Month: March 2012

New threat looms over South Sudan refugees

by adminin Israel, Writing

Inter Press Service, March 19, 2012

Hundreds of African refugees and Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday night under the banner ‘It’s dangerous in South Sudan’ to protest the imminent expulsion of 700 Sudanese asylum seekers, including children.

A small group of counter-protesters attended to show their support for the government’s decision to deport the refugees. One held a sign calling for an end to the asylum seekers’ “occupation” of South Tel Aviv, where many of the estimated 35,000 African refugees in Israel live.

Ethnic clashes between the Murle and Lou Nuer tribes continue in the Jonglei region of South Sudan, where fighting has claimed thousands of lives since the country gained independence from Sudan in July 2011. According to the United Nations, more than 300,000 South Sudanese were displaced due to internal violence last year.

Despite the volatile situation in South Sudan, the Israeli government announced in January that it would no longer give group protection to South Sudanese refugees. They have until Mar. 31 to leave voluntarily. After that, they have been warned they will be deported by force.

A number of families will be affected. About 400 of those facing expulsion are children; many were born in Israel. Some of the kids held signs that read “Help Me”.

Speaking to IPS at Saturday night’s protest, Winni Govita, a 24-year-old mother of two boys, aged six and four, said she is simply unable to imagine returning to South Sudan with her children.

“I watch television and I see (what’s happening) and I think ‘How can we go there?’” she asked. “How, how, how?”

Govita added that she has no family left in South Sudan. She was 12 when she fled to Egypt with her mother. After spending six years in Egypt, she came to Israel. Her youngest child was born here.

While open racism is becoming increasingly common in Israel – and much of it is directed towards African refugees and their children, who have been banned from some municipal schools in Eilat and South Tel Aviv – Govita said she has not had trouble in Arad, where she works at a hotel.

“The kids go to school. Everything is fine.” But, in South Sudan, she said, “There’s no healthcare, no school.”

Due to the country’s extreme poverty, and lack of education and opportunities, the UN estimates that some 2,000 minors are currently serving in South Sudan’s army.

In South Sudan, one of every three children suffers from malnutrition; nearly 50 percent of the population lacks access to clean water.

After visiting South Sudan last month, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos remarked, “The situation in the country is extremely precarious, and the risk of a dangerous decline is very real. Food insecurity has already increased, and 2012 will witness an earlier, and a longer, season of hunger.”

Wou Riek, 25, is worried about the violence in South Sudan. He is from Jonglei’s Murle community. His mother, he said, has fled the fighting.

Riek was 17 when he left Sudan and made his way to Israel after spending four years in Egypt. When asked about his last memories of South Sudan, which was in the midst of a civil war when he fled, Riek answered, “There is no need to recall this. Everyone knows what happened between the north and south.” He was referring to the 21-year civil war that saw more than two million killed and millions more displaced.

Riek said that he fears for his life in returning to South Sudan.

South Sudan’s army is widely reported to have been lax in its duty to protect citizens. Soldiers often identify with their ethnic group rather than the state, and sometimes turn a blind eye to attacks, or assist in them. Many have reportedly raped women and girls from rival tribes.

Cross-border clashes have also fueled concerns that war could erupt with Sudan again. Although a peace treaty was signed in 2005, Sudan has bombed the pro-south stronghold of South Kordofan in recent months. And tensions over South Sudan’s oil reserves remain high.

In a report released last week, the Israeli Knesset admitted that South Sudan is in a humanitarian emergency. “In recent months, we’ve received information on the deterioration of stability and the humanitarian situation in the state,” the report stated.

Responding to a recent letter protesting the deportation of South Sudanese, signed by 400 Israeli artists, writers, and academics, Interior Minister Eli Yishai remarked, “In my time as Interior Minister I have and will continue to preserve Israel as a Jewish state.”

In December 2011, Yishai told Army Radio that he intends to guard the state’s Jewish majority and that, accordingly, he will see to it that all Africans are returned to their home countries.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called African asylum seekers a “threat” to the state’s “Jewish and democratic character.”

The deportation of South Sudanese refugees is part of the Israeli government’s ongoing efforts to expel non-Jewish migrants.

Hundreds of children of Southeast Asian migrant workers, along with their parents, are currently being deported. Most of the mothers arrived legally but lost their visa because they gave birth in Israel and did not send their babies back to their home country within the three-month period allotted to them by the state. Last April, the Supreme Court ruled that this policy was a violation of Israel’s own labour laws.

In January, Israel announced its intention to expel 2000 refugees from the Cote d’Ivoire, despite the fact that some could face persecution, violence, and death back home.

The state is also deporting Eritreans of Ethiopian origin to Ethiopia, even though officials in the Ministry of Interior say that the country is unsafe for mixed Ethiopians. An Israeli judge has likened the move to “gambling with human life.”

Addressing the audience of refugees and Israelis on Saturday night, a 14-year-old girl from South Sudan said, in fluent Hebrew, “I know that you are all scared that we came here to take over your country and to take from you all something that isn’t ours, but that’s the last thing that I wanted in the world.

“I’m here to ask you for help, but I’m not here to stay here. I want to return to my country but I do not want to put my life in danger and the lives of my little brothers and that of my little brother who was just born.”

Killing of Zuhair al-Qaissi exposes Israel’s attitude to Supreme Court

by adminin Israel, Writing

The Guardian, March 14, 2012

The recent escalation between Israel and Gaza began after Israeli forces assassinated Zuhair al-Qaissi, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a militant group composed of members of various Palestinian parties. Haaretz noted that the PRC was “the organisation that captured Gilad Shalit”, the Israeli soldier who was freed in October 2011. The army says that al-Qaissi was behind the August 2011 attack that took place on the Israeli-Egyptian border – even though the PRC denied involvement and it was later revealed that the militants came from Sinai, not Gaza.

While army sources took care to point out al-Qaissi’s alleged involvement in the August 2011 incident, his assassination wasn’t just an act of punishment. No, Israel killed him on the basis of secret evidence – evidence that is not subject to legal or judicial review – that supposedly proves that al-Qaissi was planning a terror attack. Never mind that the Israeli supreme court’s December 2006 ruling placed numerous restrictions on such assassinations.

Fatmeh el-Ajou, an attorney with Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, explains that while the judgment did not place a blanket prohibition on targeted killings, it stated that the decision to carry out an assassination must be made on a case-by-case basis, “depending on the evidence that [security forces] have”. But, without seeing the security forces’ secret evidence, it’s impossible to know if al-Qaissi was indeed planning an attack, and if the army was in line with the 2006 ruling. There’s no transparency in this so-called democracy and, without transparency, there is no accountability to the state’s highest court. “From the perspective of human rights law,” el-Ajou adds, “assassinations are not legitimate … They should only be carried out if there is a ‘ticking bomb.’ [Suspects] should be brought to trial.”

To some extent, the 2006 ruling dovetails with this, stating that, whenever possible, the person in question must be arrested and tried – which is exactly what didn’t happen in 2007, when the army violated the supreme court’s restrictions on targeted killings and assassinated two men they had the power to detain instead. And then there’s the laundry list of less dramatic examples, instances when state bodies quietly ignore the court, revealing Israel to be the weak democracy it is. Such cases have spurred former deputy attorney general Yehudit Karp to send not one but two letters of complaint to the current attorney General Yehuda Weinstein. Here’s a partial sampling of rulings that Israel can’t be bothered to fully implement:

• In 2002, the supreme court ordered the municipalities of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Lod, Ramle and Nazareth Illit to “add Arabic to all municipal signs”, Adalah writes. Last April, the supreme court chastised the municipality of Nazareth Illit (upper Nazareth, a predominately Jewish area) for its lack of compliance with the nine-year-old ruling.

• In 2006, the supreme court struck down the binding arrangement, a policy that binds migrant workers to one employer, essentially making his or her visa contingent on his employer’s whim. Last year, the Knesset circumvented this ruling, passing legislation so severe that human rights groups referred to it as the “slavery law”.

• In 2007, the Israeli supreme court ruled that the separation barrier in the West Bank Palestinian village of Bilin served no security purpose in its location and ordered the state to move the fence. While Israel did move it in 2011, more than four years after the court’s decision, villagersare still separated from some of their land.

• During the December 2008 to January 2009 Israeli military operation known as Cast Lead, Israel barred media from the Gaza Strip. Even though the supreme court ruled against the ban, the press was not admitted to Gaza.

• In April 2011, the supreme court overturned the policy that stripped migrant workers who had children in Israel of their legal status, calling it a violation of the state’s own labour laws. Almost a year later, Israel is still deporting some of these women and their children, despite the fact that the very mechanism that made them “illegal” has been nullified.

In his 2006 ruling on targeted killings, former supreme court president Aharon Barak quoted an earlier judgment in which he’d stated: “At times democracy fights with one hand behind her back.” But in its war on Palestinians – and anyone that Israel deems an “other” – not only does the state use both hands, it fights with the proverbial gloves off.

Why would Israel budge?

by adminin Politics, Writing

The New York Times, March 8, 2012

Might Israel attend the meeting about a nuclear weapon free Middle East in Finland? Certainly. Just like it has “participated” in the peace process–with no real intention of making concessions. In both cases, there are no consequences for Israel sticking to its agenda. So why would Israel budge?

Israel won’t sign a nonproliferation treaty because that would mean giving up its military edge in the Middle East. Obama’s speech to AIPAC suggests that the US will ensure that Israel remains the regional powerhouse

And this question has arisen before, in 2010, when Netanyahu and Obama were already in office. The US supported the initiative; Israel, of course, rejected it.

What’s changed since then? Little to nothing. If anything, Israel has only become more defiant. Last year, Obama called for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal based on 1967 borders. But 2011 saw Israel increase settlements in the West Bank as well as demolitions of Palestinian and Bedouin structures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The United Nations reports that the rate of demolitions in 2012 is already higher than it was last year.

But, for me, where it gets really interesting is that the US initially wanted Israel to sign the non-proliferation treaty, back in the late 1960s, and Israel wouldn’t. This is a reminder that the six decades of friendship Obama spoke of earlier this week weren’t always so friendly. Some argue that Israel’s refusal to sign this treaty may have given Iran the incentive to go nuclear. It’s similar, perhaps, to how Israel had a hand in creating Hamas. Israel wanted a rival to Fatah; instead, it got, as the Wall Street Journal says, “unintended and often perilous consequences.”

Speaking of Israel creating its own boogeyman, a pre-emptive strike on Iran might actually push Iran to accelerate its nuclear program, as it has been argued was the case with Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq—creating exactly the scenario Israeli leaders fear the most.