Israel and African migrants
There has been widespread campaign throughout Israel by mostly ultra-orthodox and rightwing groups, beginning in 2011, to limit the presence of Africans there.Last year, Israel deported 3,920 migrants in a crackdown on 60,000 Africans described by the authorities of being in the country illegally.Under the new detention law, the government is expected to construct hi-tech […]
There has been widespread campaign throughout Israel by mostly ultra-orthodox and rightwing groups, beginning in 2011, to limit the presence of Africans there.
Last year, Israel deported 3,920 migrants in a crackdown on 60,000 Africans described by the authorities of being in the country illegally.
Under the new detention law, the government is expected to construct hi-tech facilities each of which can hold up to 3,300 people for long periods, pending the implementation of deportation orders or voluntary repatriation, or resolution of asylum requests.
Migrants detained in such facilities would be allowed to leave the facility during the day for specified reasons and limited time, but must return before nightfall.
The migrants cannot seek employment, although their women and children will not be detained with them in the facilities. It is unclear what provision is being made for such category of persons.
Given the character of the Israeli society and the makeup of its current rightwing Likud-led coalition government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, such measures, considered in many countries to be extreme, are in fact second nature.
The country’s policies towards its Arab population are just as draconian. Israel’s notorious ‘separation wall’ that seeks to protect the Jewish population from their ‘hostile’ Arab neighbours in the same country is a case in point.
When the campaign against African migrants picked up in 2011, Mr Netanyahu said at the time that such people were “seen by many Israelis as a law and order issue and even a threat to the long term viability of the Jewish state.”
Such language, and the emotive sentiments behind it, underscores the real motive of the new legislation, which is to ensure that Africans don’t get a place in the Jewish state.
In fact, shorn of the veneer of respectability and humanness that the policymakers seek to dress it in, it remains, at the end of the day, a racist legislation.
The Jewish state’s phobia for the so-called ticking time-bomb of a ballooning Arab population in contradistinction with a regressing birth rate among Israelis has now also been applied to refer to the presence of Africans.
From Netanyahu’s undisguised support for the law, declaring it “will keep illegals from our cities”, to the comment of a Knesset member, Miri Regev, who said that Israel “should send them all back to their countries”, it would appear that Africans are now the new ‘existential threat’ to the character and survival of the ‘Jewishness’ of the state of Israel in the eyes of its leaders.
True, some Israelis, even among the parliamentarians, did not support the legislation, but they are in a tiny minority and not part of the hard-line government. That is why voices like those of Mr Zahava Galon, who cautioned that the migrants that others thought were a problem, did not constitute a threat to Israel’s Jewish identity. “Is this how we, as a people who have sought asylum, treat human beings”, Mr Galon asked on a radio programme.
The moral soundness of Mr Galon’s position on this issue may not carry weight in the cabinet of Mr Netanyahu, but it summarises the revulsion that most of the rest of the world feel towards such inhumane legislation. Some Israelis, particularly those in the human rights and nongovernmental organisations, have called the proposed detention facilities ‘open prisons’. And they are.
But more than that, they serve to demonstrate to the rest of the world once more that Israel is not bound to respect international norms and conventions, and rules of decent behaviour that others consider to be the norm.