Global Issues
MIDEAST: 'Lay Not Thine Hand Upon the Boy'
'And He said, Lay not thine hand upon the boy, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God' (Genesis 22:12). Not so much in fear of God as in fear of their own conscience, Israeli leaders have given temporary relief to hundreds of children of foreign workers who were facing deportation with their parents.
There are an estimated 300,000 foreign workers in Israel, of whom less than a quarter have work permits. Last month, a newly established Immigration Authority began to crack down on two of the most vulnerable groups - asylum seekers from Darfur and Eritrea, and Israeli-born children of migrant workers.
A battle over their future came to a head at the end of last week. Only public pressure stayed the government's hand.
The main argument pushed by Israeli NGOs working on behalf of the migrant workers is a moral one: Israel was established in 1948 largely as a safe haven for Jews. One of the first laws promulgated in the new state was the 'Law of Return', allowing entry to any Jew who wishes to immigrate to do so.
But because Israel has deliberately not wanted to absorb any newcomers other than Jews, there has been no other formal immigration policy.
Only in the last decade, with the entry of hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill unskilled, low-paid jobs in building, agriculture and home- care which Israelis are reluctant to do, and which since the Intifadah uprising Palestinians have been barred from doing, has Israeli finally been forced to grapple with a dilemma that taxes wealthy countries.
When the Immigration Authority moved into action last month it immediately proved highly controversial. During a fortnight, its 'Oz' unit arrested 221 people, two-thirds of them approved asylum seekers from Africa.
Pending final approval of their status as refugees, the asylum seekers are in the country legally following another public outcry two years ago. Then, dozens of people from Darfur and elsewhere in war-ravaged parts of east and central Africa were crossing weekly Israel's southern Negev desert border with Egypt.
Some were shot on the Egyptian side and others intercepted by Israeli troops and incarcerated in military prisons. The government was pushed to accept that Israel, given past persecution of Jews, could simply not deny refuge to people fleeing genocide.
In last month's crackdown the detainees were alleged to have contravened the condition for their asylum - that they do not enter the Tel Aviv metropolitan area (where most jobs are available). Since they are protected from deportation, to many Israelis it seemed like a senseless demonstration of ostentatious bullying intended to intimidate and to deter other asylum seekers from trying to enter Israel.
Several Israeli NGOs like the Workers Hotline, Kav La-Oved, and Physicians for Human Rights mounted a public campaign. Their efforts only yielded success, however, when the Interior Ministry began threatening to deport all families of illegal workers, including 2,800 children who had been born in the country. Target date for arrests and deportations was last Friday.
That sparked panic among parents, among them many single mothers, whose children faced being sent to countries they'd never even visited. Israeli television and radio stations were filled with tearful accounts of children speaking fluent, unaccented Hebrew declaring they felt as Israeli as their Jewish peers. Some said they 'could not wait to serve in the army,' the major test of acceptance among Jewish Israeli citizens.
Newspapers were full of stories of children spirited away from their small rented flats in the poorest sections of downtown Tel Aviv by NGO activists to 'safe houses' and secluded from their distraught parents. Many of the children said they were scared to go out to play for fear of being picked up, the parents expressing alarm at what would happen when the school year begins in September.
The public outcry over the threatened action against the children generated a flood of protests from top-flight Israelis, cutting across the normally clear- cut liberal-conservative political divide.
'Who more than a people who have suffered bitterly in exile should show sensitivity to fellow human beings who have chosen to live in our midst,' President Shimon Peres wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prof. Yehuda Bauer, chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, said that Israel turning its back on refugees seeking asylum was akin to the way World War II Switzerland had behaved in denying entry to Jews seeking escape from the Nazis.
Former education minister Yossi Sarid penned a column in Ha'aretz about the Israeli-born six-year-old son whose mother works as a once-a-week cleaner in his home. 'He calls my wife grandma and me grandpa, and that is how we feel toward him. Don't lay a hand on this boy; he is ours, one of us. He loves us and we love him. Don't put us in this disgraceful position. Don't make us feel ashamed and disgusted with ourselves. We're disgusted enough already.'
For all the emotional outburst of morality, the damning collective 'we're disgusted enough already' sentiment reflects just how circumscribed is the success of Israeli NGOs - how ineffectual and impotent Israeli civil society is on the country's most acute human rights issue.
They managed to drum up enough support to prod Netanyahu into ordering a three-month stay of implementation of the deportations, and to reversing the ban on the asylum seekers entering Tel Aviv. But that may be the limit of their achievement. Like in most western countries, Israel prefers to skirt the whole issue of migrant workers, a deeply troubling social question about the definition of a country, its identity and its moral fibre.
And, most pertinently in Israel's case, NGOs working for a peaceful end to the Occupation, and calls for recognition of the historical suffering of Palestinian refugees as a result of the creation of Israel not merely fall on deaf ears - they even provoke ire, both at the government level and among the Israeli public. As all too often happens, the power of human rights is trumped by the right of those in power to do what they choose.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service