum, less than one percent have received refugee status. In the rest of the world, 43 percent of Sudanese and 81 percent of Eritreans that request asylum receive refugee status — the vast majority of Africans in Israel hail from Sudan and Eritrea — according to the Israel Knesset Research and Information Center’s own report from last month (see pages 52-53 [PDF]). Also, the Middle Eastern countries have done much for asylum-seekers as a whole, taking in millions of refugees (Annex to UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2012, Table 3, page 79).
But Israel leads the world — by far — in the ratio between the number of asylum-seekers living in the country that are recognized by the United Nations, to the number of asylum-seekers living in the country that are recognized as refugees by the country itself.
In other words, Israel refuses to grant refugee status to almost any asylum seeker.
Bauer’s petition references the Evian Conference of July 1938, castigating those countries that “ ‘failed the test of civilization’ by refusing to help Europe’s Jewish refugees” on the eve of the Nazi Holocaust. Bauer’s words became especially ironic on 14 July 2013, when Israel began to deport asylum-seekers back to the repressive regime they fled from in Eritrea — 75 years after the original Evian conference.
9. Gaby Barabash — hospital director
During a meeting held in the Knesset in April, Gary Barabash, director of the Ichilov Medical Center (the largest hospital in Tel Aviv), complained that African asylum-seekers in Israel were having babies.
Although no new African asylum-seekers entered Israel in 2013, Barabash said, “The problem is that they closed down the fence, but they did not close down the natural growth, and the number of Eritreans born here rises from year to year.”
In July 2012, Barabash forbade African asylum-seekers from entering Ichilov to visit their friends and relatives receiving medical attention there. That decision was later rescinded after doctors called it “patient-care apartheid” and a health ministry official called the policy “racist,” saying, “a country that went through the Holocaust cannot possibly use discriminatory policies against migrants.”
Unfortunately, Barabash’s anti-African policies are not the exception, but the rule in Israel.
After many years in which the Israeli government would not allow asylum-seekers access to any public health care services except in absolute emergencies, it opened a clinic in south Tel Aviv so that they could receive treatment without having to come into proximity with the rest of the population. As soon as it was set up in January, Israeli immigration police began to “ambush” asylum-seekers there, according to Israel’s health ministry.
Israeli social worker Bracha Shapiro noted in August that asylum-seekers are often refused medical services at Israeli hospitals because they are not Jewish or because they come from Africa. Their only option is to turn to institutions operated by communities of Christians and Messianic Jews.
8. Danny Adino Abebe — journalist
There is no shortage of Israeli journalists who couch their reporting on African asylum-seekers in derogatory terms, vilifying them in the eyes of the Israeli public.
In June, top Israel Army Radio reporter Hadas Steif employed racist tropes traditionally used to dehumanize Africans, saying that an African man suspected of snatching the wallet of an Israeli man “thought that he was in the jungle” and that Africans “tend to crawl.”
But the Israeli journalist who has superseded all of his colleagues in attempts to smear asylum-seekers is actually an African man himself: Ethiopian-Israeli reporter for Yediot Ahronot Danny Adino Abebe.
Just days after Steif’s racist report, Adino Abebe published a scandalous accusation: at least 1,000 Ethiopian-Israeli Jewish women had been kidnapped in Israel and were being held against their will by non-Jewish African asylum-seekers.
Adino Abebe did not produce even one piece of evidence to back up this calumny. Adino Abebe ignored all my requests for just a single source that would lend credence to this claim.
After Muftah published my report on his accusation, I sought out Adino Abebe again in October to ask for his reaction, and this time he personally responded to my query. In that exchange, he stood by his claims, but still refused to provide even a scintilla of evidence.
Adino Abebe’s attack on African asylum-seekers neatly mirrored a nearly identical slander made against Palestinian citizens of Israel. At a Knesset committee meeting in February 2012, Danny Danon (now the deputy defense minister) accused Bedouins of kidnapping 1,000 Jewish Israeli women.
High-ranking Israeli police officials at the meeting said they had no evidence that even one of these alleged kidnappings had ever occurred.
7. May Golan — rising political star
When Michael Ben-Ari failed to receive enough votes in January’s national elections to retain his Knesset seat, some naive analysts suggested anti-African racism in Israel was waning.
Ben-Ari, more than any other Israeli legislator, was adept at riling up a crowd with calls to ethnically cleanse the country of non-Jews. But his performance at the polls, just short of an electoral mandate, was in all likelihood not a sign that the voting public had rejected his views.
Rather it showed that most mainstream political parties had actually adopted his views on African asylum-seekers. There was no need to vote for a splinter faction when the ruling party campaigned on the same racist platform.
In the run-up to the national elections, Ben-Ari welcomed May Golan under his wing. She shared Ben-Ari’s desire to deport all African asylum-seekers, as well as his penchant for fiery — and racist — rhetoric.
But while Ben-Ari now lives in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank and only visits south Tel Aviv on occasion to stir up anti-African sentiment, Golan continues to live in south Tel Aviv, an area that has seen the largest influx of African asylum-seekers. She is seen as having more street credibility.
What’s more, Golan is young, secular and photogenic, which gives her the potential to influence more Israelis than Ben-Ari could have hoped to. In the run-up to municipal elections in October, Golan scored political points that her mentor Ben-Ari could never claim.
In an effort to harness the anti-African sentiment simmering in south Tel Aviv, Israel’s ruling Likud party announced a pact with Golan. In exchange for Golan’s endorsement of the Likud list for the Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council, Likud promised to appoint Golan to head a steering committee of south Tel Aviv residents that would deal with the issue of African asylum-seekers. The deal was sealed with a warm hug from the Likud party’s number two Gideon Saar, Israel’s new interior minister.
Golan has expressed hope that the Israelis who come to the aid of African asylum-seekers be raped.
|
|
Likud’s embrace of Golan who, like Ben Ari, is a follower of Meir Kahane, may signal the Israeli government’s most enthusiastic adoption of the political positions of the notorious racist, who Golan eulogized at a memorial service in October. (Video)
Kahane was a popular American-Israeli ultra-nationalist rabbi who, as a Member of Knesset between 1984 and 1988, advocated that Israel should: outright annex the West Bank and Gaza, ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population, criminalize inter-racial/religious relationships, and become a Jewish theocracy. Kahane and members of the group he founded, the Jewish Defense League, were found guilty in domestic terrorism cases in the United States during the 1970s. Kahane himself was eventually assassinated in New York City in 1990. |
6. Ron Huldai — Tel Aviv mayor
Tel Aviv-Jaffa mayor Ron Huldai is the only one of Israel’s racist ringleaders from 2012 to have hung on to a spot in 2013, besides the man in the number one slot.
Huldai dropped from number four to position six, not because he persecuted African asylum-seekers any less in 2013 than he did in 2012, but simply because the ranks of Israel’s leading anti-Africans have swelled so much.
Tel Aviv is economically reliant on foreign financing. In order to ensure that investment dollars and tourism euros keep on flowing, the city has to maintain its reputation as a multicultural metropolis. But Tel Aviv’s sandy beaches and modern museums are nowhere near the impoverished areas of town where asylum-seekers have settled, so there’s no danger of international visitors taking notice of Huldai’s harassment of the city’s African population.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa mayor Ron Huldai is the only one of Israel’s racist ringleaders from 2012 to have hung on to a spot in 2013, besides the man in the number one slot.
Huldai dropped from number four to position six, not because he persecuted African asylum-seekers any less in 2013 than he did in 2012, but simply because the ranks of Israel’s leading anti-Africans have swelled so much.
Tel Aviv is economically reliant on foreign financing. In order to ensure that investment dollars and tourism euros keep on flowing, the city has to maintain its reputation as a multicultural metropolis. But Tel Aviv’s sandy beaches and modern museums are nowhere near the impoverished areas of town where asylum-seekers have settled, so there’s no danger of international visitors taking notice of Huldai’s harassment of the city’s African population.
An Eritrean women hides inside an Internet cafe owned by refugees after Israeli protesters tried to break in during a protest against African refugees in south Tel Aviv, 13 March 2013.
In May, Huldai’s municipal inspectors entered African restaurants and poured bleach into their pots of food. When human rights activists responded with shock, the municipality claimed that these were standard procedures applying to all food-serving establishments.
This cynical excuse may have been more convincing if the raids had been not been conducted during the dinner hour, in full view of paying customers. In reality, it was simply an attack on African businesses, and an attempt to cut off what little income asylum-seekers make. This was part of the national strategy to “make their lives miserable” so they will give up and leave.
Israel has only granted a tiny fraction of the African asylum-seekers in the country legal work visas. But even this minuscule amount was too much for Huldai who in July changed municipal policy to exclude Eritreans from opening their own businesses.
When human rights activists realized that the rules had been altered, they appealed to Huldai for clemency. He agreed to let those asylum-seekers who had already paid out of pocket for the registration process to go through with it; but in the future, there would be no new such shops in Tel Aviv.
5. Hagai Hadas — ex-Mossad official
The January 2012 “anti-infiltration” amendment, which the government used to imprison all African asylum-seekers who entered the country from June 2012 onwards, was challenged in the courts by human rights groups and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. Eventually, in September 2013, all nine Israeli high court judges voted to strike down the amendment and ordered the government to free all the 1,750 Africans jailed on the basis of it within three months.
Instead, the government released just 700, most of them women and children, and passed a new anti-infiltration amendment last week. It circumvents the high court ruling and permits the continued incarceration of the remaining approximately 1,000 asylum-seekers, plus thousands more that the authorities intend to sweep off the streets.
The Knesset’s own legal advisor has admitted that the new amendment will likely be rejected by the high court. But that will take time.
One of the main reasons that it took so long for the court to strike down the January 2012 amendment was that the government argued that such a move would be unnecessary, since it planned to swiftly expel all African asylum-seekers from the country.
The government claimed that it had reached understandings with several African countries that had agreed to take in the asylum-seekers, so the court suspended its decision until the government could provide details of the plan.
The man appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his special representative to negotiate these agreements was Hagai Hadas — formerly a senior official in Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency.
Hadas claimed he was on the verge of sealing deals with at least three African countries which had agreed to take in tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, in exchange for Israeli arms and military training.
When the government’s stalling tactics began to test the court’s patience, they announced Hadas had sealed a deal with Uganda. But the Ugandan government immediately denied that it had agreed to any such deal.
The idea that Hadas, acting on behalf of the Israeli government, was plying African nations with weapons is especially horrific, given the history of Israeli arms sales to Africa.
In May, Huldai’s municipal inspectors entered African restaurants and poured bleach into their pots of food. When human rights activists responded with shock, the municipality claimed that these were standard procedures applying to all food-serving establishments.
This cynical excuse may have been more convincing if the raids had been not been conducted during the dinner hour, in full view of paying customers. In reality, it was simply an attack on African businesses, and an attempt to cut off what little income asylum-seekers make. This was part of the national strategy to “make their lives miserable” so they will give up and leave.
Israel has only granted a tiny fraction of the African asylum-seekers in the country legal work visas. But even this minuscule amount was too much for Huldai who in July changed municipal policy to exclude Eritreans from opening their own businesses.
When human rights activists realized that the rules had been altered, they appealed to Huldai for clemency. He agreed to let those asylum-seekers who had already paid out of pocket for the registration process to go through with it; but in the future, there would be no new such shops in Tel Aviv.
5. Hagai Hadas — ex-Mossad official
The January 2012 “anti-infiltration” amendment, which the government used to imprison all African asylum-seekers who entered the country from June 2012 onwards, was challenged in the courts by human rights groups and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. Eventually, in September 2013, all nine Israeli high court judges voted to strike down the amendment and ordered the government to free all the 1,750 Africans jailed on the basis of it within three months.
Instead, the government released just 700, most of them women and children, and passed a new anti-infiltration amendment last week. It circumvents the high court ruling and permits the continued incarceration of the remaining approximately 1,000 asylum-seekers, plus thousands more that the authorities intend to sweep off the streets.
The Knesset’s own legal advisor has admitted that the new amendment will likely be rejected by the high court. But that will take time.
One of the main reasons that it took so long for the court to strike down the January 2012 amendment was that the government argued that such a move would be unnecessary, since it planned to swiftly expel all African asylum-seekers from the country.
The government claimed that it had reached understandings with several African countries that had agreed to take in the asylum-seekers, so the court suspended its decision until the government could provide details of the plan.
The man appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his special representative to negotiate these agreements was Hagai Hadas — formerly a senior official in Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency.
Hadas claimed he was on the verge of sealing deals with at least three African countries which had agreed to take in tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, in exchange for Israeli arms and military training.
When the government’s stalling tactics began to test the court’s patience, they announced Hadas had sealed a deal with Uganda. But the Ugandan government immediately denied that it had agreed to any such deal.
The idea that Hadas, acting on behalf of the Israeli government, was plying African nations with weapons is especially horrific, given the history of Israeli arms sales to Africa.
|
|
In June 2012, the Israeli newspaper Maariv revealed that the government had approved the sale of arms which had been used to slaughter civilians in Rwanda and other African nations. Even Michael Ben-Ari, the previous Knesset’s most ardent enemy of African asylum-seekers, admitted this to me when I interviewed him in August 2010. (Video)
4. Arnon Sofer — eminent academic In his last major act as interior minister in the previous government, Eli Yishai published an official report advising the Israeli government to deal harshly with African asylum-seekers. The report was authored by a committee led by Professor Arnon Sofer, a founder of the University of Haifa, a lecturer at the National Defense College and an advisor to Israel’s prime ministers. |
For years, Sofer has warned that Jews will soon comprise less than half of Israel’s population and that once this occurs, the Arab majority will usher in a fundamentalist Islamic regime. To prevent this from happening, Sofer has advocated that the government suspend civil rights and build hermetic walls to keep Palestinians out.
He said in 2004: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
Sofer is regarded as the ideological architect of Israel’s wall in the West Bank, and advised former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when it was being planned.
At Yishai’s behest, Sofer applied his paranoia of Palestinians to the issue of African asylum-seekers. The insurmountable walls he wants to construct would also serve the secondary purpose of keeping out any other non-Jews who would seek asylum in Israel. Sofer has said that if not for these walls, 100 million Africans might try to migrate to Israel.
He said in 2004: “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
Sofer is regarded as the ideological architect of Israel’s wall in the West Bank, and advised former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when it was being planned.
At Yishai’s behest, Sofer applied his paranoia of Palestinians to the issue of African asylum-seekers. The insurmountable walls he wants to construct would also serve the secondary purpose of keeping out any other non-Jews who would seek asylum in Israel. Sofer has said that if not for these walls, 100 million Africans might try to migrate to Israel.
Nahal Raviv detention center for African refugees in the Naqab (Negev) desert, 12 December 2013
The construction of a wall on Israel’s border with Africa was already well underway when Sofer was tasked with writing his report, and it has since been completed, drastically reducing the number of asylum-seekers entering Israel to nearly none. But this measure would not suffice for Sofer.
As I wrote back in May, the report “calls for toughening the rules of engagement on Israel’s borders to send smugglers a message — a euphemism for possibly instructing soldiers to shoot asylum-seekers, a position held by some of Israel’s most racist lawmakers. The report also labels Israeli citizens and others who advocate for the rights of African asylum-seekers as ‘anti-Semitic’ and possibly terrorists, and calls for them to be arrested. The Sofer Report minces no words concerning the 60,000 African asylum-seekers already in Israel. ‘There’s no room for another ethno-national group in Israel,’ the report says, ‘they must be expelled.’ Sofer’s report dispenses with the whitewashed term ‘detention’ that the government once used to describe its prison for asylum-seekers, and now shamelessly adopts the word ‘concentration’ to describe the camp it decrees the Africans must be rounded into.”
3. Yehuda Weinstein — Attorney General
You’re riding your bicycle down the street when you hear your phone ring. You pull over to the side of the road, step onto the sidewalk and answer your phone. At that moment a policeman walks up and asks you if the bike and the phone belong to you. When you answer in the affirmative, he demands that you produce receipts proving that you purchased them.
If you are unable to do so, and you are an African refugee living in Israel, you could be taken to jail, without even the courtesy of a kangaroo court trial.
The man who created this racist regulation, first made public in July, is Israel’s Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein.
Israeli blogger Yossi Gurvitz compared the procedure to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, when the US Supreme Court ruled that black people were not humans and as such they were not entitled to legal protections such as the right to a trial, called habeas corpus. When human rights activists learned of the regulation, they immediately petitioned Israel’s high court to overturn it.
The court dismissed the petition out of hand.
The construction of a wall on Israel’s border with Africa was already well underway when Sofer was tasked with writing his report, and it has since been completed, drastically reducing the number of asylum-seekers entering Israel to nearly none. But this measure would not suffice for Sofer.
As I wrote back in May, the report “calls for toughening the rules of engagement on Israel’s borders to send smugglers a message — a euphemism for possibly instructing soldiers to shoot asylum-seekers, a position held by some of Israel’s most racist lawmakers. The report also labels Israeli citizens and others who advocate for the rights of African asylum-seekers as ‘anti-Semitic’ and possibly terrorists, and calls for them to be arrested. The Sofer Report minces no words concerning the 60,000 African asylum-seekers already in Israel. ‘There’s no room for another ethno-national group in Israel,’ the report says, ‘they must be expelled.’ Sofer’s report dispenses with the whitewashed term ‘detention’ that the government once used to describe its prison for asylum-seekers, and now shamelessly adopts the word ‘concentration’ to describe the camp it decrees the Africans must be rounded into.”
3. Yehuda Weinstein — Attorney General
You’re riding your bicycle down the street when you hear your phone ring. You pull over to the side of the road, step onto the sidewalk and answer your phone. At that moment a policeman walks up and asks you if the bike and the phone belong to you. When you answer in the affirmative, he demands that you produce receipts proving that you purchased them.
If you are unable to do so, and you are an African refugee living in Israel, you could be taken to jail, without even the courtesy of a kangaroo court trial.
The man who created this racist regulation, first made public in July, is Israel’s Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein.
Israeli blogger Yossi Gurvitz compared the procedure to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, when the US Supreme Court ruled that black people were not humans and as such they were not entitled to legal protections such as the right to a trial, called habeas corpus. When human rights activists learned of the regulation, they immediately petitioned Israel’s high court to overturn it.
The court dismissed the petition out of hand.
Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein speaks to Israeli activists and African refugees during a protest of the “infiltration law” outside his home in the city of Herzliya, 20 July 2013.
In October, the high court finally invalidated the January 2012 anti-infiltration amendment and ordered the government to free all the African asylum-seekers Israel was jailing without trial on the basis of it. In response, Weinstein ordered police, prison and immigration officials to ignore the court’s decision and to continue incarcerating asylum-seekers (albeit under a different law) for the protection of “state security” and “public health.”
In February, it was revealed that Israel had secretly coerced at least 1,000 asylum-seekers to return to Eritrea and Sudan, behind the back of the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR. The UNHCR representative in Israel, Michael Bavli, called this “the gravest violation possible of the convention that Israel has signed — a crime never before committed.”
Caught contravening a ruling of Israel’s own high court, Weinstein drew up a new protocol for interior ministry officials, a legal fiction which would allow Israel to publicly claim that these deportations were not coerced. By the summer, the deportations had resumed in earnest.
Back in May 2012, Weinstein decided not to prosecute the Israeli author of a book which advocated killing non-Jewish people and even non-Jewish babies. Weinstein said that he based his decision on the fact that the book’s author did not specify Palestinians and other Arabs as the non-Jewish people that he advocated killing.
In other words, Weinstein ruled that there was nothing illegal about publicly advocating the killing of other non-Jewish people, such as African asylum-seekers.
2. Gideon Saar — Minister of the Interior
The day that Eli Yishai stepped down as Israel’s interior minister, asylum-seekers and their allies across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Yishai had used this powerful perch to incite racial hatred in ways that would be unthinkable in any other democratic country, publicly accusing Africans of bringing AIDS to Israel and of raping Israeli women to give them the disease. Whoever replaced him would be welcomed as an improvement.
Unlike Yishai, the man who took his place, Gideon Saar, does not make such crass statements. As a leading contender to eventually replace Netanyahu as prime minister, Saar has a more moderate image to maintain. So, like Netanyahu, he uses coded language to achieve the same effect.
Any hopes that Saar would rein in the interior ministry’s persecution of asylum-seekers were dashed after his first foray into south Tel Aviv, just weeks after he entered office.
On a tour of the neighborhoods most heavily populated by Africans, Saar refused to communicate with any of the African people who approached him. He told journalists that the Africans must return to the countries they fled from or find refuge in some other country.
By tapping May Golan to lead a steering committee of south Tel Aviv residents that would advise the government on asylum-seekers, Saar can continue to speak in measured tones, while he rubber-stamps the demands of one of the country’s most extreme racists.
1. Benjamin Netanyahu — Prime Minister
Once more, Israel’s most powerful politician, Benjamin Netanyahu, tops the list of Israel’s racist ringleaders.
He easily swept January’s national elections and deftly neutralized competition from political challengers. Even without either ultra-Orthodox party, he was able to form a supposedly center-right coalition that controls seventy seats out of a total of 120.
With victory in hand, Netanyahu appointed Likud lawmaker Miri Regev to head the important interior committee that determines the fate of asylum-seekers.
Regev is the very same member of Knesset who triggered the 23 May 2012 anti-African race riot in Tel Aviv with her cry of “The Sudanese are a cancer in our body” — and later apologized to cancer victims for comparing them to Africans.
In a powerful opinion piece published in Haaretz in March, Israeli filmmaker Galia Oz described Netanyahu’s war on African asylum-seekers, Palestinians and other non-Jewish groups as Kahanism (the ideology based on the teachings of Meir Kahane) by proxy. “The hands are the hands of Interior Minister Eli Yishai,” he wrote, “but the voice is the voice of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … He no longer needs to engage in verbal thuggery. Others take care of it for him. Netanyahu watches from the sidelines.”
Netanyahu does not need to resort to the vilest forms of racism to delegitimize asylum-seekers; others do that work for him. But the master plan is his: to decant the country of all non-Jewish Africans.
In December 2012, he announced that the completion of the border fence was imminent and that the rate of Africans entering the country had been reduced to nil. But that was not enough.
“Now we are moving to the second phase,” he said. “That’s the phase of returning the infiltrators that are already here.”
After the high court struck down the January 2012 anti-infiltration amendment, Netanyahu quickly took the lead and established that the government would not comply with the court order. He made clear he would instead work around it to pursue the goal of ethnically cleansing the country, with or without judicial assent: “I have ordered to move forward with new legislation that will enable the strengthening of the detention of illegal work infiltrators.”
Earlier this month, a massive majority of Israel’s legislators approved his handiwork.
David Sheen is an independent writer and filmmaker. Born in Toronto, Canada, Sheen now lives in Dimona. His website is www.davidsheen.com and he can be followed on Twitter: @davidsheen.
In October, the high court finally invalidated the January 2012 anti-infiltration amendment and ordered the government to free all the African asylum-seekers Israel was jailing without trial on the basis of it. In response, Weinstein ordered police, prison and immigration officials to ignore the court’s decision and to continue incarcerating asylum-seekers (albeit under a different law) for the protection of “state security” and “public health.”
In February, it was revealed that Israel had secretly coerced at least 1,000 asylum-seekers to return to Eritrea and Sudan, behind the back of the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR. The UNHCR representative in Israel, Michael Bavli, called this “the gravest violation possible of the convention that Israel has signed — a crime never before committed.”
Caught contravening a ruling of Israel’s own high court, Weinstein drew up a new protocol for interior ministry officials, a legal fiction which would allow Israel to publicly claim that these deportations were not coerced. By the summer, the deportations had resumed in earnest.
Back in May 2012, Weinstein decided not to prosecute the Israeli author of a book which advocated killing non-Jewish people and even non-Jewish babies. Weinstein said that he based his decision on the fact that the book’s author did not specify Palestinians and other Arabs as the non-Jewish people that he advocated killing.
In other words, Weinstein ruled that there was nothing illegal about publicly advocating the killing of other non-Jewish people, such as African asylum-seekers.
2. Gideon Saar — Minister of the Interior
The day that Eli Yishai stepped down as Israel’s interior minister, asylum-seekers and their allies across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Yishai had used this powerful perch to incite racial hatred in ways that would be unthinkable in any other democratic country, publicly accusing Africans of bringing AIDS to Israel and of raping Israeli women to give them the disease. Whoever replaced him would be welcomed as an improvement.
Unlike Yishai, the man who took his place, Gideon Saar, does not make such crass statements. As a leading contender to eventually replace Netanyahu as prime minister, Saar has a more moderate image to maintain. So, like Netanyahu, he uses coded language to achieve the same effect.
Any hopes that Saar would rein in the interior ministry’s persecution of asylum-seekers were dashed after his first foray into south Tel Aviv, just weeks after he entered office.
On a tour of the neighborhoods most heavily populated by Africans, Saar refused to communicate with any of the African people who approached him. He told journalists that the Africans must return to the countries they fled from or find refuge in some other country.
By tapping May Golan to lead a steering committee of south Tel Aviv residents that would advise the government on asylum-seekers, Saar can continue to speak in measured tones, while he rubber-stamps the demands of one of the country’s most extreme racists.
1. Benjamin Netanyahu — Prime Minister
Once more, Israel’s most powerful politician, Benjamin Netanyahu, tops the list of Israel’s racist ringleaders.
He easily swept January’s national elections and deftly neutralized competition from political challengers. Even without either ultra-Orthodox party, he was able to form a supposedly center-right coalition that controls seventy seats out of a total of 120.
With victory in hand, Netanyahu appointed Likud lawmaker Miri Regev to head the important interior committee that determines the fate of asylum-seekers.
Regev is the very same member of Knesset who triggered the 23 May 2012 anti-African race riot in Tel Aviv with her cry of “The Sudanese are a cancer in our body” — and later apologized to cancer victims for comparing them to Africans.
In a powerful opinion piece published in Haaretz in March, Israeli filmmaker Galia Oz described Netanyahu’s war on African asylum-seekers, Palestinians and other non-Jewish groups as Kahanism (the ideology based on the teachings of Meir Kahane) by proxy. “The hands are the hands of Interior Minister Eli Yishai,” he wrote, “but the voice is the voice of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … He no longer needs to engage in verbal thuggery. Others take care of it for him. Netanyahu watches from the sidelines.”
Netanyahu does not need to resort to the vilest forms of racism to delegitimize asylum-seekers; others do that work for him. But the master plan is his: to decant the country of all non-Jewish Africans.
In December 2012, he announced that the completion of the border fence was imminent and that the rate of Africans entering the country had been reduced to nil. But that was not enough.
“Now we are moving to the second phase,” he said. “That’s the phase of returning the infiltrators that are already here.”
After the high court struck down the January 2012 anti-infiltration amendment, Netanyahu quickly took the lead and established that the government would not comply with the court order. He made clear he would instead work around it to pursue the goal of ethnically cleansing the country, with or without judicial assent: “I have ordered to move forward with new legislation that will enable the strengthening of the detention of illegal work infiltrators.”
Earlier this month, a massive majority of Israel’s legislators approved his handiwork.
David Sheen is an independent writer and filmmaker. Born in Toronto, Canada, Sheen now lives in Dimona. His website is www.davidsheen.com and he can be followed on Twitter: @davidsheen.
17 dec 2013
African illegal immigrants take part in a protest march on the highway near Lahav junction in southern Israel on their way to Jerusalem on December 16, 2013 after they fled a detention centre in the south where they were being held.
Two situations capture the moral imagination as Christmas holidays approach: the plight of undocumented migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa who are living in Israel, and the even direr humanitarian emergency in the Gaza Strip.
Reports about illegal immigrants from Eritrea, Sudan and other African countries who have entered Israel in recent years, seeking asylum and refugee status, being sent to a “de facto jail” raise questions about how a modern and progressive state can deprive people of liberty without charge or any specified release date.
So far, Israel has taken the position (which seems generally accurate) that these African migrants, of which there are some 55,000, are not entitled to refugee status because their motivation was economic, and that there is no evidence that they face persecution. Unfortunately, governments have virtually unlimited authority to make such a determination without any right of the immigrant to mount a legal challenge – beyond what may be granted in the domestic legal system. International law is vague and unsatisfactory, although the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees does confirm the rule that no one can be forcibly deported to their country of nationality if they face the prospect of persecution upon return as a result of their race, religion or political views.
The issue has recently surfaced in an ugly form as right-wing extremists in Israel have demanded that the government take stronger measures to prevent future entry and to detain and deport those who are currently present. They argue that such immigrants pose security problems by engaging in crime and they also dilute the Jewish character of Israel.
In response, the government has constructed a fence along its 230-kilometer border with Egypt. Israel has also been negotiating deals with several African countries who are agreeing to take tens of thousands of migrants in exchange for a package that includes military equipment and training, and economic assistance relating to agriculture.
What has caused concern among human rights groups is the prospect of putting these illegal migrants in a large detention center that is being built in the Israeli desert. A leftist Israeli politician, Zahava Galon, raised a poignant objection: “Is this how we, as a people who have asylum, treat human beings?” Of course, in Nazi times the Jews of Israel, more than any people of Earth were both asylum seekers and victims of exclusionary policies by the cruel self-righteous liberal democracies that invoked their sovereign rights.
Two situations capture the moral imagination as Christmas holidays approach: the plight of undocumented migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa who are living in Israel, and the even direr humanitarian emergency in the Gaza Strip.
Reports about illegal immigrants from Eritrea, Sudan and other African countries who have entered Israel in recent years, seeking asylum and refugee status, being sent to a “de facto jail” raise questions about how a modern and progressive state can deprive people of liberty without charge or any specified release date.
So far, Israel has taken the position (which seems generally accurate) that these African migrants, of which there are some 55,000, are not entitled to refugee status because their motivation was economic, and that there is no evidence that they face persecution. Unfortunately, governments have virtually unlimited authority to make such a determination without any right of the immigrant to mount a legal challenge – beyond what may be granted in the domestic legal system. International law is vague and unsatisfactory, although the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees does confirm the rule that no one can be forcibly deported to their country of nationality if they face the prospect of persecution upon return as a result of their race, religion or political views.
The issue has recently surfaced in an ugly form as right-wing extremists in Israel have demanded that the government take stronger measures to prevent future entry and to detain and deport those who are currently present. They argue that such immigrants pose security problems by engaging in crime and they also dilute the Jewish character of Israel.
In response, the government has constructed a fence along its 230-kilometer border with Egypt. Israel has also been negotiating deals with several African countries who are agreeing to take tens of thousands of migrants in exchange for a package that includes military equipment and training, and economic assistance relating to agriculture.
What has caused concern among human rights groups is the prospect of putting these illegal migrants in a large detention center that is being built in the Israeli desert. A leftist Israeli politician, Zahava Galon, raised a poignant objection: “Is this how we, as a people who have asylum, treat human beings?” Of course, in Nazi times the Jews of Israel, more than any people of Earth were both asylum seekers and victims of exclusionary policies by the cruel self-righteous liberal democracies that invoked their sovereign rights.
African illegal immigrants take part in a protest march on the highway near Lahav junction in southern Israel on their way to Jerusalem on December 16, 2013 after they fled a detention centre in the south where they were being held.
The official response is that the state in Israel is doing its best to strike a balance between protection of borders and infiltration and human rights, but with such historical memories, we might have expected more empathy by the leaders and public in Israel.
Actually, international law and human rights standards have far too little to say about the vulnerability of these migrants. Israel is entitled to conclude that according to the legal definition of refugee these individuals do not qualify, as their motivation appears to have been economic, although some claim they face harsh punishments if they are deported to their country of nationality. Once denied refugee status, a government has broad discretion to detain and deport migrants. The whole situation points up the dangerous gap in the law that leaves such individuals in acutely vulnerable situations.
What is obviously needed is a lawmaking treaty that addresses the challenge of illegal and unwanted economic migrants as a humanitarian challenge to the international community as a whole. Until this happens, and it is unlikely in the current internationally stressed situation, the tragic fate that confronts these undocumented migrants in Israel is likely to be repeated elsewhere.
However, such an ethically disappointing approach is nothing new for Israel, taking into consideration that no less compelling and even more dramatic is the situation in Gaza, where the 1.7 million resident Palestinians have been blockaded by Israel since the middle of 2007 when Hamas took over the governance of the territory. The blockade, which has slightly eased in recent years, was a form of collective punishment, violating Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention, and amounting to a crime against humanity. It was a punitive measure imposed by Israel to punish the people in Gaza for voting in favor of Hamas in 2006 legislative elections and partly to make political life as difficult as possible for Hamas. To ease the burdens on the population, Gaza depended on an extraordinary tunnel network to bring supplies across the border from Egypt, and although it meant Gaza residents would be paying black market prices, it did provide the people with the necessities of life.
The official response is that the state in Israel is doing its best to strike a balance between protection of borders and infiltration and human rights, but with such historical memories, we might have expected more empathy by the leaders and public in Israel.
Actually, international law and human rights standards have far too little to say about the vulnerability of these migrants. Israel is entitled to conclude that according to the legal definition of refugee these individuals do not qualify, as their motivation appears to have been economic, although some claim they face harsh punishments if they are deported to their country of nationality. Once denied refugee status, a government has broad discretion to detain and deport migrants. The whole situation points up the dangerous gap in the law that leaves such individuals in acutely vulnerable situations.
What is obviously needed is a lawmaking treaty that addresses the challenge of illegal and unwanted economic migrants as a humanitarian challenge to the international community as a whole. Until this happens, and it is unlikely in the current internationally stressed situation, the tragic fate that confronts these undocumented migrants in Israel is likely to be repeated elsewhere.
However, such an ethically disappointing approach is nothing new for Israel, taking into consideration that no less compelling and even more dramatic is the situation in Gaza, where the 1.7 million resident Palestinians have been blockaded by Israel since the middle of 2007 when Hamas took over the governance of the territory. The blockade, which has slightly eased in recent years, was a form of collective punishment, violating Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention, and amounting to a crime against humanity. It was a punitive measure imposed by Israel to punish the people in Gaza for voting in favor of Hamas in 2006 legislative elections and partly to make political life as difficult as possible for Hamas. To ease the burdens on the population, Gaza depended on an extraordinary tunnel network to bring supplies across the border from Egypt, and although it meant Gaza residents would be paying black market prices, it did provide the people with the necessities of life.
African illegal immigrants take part in a protest march on the highway near Lahav junction in southern Israel on their way to Jerusalem on December 16, 2013 after they fled a detention centre in the south where they were being held.
Since the Egyptian coup of July 3, 2013, the situation in Gaza, always bad, has turned critical. The tunnels have been mainly destroyed by Egypt as an expression of its anti-Hamas outlook and in connection with its Sinai security concerns, resulting in crippling fuel shortages that imperil the health and wellbeing of Gaza in potentially catastrophic ways. Children are wading through streets overflowing with raw sewage, hospital machinery needed for the care of severe kidney and cardiac ailments is unavailable, and there is insufficient fuel for the minimal necessities of life, a situation aggravated in recent days by freezing temperatures.
The silence of neighboring Arab governments, with the notable exceptions of Turkey and Qatar, which have sent Gaza money and fuel, and of the UN, is unforgivable. Even the normally apolitical relief agency, UNRWA, has called publically upon Israel to end the blockade in recognition of the emergency conditions.
In 2011 the UN Security Council invoked R2P, the Responsibility to Protect, to justify a military operation in Libya to protect the civilian population of Benghazi, and then proceeded to seek regime change that had never been authorized. In the context of Gaza, double standards are all too evident. There is no international call for R2P, despite the desperate plight of Gaza residents trapped in an emergency situation, cut off from help by an unlawful blockade. It is time to act. We all have a responsibility to raise our voices and cry, “Shame!”
Richard Falk for RT
Since the Egyptian coup of July 3, 2013, the situation in Gaza, always bad, has turned critical. The tunnels have been mainly destroyed by Egypt as an expression of its anti-Hamas outlook and in connection with its Sinai security concerns, resulting in crippling fuel shortages that imperil the health and wellbeing of Gaza in potentially catastrophic ways. Children are wading through streets overflowing with raw sewage, hospital machinery needed for the care of severe kidney and cardiac ailments is unavailable, and there is insufficient fuel for the minimal necessities of life, a situation aggravated in recent days by freezing temperatures.
The silence of neighboring Arab governments, with the notable exceptions of Turkey and Qatar, which have sent Gaza money and fuel, and of the UN, is unforgivable. Even the normally apolitical relief agency, UNRWA, has called publically upon Israel to end the blockade in recognition of the emergency conditions.
In 2011 the UN Security Council invoked R2P, the Responsibility to Protect, to justify a military operation in Libya to protect the civilian population of Benghazi, and then proceeded to seek regime change that had never been authorized. In the context of Gaza, double standards are all too evident. There is no international call for R2P, despite the desperate plight of Gaza residents trapped in an emergency situation, cut off from help by an unlawful blockade. It is time to act. We all have a responsibility to raise our voices and cry, “Shame!”
Richard Falk for RT
|
|
African migrants' two-day journey to Jerusalem ends as they are forced to travel back to southern facility. PM: They can either stay in Holot or go back to their home countries
The asylum seekers' protest at the Knesset on Tuesday quickly turned into a violent confrontation with security forces. Police officers of the Immigration Police announced to the protesters via megaphones that they had to get on buses and return to the detainment center, or they would be arrested. As a result, the protesters tried to block the road adjacent to the Knesset, and prepared for an altercation. The protesters said they opposed any arrests by force, but that they would |
not board the buses. Yossi Edelstein, the director of the Foreigners Department in the Immigration Authority, warned that if they do not return to the facility, his officers would begin enforcing the law.
According to a new amendment to the Prevention of Infiltration Law approved by the Knesset last week, anyone held in the open detention facility can be detained within 48 hours of leaving it and jailed in the closed Saharonim facility.
Several of the asylum seekers boarded the buses of their own accord, while others were forced on by Immigration Police. Activists supporting asylum seekers cried out: "You should be embarrassed," and "They dragged your grandfather like that."
The asylum seekers arrived in Jerusalem two days after they left the open Holot facility in the south, where they were sent on Sunday. They left the facility and started walking towards the capital, demanding that government authorities look at their request to be considered political refugees.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in response that the infiltrator law will be enforced.
"Just as we are determined to protect our borders, we're determined to enforce the law," he said. "The law is the law, and naturally it also applies to illegal workers. The infiltrators who were transferred to the special detainment facility can either stay there or go back to their home countries."
Netanyahu made his statement at an event marking 60 years of the Border Guard.
"We put a complete end to the infiltration by building a fence, as well as with the help of the Border Guard and other units."
Lawyer Tony Garcia from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who escorted the migrants, told Ynet: "We are concerned about their situation. The refugee seekers are desperate and therefore decided to launch a protest march under harsh conditions."
He explained that according to the UN Refugee Convention, Israel must look into each asylum request individually, but that the State has been failing to do so as a policy in recent years.
"We have discussed it with senior Israeli officials, but they have yet to provide us with answers," he explained.
The asylum seekers protested in front of the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem on Tuesday, carrying signs saying "We are in danger; we're not dangerous." They were received with rounds of applause by some 100 additional protesters who came to support them.
According to the Israel Prison Service, 280 refuge seekers left the facility where they were placed last week among 483 detainees from Shaharonim. The Holot facility is open during the day and closed at night. Those held in the detention center may leave during the day as long as they report to the facility three times a day and return at night.
Additional detainees left the facility on Monday. Within the past three days, more than half of the detainees left the site.
According to a new amendment to the Prevention of Infiltration Law approved by the Knesset last week, anyone held in the open detention facility can be detained within 48 hours of leaving it and jailed in the closed Saharonim facility.
Several of the asylum seekers boarded the buses of their own accord, while others were forced on by Immigration Police. Activists supporting asylum seekers cried out: "You should be embarrassed," and "They dragged your grandfather like that."
The asylum seekers arrived in Jerusalem two days after they left the open Holot facility in the south, where they were sent on Sunday. They left the facility and started walking towards the capital, demanding that government authorities look at their request to be considered political refugees.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in response that the infiltrator law will be enforced.
"Just as we are determined to protect our borders, we're determined to enforce the law," he said. "The law is the law, and naturally it also applies to illegal workers. The infiltrators who were transferred to the special detainment facility can either stay there or go back to their home countries."
Netanyahu made his statement at an event marking 60 years of the Border Guard.
"We put a complete end to the infiltration by building a fence, as well as with the help of the Border Guard and other units."
Lawyer Tony Garcia from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who escorted the migrants, told Ynet: "We are concerned about their situation. The refugee seekers are desperate and therefore decided to launch a protest march under harsh conditions."
He explained that according to the UN Refugee Convention, Israel must look into each asylum request individually, but that the State has been failing to do so as a policy in recent years.
"We have discussed it with senior Israeli officials, but they have yet to provide us with answers," he explained.
The asylum seekers protested in front of the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem on Tuesday, carrying signs saying "We are in danger; we're not dangerous." They were received with rounds of applause by some 100 additional protesters who came to support them.
According to the Israel Prison Service, 280 refuge seekers left the facility where they were placed last week among 483 detainees from Shaharonim. The Holot facility is open during the day and closed at night. Those held in the detention center may leave during the day as long as they report to the facility three times a day and return at night.
Additional detainees left the facility on Monday. Within the past three days, more than half of the detainees left the site.
|
|
Dozens of African asylum seekers who left southern detention facility arrive in Jerusalem, hold demonstration outside Prime Minister's Office
Dozens of African asylum seekers who left the Holot open detention facility in southern Israel two days ago, arrived in Jerusalem on Tuesday morning for a protest outside the Prime Minister's Office. The protestors arrived on buses from Kibbutz Nachshon, where they spent the night. They held signs reading, "We're in danger, not dangerous," and were received with a round of applause from some 100 additional protestors who arrived to support them. |
Earlier Tuesday, inspectors of the Population and Immigration Authority, accompanied by massive police and Border Guard forces, arrived at Kibbutz Nachshon, north of Beit Shemesh, in order to detain some 150 African asylum seekers who spent the night there.
The refuge seekers left the Holot facility two days ago to try to march to Jerusalem, where they plan to rally outside the government building in protest of the Israeli authorities' failure to look into their requests for political asylum. According to a new amendment to the Anti-Infiltration Law approved by the Knesset last week, anyone put in the open detention facility can be detained within 48 hours since leaving it and be jailed in the closed Saharonim facility.
Attorney Tony Garcia from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who is escorting the migrants, told Ynet: "We are concerned about their situation. The refugee seekers are desperate and therefore decided to launch a protest march under harsh conditions."
He explained that according to the UN Refugee Convention, Israel must look into each asylum request individually, but that the State has been failing to do so as a policy in recent years.
"We have discussed it with senior Israeli officials, but they have yet to provide us with answers," he explained.
Sources in the enforcement authorities told Ynet that the asylum seekers would not be arrested in the first stage if they reach the planned protest on buses. But if they march to Jerusalem and cause disturbances, they will likely be arrested.
According to the Israel Prison Service (IPS), some 280 refuge seekers left the facility where they were placed last week among 483 detainees from Shaharonim. The Holot facility is open during the day and closed at night. Those placed in may leave it during the day as long as they report to the facility three times a day and return at night.
Additional detainees left the facility on Monday. Within the past three days, more than half of the detainees have left the place, which cost hundreds of millions of shekels to build. Earlier Monday, Population and Immigration Authority inspectors detained some 20 asylum seekers in Tel Aviv. Some of them were transferred to the open facility for the first time. Mohammad, an asylum seeker from Darfur, told Ynet: "We are marching for our freedom. The State of Israel is not giving us our rights. We demand they go over our asylum requests.
We were jailed for months at Saharonim, without the ability to communicate with the outside world. Now we are asking to be heard." The Population and Immigration Authority said in a statement, "Human rights organizations are operating against the letter of the law and sabotaging its implementation when they convince the 'infiltrators' not to return to the facility.
"Without a doubt, they didn't return to the facility not because of the conditions, but – according to them – because they simply want to work. The Population and Immigration Authority will operate according to the law towards infiltrators who do not return to the open detention facility."
The authorities had expected the migrants to abandon the facility, as the first group to enter the open detention facility had been previously imprisoned at Saharonim for over a year. Despite the immediate setback, immigration authorities will bring other groups of migrants to the facility.
The refuge seekers left the Holot facility two days ago to try to march to Jerusalem, where they plan to rally outside the government building in protest of the Israeli authorities' failure to look into their requests for political asylum. According to a new amendment to the Anti-Infiltration Law approved by the Knesset last week, anyone put in the open detention facility can be detained within 48 hours since leaving it and be jailed in the closed Saharonim facility.
Attorney Tony Garcia from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who is escorting the migrants, told Ynet: "We are concerned about their situation. The refugee seekers are desperate and therefore decided to launch a protest march under harsh conditions."
He explained that according to the UN Refugee Convention, Israel must look into each asylum request individually, but that the State has been failing to do so as a policy in recent years.
"We have discussed it with senior Israeli officials, but they have yet to provide us with answers," he explained.
Sources in the enforcement authorities told Ynet that the asylum seekers would not be arrested in the first stage if they reach the planned protest on buses. But if they march to Jerusalem and cause disturbances, they will likely be arrested.
According to the Israel Prison Service (IPS), some 280 refuge seekers left the facility where they were placed last week among 483 detainees from Shaharonim. The Holot facility is open during the day and closed at night. Those placed in may leave it during the day as long as they report to the facility three times a day and return at night.
Additional detainees left the facility on Monday. Within the past three days, more than half of the detainees have left the place, which cost hundreds of millions of shekels to build. Earlier Monday, Population and Immigration Authority inspectors detained some 20 asylum seekers in Tel Aviv. Some of them were transferred to the open facility for the first time. Mohammad, an asylum seeker from Darfur, told Ynet: "We are marching for our freedom. The State of Israel is not giving us our rights. We demand they go over our asylum requests.
We were jailed for months at Saharonim, without the ability to communicate with the outside world. Now we are asking to be heard." The Population and Immigration Authority said in a statement, "Human rights organizations are operating against the letter of the law and sabotaging its implementation when they convince the 'infiltrators' not to return to the facility.
"Without a doubt, they didn't return to the facility not because of the conditions, but – according to them – because they simply want to work. The Population and Immigration Authority will operate according to the law towards infiltrators who do not return to the open detention facility."
The authorities had expected the migrants to abandon the facility, as the first group to enter the open detention facility had been previously imprisoned at Saharonim for over a year. Despite the immediate setback, immigration authorities will bring other groups of migrants to the facility.
12 dec 2013
|
|
Israel has started transferring African migrants to a new detention facility in the Negev Desert, sparking criticism from immigrants' rights advocates.
Spokeswoman for Israel’s prison services, Sivan Weitzman, said on Thursday that around 500 migrants were moved to the new facility. She added that the number would increase to 1,000 by the end of December. On Monday, the Israeli parliament, Knesset, approved a law allowing officials to keep African migrant workers in detention facilities without trial for one year. The law also gives Israel the right to send immigrants to complexes called |
“open facilities” -- until they are deported or voluntarily go back to their homelands. Migrants kept in the open facilities will have no right to work.
Critics of the new law have described the open facilities as prisons, predicting the new law will be challenged in the Supreme Court.
More than 50,000 African immigrants, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, currently work in low-paying jobs in Israel.
Orit Marom, a migrant advocate, said that Tel Aviv is using the pressure tactic to make migrants leave Israel voluntarily.
Human Right Watch has said that Tel Aviv used the “threat of prolonged detention” to force the African migrants give up their asylum claims, adding, “Israel should end its unlawful detention policy and release all asylum seekers.”
Critics of the new law have described the open facilities as prisons, predicting the new law will be challenged in the Supreme Court.
More than 50,000 African immigrants, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, currently work in low-paying jobs in Israel.
Orit Marom, a migrant advocate, said that Tel Aviv is using the pressure tactic to make migrants leave Israel voluntarily.
Human Right Watch has said that Tel Aviv used the “threat of prolonged detention” to force the African migrants give up their asylum claims, adding, “Israel should end its unlawful detention policy and release all asylum seekers.”
10 dec 2013
|
|
Israel's parliament has approved a law which allows illegal immigrants from Africa to be detained for up to a year without trial, MPs announced on Tuesday.
The government-backed bill amends earlier legislation from 2012 under which illegal immigrants could be held for three years without trial that was overturned by the Supreme Court in September. The new bill passed by 30 votes in favour to 15 against during a late-night vote in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset. It was the latest in a series of measures aimed at cracking down on the |
numbers of Africans entering the country illegally, which Israel says poses a threat to the state's Jewish character.
Last year, Israel launched a crackdown on what it said were 60,000 illegal African immigrants, rounding up and deporting 3,920 by the end of the year, and building a hi-tech fence along the border with Egypt.
On November 24, the cabinet approved measures aimed at tackling the question of illegal immigrants, including a crackdown on employers and financial incentives for those agreeing to return to their country of origin.
It has also invested in the construction of a sprawling detention facility for illegals arriving in Israel and for immigrants already in the country who "disturb the public order," the premier's office said.
The facility, to be inaugurated on December 12 and run by the Israel Prisons Services, will be open during the day but locked at night, and it will initially house up to 3,300 people, Haaretz newspaper reported.
It said capacity could be expanded to hold up to 11,000.
Hardliners from Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud party praised the new legislation, with Interior Minister Gideon Saar saying it would "allow us to keep illegals away from our cities."
And MP Miri Regev said Israel should "send them all back to their countries."
But not everyone welcomed the legislation.
"Would you also have placed Nelson Mandela in a closed detention centre?" asked Tamar Zandberg from the leftwing Meretz party.
Human rights groups say most African migrants in Israel cannot be deported because their lives would be under threat if they returned home to Sudan and Eritrea.
Israel approves detention without charges for African migrants
Israel's parliament has moved to ensure African migrants who enter the country illegally can be held without charge, despite a Supreme Court ruling that had struck down a previous detention law. Legislation approved late on Monday set a maximum detention period of one year for new illegal migrants, a change from a term of up to three years stipulated in a previous law annulled by the court in September.
But with a newly-built Israeli border fence effectively choking off what had been a stream of African migrants crossing from Egypt, the new law could also have an impact on some of the estimated 50,000 mainly Sudanese and Eritrean nationals already in the Jewish state.
The new regulations, which opponents predicted would also be challenged in the Supreme Court, enables authorities to send migrants, now living illegally in Israeli cities, to what the government describes as "open facilities".
Under the law, their detention would be open-ended, pending resolution of their asylum requests, implementation of deportation orders or voluntary repatriation.
The first such complex, which can hold several hundred people, is due to begin operating this week in the southern Israeli desert.
Migrants detained there will be able to leave the facility during the day but must return at night, and they will not be allowed to seek employment. Women, children and families will not, at this stage, be sent to the complex, which the law stipulates must provide health care and social services.
Critics say the facility is effectively a prison.
Legislators who supported the new law said they were defending the Jewish character of Israel. Opponents called the measure undemocratic.
The government sees the migrants as illegal job-seekers, while rights groups and liberal lawmakers say many are asylum-seekers fleeing hardship and persecution in their homelands.
"This law is needed in order to deter potential infiltrators. The present reality is a human ticking timebomb," coalition lawmaker Miri Regev, head of the Knesset's Interior Committee, told parliament.
Since the Supreme Court ruling in September, some 700 of the 1,700 migrants under detention have been released from a prison in southern Israel, officials said. The rest are to be transferred to the new "open facility" this week, the Prisons Authority said.
Tens of thousands of Africans, many working in low-paying jobs as cleaners and dish washers, still populate poor neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.
Israel has been trying to persuade them to leave voluntarily in return for a payout. Some 1,700 Sudanese and Eritreans have gone home this year, the Interior Ministry said.
Zahava Galon, head of the left-wing Meretz party, said the migrants were no threat to Israel's Jewish identity.
"Is this how we, as a people who have sought asylum, treat human beings?" she asked on Israel Radio.
Last year, Israel launched a crackdown on what it said were 60,000 illegal African immigrants, rounding up and deporting 3,920 by the end of the year, and building a hi-tech fence along the border with Egypt.
On November 24, the cabinet approved measures aimed at tackling the question of illegal immigrants, including a crackdown on employers and financial incentives for those agreeing to return to their country of origin.
It has also invested in the construction of a sprawling detention facility for illegals arriving in Israel and for immigrants already in the country who "disturb the public order," the premier's office said.
The facility, to be inaugurated on December 12 and run by the Israel Prisons Services, will be open during the day but locked at night, and it will initially house up to 3,300 people, Haaretz newspaper reported.
It said capacity could be expanded to hold up to 11,000.
Hardliners from Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud party praised the new legislation, with Interior Minister Gideon Saar saying it would "allow us to keep illegals away from our cities."
And MP Miri Regev said Israel should "send them all back to their countries."
But not everyone welcomed the legislation.
"Would you also have placed Nelson Mandela in a closed detention centre?" asked Tamar Zandberg from the leftwing Meretz party.
Human rights groups say most African migrants in Israel cannot be deported because their lives would be under threat if they returned home to Sudan and Eritrea.
Israel approves detention without charges for African migrants
Israel's parliament has moved to ensure African migrants who enter the country illegally can be held without charge, despite a Supreme Court ruling that had struck down a previous detention law. Legislation approved late on Monday set a maximum detention period of one year for new illegal migrants, a change from a term of up to three years stipulated in a previous law annulled by the court in September.
But with a newly-built Israeli border fence effectively choking off what had been a stream of African migrants crossing from Egypt, the new law could also have an impact on some of the estimated 50,000 mainly Sudanese and Eritrean nationals already in the Jewish state.
The new regulations, which opponents predicted would also be challenged in the Supreme Court, enables authorities to send migrants, now living illegally in Israeli cities, to what the government describes as "open facilities".
Under the law, their detention would be open-ended, pending resolution of their asylum requests, implementation of deportation orders or voluntary repatriation.
The first such complex, which can hold several hundred people, is due to begin operating this week in the southern Israeli desert.
Migrants detained there will be able to leave the facility during the day but must return at night, and they will not be allowed to seek employment. Women, children and families will not, at this stage, be sent to the complex, which the law stipulates must provide health care and social services.
Critics say the facility is effectively a prison.
Legislators who supported the new law said they were defending the Jewish character of Israel. Opponents called the measure undemocratic.
The government sees the migrants as illegal job-seekers, while rights groups and liberal lawmakers say many are asylum-seekers fleeing hardship and persecution in their homelands.
"This law is needed in order to deter potential infiltrators. The present reality is a human ticking timebomb," coalition lawmaker Miri Regev, head of the Knesset's Interior Committee, told parliament.
Since the Supreme Court ruling in September, some 700 of the 1,700 migrants under detention have been released from a prison in southern Israel, officials said. The rest are to be transferred to the new "open facility" this week, the Prisons Authority said.
Tens of thousands of Africans, many working in low-paying jobs as cleaners and dish washers, still populate poor neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.
Israel has been trying to persuade them to leave voluntarily in return for a payout. Some 1,700 Sudanese and Eritreans have gone home this year, the Interior Ministry said.
Zahava Galon, head of the left-wing Meretz party, said the migrants were no threat to Israel's Jewish identity.
"Is this how we, as a people who have sought asylum, treat human beings?" she asked on Israel Radio.
4 dec 2013
Israeli lawmakers must reject proposed amendments to the country’s Prevention of Infiltration Law, which would allow thousands of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants to be held indefinitely in a remote desert detention center, Amnesty International said in a press release, ahead of a 4 December vote in the Internal Affairs Committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
The Committee has announced that it will bring the bill before the full Knesset for its final readings in the coming days.
According to government reports, the amendments will provide for detaining some 3,300 people indefinitely in a fenced-in facility operated by the Israel Prison Service in the Negev desert, which the government is calling an “open center”. The draft legislation states release from the “open” center is possible through deportation to their countries of origin – mainly Eritrea and Sudan.
“Detaining refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants indefinitely in what is essentially a prison in the desert is a flagrant violation of international human rights law. The Knesset must scrap the proposed amendments and begin a complete overhaul of Israel’s asylum procedures to bring them in line with Israel’s international obligations,” said Philip Luther, Director for Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International in the press release.
The release continued, detailing how, if passed, the amendments to the Prevention of Infiltration Law would contradict a 16 September 2013 ruling by Israel’s High Court of Justice. A panel of nine judges unanimously overturned the amendments to the Law passed by the Knesset in January 2012, which had allowed for refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants to be detained for three or more years. The judges struck down the measure, deeming it unconstitutional and “a grave and disproportionate abuse of the right to personal freedom, which is a fundamental right of every human being, and deviates from the principles accepted in Israel and [its allies].”
The Court ordered the state to review the cases of approximately 1,700 refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants detained in Israeli prisons. Those detained unlawfully were ordered to be released within 90 days of the ruling, by 15 December this year.
Instead of fully complying with that order, the Knesset fast-tracked voting on new draft amendments to the Prevention of Infiltration Law, which are expected to be adopted this month.
While the proposed amendments would reduce the initial period of “closed” detention of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants to one year, this would be followed by indefinite detention in an “open” detention center. The proposed location is the Sadot facility, adjacent to Saharonim prison in a remote area of the Negev desert.
Asylum-seekers held at Sadot would be subjected to headcounts three times a day, which, together with the remote location and lack of sufficient public transportation, would effectively prevent them from leaving the vicinity. The “open” center would also be closed at night.
The bill gives the staff of the center the authority to demand identification as well as to search, prevent entry, apprehend and remove individuals. If an individual breaches or is accused of intending to breach a condition of the “open” center, or is found to endanger the “security of the state” or “public safety”, he or she can be transferred to a prison for three months to a year. These stipulations are not well defined and open to abuse.
Amnesty International stated its belief that the new proposed amendments to the Law fall far short of Israel’s international legal obligations as a state party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Israel’s Minister of Interior has stated that the objective of such a “center” is to encourage “voluntary” repatriation to home countries, highlighting its punitive nature. Around 90% of the asylum-seekers in Israel are from Eritrea or Sudan, and would be at real risk of serious human rights violations or abuses if returned there.
“Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers may face torture and other ill-treatment or imprisonment upon their return, but that has not stopped the Israeli authorities from violating international refugee law by ‘voluntarily’ returning hundreds in the past. Deportation is not ‘voluntary’ when the only alternative is prolonged and indefinite detention,” Philip Luther told Amnesty International.
The press release concluded stating that, under international law, restrictions on the right to liberty of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants must be exceptional measures, prescribed by law, necessary in the specific circumstances of the individual concerned and proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued. Amnesty International urges Knesset members to ensure that any immigration or national security provisions fully respect Israel’s international human rights obligations.
The Committee has announced that it will bring the bill before the full Knesset for its final readings in the coming days.
According to government reports, the amendments will provide for detaining some 3,300 people indefinitely in a fenced-in facility operated by the Israel Prison Service in the Negev desert, which the government is calling an “open center”. The draft legislation states release from the “open” center is possible through deportation to their countries of origin – mainly Eritrea and Sudan.
“Detaining refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants indefinitely in what is essentially a prison in the desert is a flagrant violation of international human rights law. The Knesset must scrap the proposed amendments and begin a complete overhaul of Israel’s asylum procedures to bring them in line with Israel’s international obligations,” said Philip Luther, Director for Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International in the press release.
The release continued, detailing how, if passed, the amendments to the Prevention of Infiltration Law would contradict a 16 September 2013 ruling by Israel’s High Court of Justice. A panel of nine judges unanimously overturned the amendments to the Law passed by the Knesset in January 2012, which had allowed for refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants to be detained for three or more years. The judges struck down the measure, deeming it unconstitutional and “a grave and disproportionate abuse of the right to personal freedom, which is a fundamental right of every human being, and deviates from the principles accepted in Israel and [its allies].”
The Court ordered the state to review the cases of approximately 1,700 refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants detained in Israeli prisons. Those detained unlawfully were ordered to be released within 90 days of the ruling, by 15 December this year.
Instead of fully complying with that order, the Knesset fast-tracked voting on new draft amendments to the Prevention of Infiltration Law, which are expected to be adopted this month.
While the proposed amendments would reduce the initial period of “closed” detention of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants to one year, this would be followed by indefinite detention in an “open” detention center. The proposed location is the Sadot facility, adjacent to Saharonim prison in a remote area of the Negev desert.
Asylum-seekers held at Sadot would be subjected to headcounts three times a day, which, together with the remote location and lack of sufficient public transportation, would effectively prevent them from leaving the vicinity. The “open” center would also be closed at night.
The bill gives the staff of the center the authority to demand identification as well as to search, prevent entry, apprehend and remove individuals. If an individual breaches or is accused of intending to breach a condition of the “open” center, or is found to endanger the “security of the state” or “public safety”, he or she can be transferred to a prison for three months to a year. These stipulations are not well defined and open to abuse.
Amnesty International stated its belief that the new proposed amendments to the Law fall far short of Israel’s international legal obligations as a state party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Israel’s Minister of Interior has stated that the objective of such a “center” is to encourage “voluntary” repatriation to home countries, highlighting its punitive nature. Around 90% of the asylum-seekers in Israel are from Eritrea or Sudan, and would be at real risk of serious human rights violations or abuses if returned there.
“Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers may face torture and other ill-treatment or imprisonment upon their return, but that has not stopped the Israeli authorities from violating international refugee law by ‘voluntarily’ returning hundreds in the past. Deportation is not ‘voluntary’ when the only alternative is prolonged and indefinite detention,” Philip Luther told Amnesty International.
The press release concluded stating that, under international law, restrictions on the right to liberty of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants must be exceptional measures, prescribed by law, necessary in the specific circumstances of the individual concerned and proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued. Amnesty International urges Knesset members to ensure that any immigration or national security provisions fully respect Israel’s international human rights obligations.
22 oct 2013
9 migrants and asylum seekers released
Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein has ordered the immediate release of 2,000 migrants and asylum seekers who were imprisoned under the Infiltration Prevention Act, as per the Supreme Court ruling.
Weinstein said Sunday that the process, which may last a few weeks, will begin with the release of 9 migrants and asylum seekers Sunday. Weinstein warned the responsible ministers to execute the ruling within the given timeframe.
Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein has ordered the immediate release of 2,000 migrants and asylum seekers who were imprisoned under the Infiltration Prevention Act, as per the Supreme Court ruling.
Weinstein said Sunday that the process, which may last a few weeks, will begin with the release of 9 migrants and asylum seekers Sunday. Weinstein warned the responsible ministers to execute the ruling within the given timeframe.
Page: 2 - 1
