Month: May 2012

Israel bans mother from visiting daughters, deports families

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

Inter Press Service, May 31, 2012

Hundreds of thousands of families — from Palestinians to Southeast Asian migrant workers to African refugees — struggle under Israeli policies that seek to limit the number of non-Jews within Israel and in the areas it occupies.

Sitting in the living room of her home in East Amman, Jordan, Sabah Othman flips through the photos of her two daughters’ weddings. “I love all of my children,” she said, in Arabic. “But my girls are my best friends.”

Due to Israeli policies, however, Othman’s relationship with her daughters now takes place on the phone.

Othman’s daughters live with their Palestinian husbands in Shuafat refugee camp in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. Because Othman’s husband is from Hebron, all of Othman’s Jordanian-born children hold West Bank identification cards and can enter the West Bank without a visa.

But Othman holds only a Jordanian passport, so she must apply to the Israeli consulate in Amman to enter the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. In the past three years, she has applied six times and has been rejected four times. The two times Othman received a visa, she was permitted to visit for two weeks.

Most tourists get a three-month visa issued on the border.

Israeli officials have admitted that the state has no security claim against Othman, who is a mother of five and a grandmother of eight. Numerous inquiries at the Ministry of Interior, the Israeli consulate in Amman, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that Othman’s visa requests were denied due to questions about her “migration intentions.”

Othman denied that she intended to leave her husband, sons and grandchildren in Amman and migrate to Shuafat Refugee Camp. But Israel’s concerns that she would do so point to the state’s obsession with demographics and maintaining a Jewish majority.

Sam Bahour of the Ramallah-based organization Right to Enter explained that, under Israeli law, West Bank ID holders can help first degree relatives secure residency in the West Bank. In practice, however, things are not so simple.

Bahour, who was born and raised in the United States, married a West Bank Palestinian in 1994 and immediately applied for an ID. “The Palestinian Authority wasn’t even here yet [and the Israelis] refused to deal with it.”

Since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967, Israel has purged more than 150,000 Palestinian residents from the population registry and has ignored hundreds of thousands of requests like Bahour’s for family unification. Between 2000 and 2005 alone Israel received 120,000 such applications. The requests were simply not processed.

A survey conducted in 2005, on behalf of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, estimated that more than 640,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had a parent, sibling, child, or spouse who was unregistered.

Because Israel controls the population registry for the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority cannot help.

“The PA is just the mailman,” Bahour says, explaining that Palestinians submit their applications to the PA, which delivers them to Israel and then distributes the Israelis’ answers.

After 15 years of living in the West Bank, Bahour received an ID in 2009. His was one of the 33,000 applications Israel processed to reward the PA for taking part in “peace talks” — turning the human right to family into a political card.

Bahour believes that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and their family members reflects a “policy of fragmentation” designed to pressure the population into emigrating.

Othman’s daughter, Amira Dana, has begun to look for work abroad. She hopes to move to a place where her family members can visit her whenever they like.

Dana mourns the important life moments she has been unable to share with her mother, like the births of her three children.

“I really wanted her there next to me. I didn’t want anyone there except her,” Dana said. But Israel denied Othman entry.

Inside present-day Israel, migrant workers’ children and African asylum seekers bear the brunt of Israel’s demographic war.

The state ignores African refugees’ requests for asylum. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called them a “concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the country” and even though Sudanese and Eritrean citizens cannot be deported to their home countries, Israel does not provide them with work visas.

Speaking to Israel’s Army Radio recently, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said, “Jobs will root them here.” As a result, many of Israel’s approximately 45,000 African asylum seekers are unemployed and homeless.

Mimi Hylameshesh, a 28-year-old refugee from Eritrea, cleans houses for a living. She makes just enough to rent a small apartment in south Tel Aviv and to send her daughter to daycare. While Hylameshesh manages to feed her child, she does not always have the money to buy food for herself.

In another attempt to preserve its Jewish majority, the state is in the process of deporting hundreds of families of migrant workers, including Israeli-born children. Until now, all of the children who have been expelled have been aged four and under. But members of the organization Israeli Children explain that older kids could be arrested and expelled during the upcoming summer break.

Angie Robles, 56, has been taking care of her 15-year-old grandson since 1999, when his father died and his mother abandoned him. The boy was born here, attends public school in Tel Aviv, celebrates the Jewish holidays, and speaks fluent Hebrew.

Despite the fact that he met all of the criteria for “naturalization” in both 2005 and 2010 — when Israel opened “one-time” windows for the children of undocumented migrant workers — his applications were denied. He faces expulsion to the Philippines, his parents’ home country, a place he has never visited.

Rose Fabianas, 32, and her six-year-old daughter, Danielle, also face imminent deportation to the Philippines.

Fabianas sits on a park bench in south Tel Aviv, watching her daughter play on the swings with friends. She calls to Danielle and the girl darts over. Danielle talks, shyly, about her life in Israel, where she was born. Her favorite subject is mathematics, she said in fluent Hebrew, and her favourite holiday is Purim.

Fabianas remarked that Danielle used to live in constant fear of the immigration police. When someone knocked on the door, Danielle would beg her mother not to answer. “But now she says, ‘Ima [mom], I’m already big, they’re not going to take me’ … She’s very settled.”

Growing tensions between locals and migrants

by adminin Israel, Writing

IRIN, May 17, 2012

Blessing Akachukneu was already looking for a new place to live when her south Tel Aviv apartment, which doubles as a day-care centre, was firebombed in April. Her Israeli neighbours, she explained, had complained to the landlord about the noise from the day-care centre and she had been asked to leave. Otherwise, she had not had any problems in Shapira neighbourhood.

So Akachukneu was shocked when Molotov cocktails were thrown at her flat. Four other apartments – all home to African asylum-seekers – were targeted in the attack. Haim Mula, a 20-year-old Israeli man Shapira residents call “quiet” and “religious”, was arrested in connection with the incident. Police believe the attacks were racially motivated; Mula had been detained recently for throwing eggs at a Sudanese refugee.

A week later, two Molotov cocktails were thrown at the south Tel Aviv apartment of Nigerian workers.

But this was not the first time the African community was singled out for violence. In January 2011, a burning tyre was thrown into the Ashdod apartment of five Sudanese refugees. Two of the men were hospitalized. On the same night, three teenagers – Israeli-born daughters of African migrants – were beaten up by a group of Jewish youth. One of the attackers was armed with a knife; another allegedly shouted racial slurs at the girls.

“I’m afraid that something like this will happen again,” Akachukneu told IRIN.

The incidents point to escalating tensions between Jewish Israelis and the country’s roughly 45,000 African asylum-seekers. Human rights groups say 85 percent of these men, women, and children are refugees from Eritrea and Sudan.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called African asylum-seekers “infiltrators” who are a “concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the country”. Speaking to IRIN, Ministry of Interior spokeswoman Sabine Hadad said most of the country’s “infiltrators” are work migrants who do not meet the definition of a refugee.

The country’s laws define an “infiltrator” as anyone who enters Israel other than through an official border crossing, but according to Amnesty International, the term “infiltrators” is inappropriate because it carries connotations of threats and criminality, and fuels xenophobia and discrimination against asylum-seekers and migrants.

Human rights groups also point out that the government does not process requests for asylum. But in what seems to be a nod to the dangerous circumstances they face in their home countries, Israel is not currently deporting Eritrean or Sudanese citizens.

While they are allowed to stay, Israel does not give these asylum-seekers work visas. Most take odd jobs. In historically poor south Tel Aviv, they can find relatively cheap housing. They tend to live in cramped conditions, sometimes as many as eight to a room. Those that cannot find enough work to pay rent, end up sleeping in parks.

Locals say crime has risen as the African community has grown. They also say the increased demand for housing has driven prices up in the area. Some accuse the asylum-seekers of stealing much-needed jobs.

In the past two years, Jewish Israelis have held a number of protests against the presence of Africans in south Tel Aviv and have called on the state to deport the “infiltrators”. While the demonstrations have a decidedly xenophobic feel, the protesters accurately point out that the government is doing nothing about the social problems that come with the Africans’ unemployment and homelessness – a concern shared by human rights groups.

But while recent incidents suggest more violence could be on the horizon, south Tel Aviv’s refugees say they are most concerned with making a living.

Tekne Micaele, 38, fled Eritrea after doing 10 years’ national service without pay. Like most of the asylum-seekers in Israel, he walked here, crossing the southern border with Egypt on foot. The journey is hazardous with many of the asylum-seekers often held by gangs until their relatives pay a ransom.

For the past year and a half, Micaele has lived in a south Tel Aviv park. He gets food from an Israeli grassroots organization which offers refugees a meal a day. While no one has threatened him physically or verbally, Micaele’s biggest problem is the fact that he does not have a work visa.

In early 2010, Israeli authorities announced they would crack down on employers who hired undocumented workers, hitting them with steep fines. The state also conducted a media blitz warning of the consequences of hiring illegal labourers. Two years later, it seems that the campaign has had some effect – Micaele and other asylum-seekers report that potential employers usually ask to see a visa and are reluctant to hire them without one.

Micaele sums up his situation: “No work, no house, nothing.”

Another asylum-seeker, Mimi Hylameshesh, 28, has a job cleaning houses, but struggles to make ends meet. On a good month, she makes just over 2,000 NIS (US$523). Rent costs her 1,500 NIS and she pays 600 NIS to send her three-and-a-half-year old daughter to an unlicensed day-care centre.

Hylameshesh and her husband escaped national service and fled Eritrea four years ago. Her husband went on to Libya and then to Europe. Arriving in Israel alone with an eight-month-old daughter, Hylameshesh, spent a year in prison, where she was held without charge, before coming to south Tel Aviv.

Under a new law passed in January, anyone who enters Israel illegally – including Sudanese and Eritreans – can be detained for up to three years, even if there is no intention of deporting them. In some cases, this time period can be extended, even indefinitely. Amnesty International criticized the law arguing that automatic and prolonged detention violates international law and standards.

Hylameshesh’s husband currently lives in Switzerland but does not send Hylameshesh money. “It is hard for me,” she says, adding that there is always enough food for her child, but not always enough for her.

African refugees join Palestinians as a “threat” to Israel

by adminin Israel, Writing

The National, May 10, 2012

On Tuesday Israelis woke up to the surprising news that the early elections Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had announced on Sunday had been cancelled.

In a deal made while the country was asleep, Netanyahu forged a new coalition with Kadima. Now the Knesset will march in lockstep behind the PM, meaning little will change. Not that elections would have made much of a difference, however – the popular Mr Netanyahu had been expected to win by a landslide.

Public support for him is somewhat surprising. Last summer’s protests against the cost of living suggested that many Israelis are less than satisfied with the state of the state. And almost a year later, life in Israel is only getting more expensive. Housing is as unaffordable as ever and wages are still relatively low. The gap between Israel’s rich and poor remains one of the highest in the western world. This winter saw a steep increase in electricity and gas prices. And, despite last year’s “cottage cheese protests”, food prices continue to rise.

“Social justice” – a term Israelis use not about ending the occupation of Palestinian land, but about building a more egalitarian economy – remains elusive. Meanwhile Mr Netanyahu’s government uses policy and rhetoric not only against Palestinians but also against Israel’s other “others” – migrant workers and African refugees.

Palestinians have been squeezed by the Netanyahu administration: increased settlement growth; a dramatic rise in demolition of Palestinian and Bedouin homes in East Jerusalem and Israeli-controlled Area C in the West Bank; and the approval of the Prawer Plan, which will see tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel forcibly removed from their villages in the Negev (Naqab) to make way for Judaisation of the area.

But Africans and refugees are under pressure, too. The list of examples includes a government campaign in which paid actors claimed that they are unemployed because foreigners took their jobs. It includes the deportation of Israel-born children of migrant workers, even though the Supreme Court overturned the policy that made their parents illegal. It includes the construction of what will be the world’s largest detention centre, a prison to house African refugees, including women and children. There, asylum-seekers will be held without trial, most for up to three years, some indefinitely.

Their only crime will be that they violated Israel’s 1954 Infiltration Prevention law, intended to criminalise the actions of Palestinian “infiltrators” – refugees who attempted to enter the newly created state of Israel to return to the homes and lands from which they had been expelled in 1948, during the nakba. Last year, this law was modified to include undocumented migrants who enter Israel via Egypt. A large majority of those coming in through the southern border are African asylum-seekers, a group the government, including Mr Netanyahu, calls “infiltrators.”

And then there’s the legislation that Israeli human rights groups call the “slavery law.” It’s a modification of the 1952 Entry to Israel law, conferring privileges on Jews while preventing Palestinians from returning. It places severe restrictions on the freedom of foreign caregivers, going as far as to limit them to a set region of the country.

It’s no coincidence that Israel is using laws intended to discriminate against Palestinians to tread on the human rights of another non-Jewish group.

In 2003 Mr Netanyahu, then finance minister, called Arab citizens of the state a “demographic problem” adding that the separation barrier would stop a “demographic spillover” of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Fast forward to 2010: Prime Minister Netanyahu calls African asylum seekers a “concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the country” and promises another separation barrier, this one to run the length of the border between Egypt and Israel.

When considered through the lens of the government’s goal of maintaining a “Jewish and democratic” country, every non-Jew – Arab or African, Christian or Muslim – becomes a “threat” to or enemy of the state. It’s not about Palestinians or Arabs per se. It’s about maintaining Jewish privilege.

The state’s policies have implications for citizens’ behaviour. As the state steps up its persecution of and incitement against foreigners – whipping the public into a nationalistic frenzy – Jewish Israelis are emboldened to ratchet up violence and discrimination against migrants. In Eilat, for example, African refugees have been banned from municipal schools. Several schools in Tel Aviv have also barred foreign children.

In South Tel Aviv, Jewish Israelis have held protests against the mere presence of Africans, calling on the state to deport them. Right-wing Knesset members have taken part in these demonstrations, lending an air of governmental approval.

South Tel Aviv is becoming a flashpoint for rising tensions. As Independence Day drew to a close a week ago, a 20-year-old Israeli threw Molotov cocktails at a kindergarten and four apartments that serve African refugees. A week later, two firebombs were hurled at the home of Nigerian immigrants.

In 2011, three teenage girls – the Israeli-born, Hebrew-speaking daughters of African migrant workers – were beaten by a group of Jewish teenagers. The attackers, one of whom was armed with a knife, allegedly called them “dirty niggers.” One of the girls needed medical treatment for her injuries.

There have also been a number of other violent incidents.

The new coalition just means more of the same, discrimination and violence against non-Jews on both sides of the Green Line. Whether that violence comes from the state or its citizens, whether it takes the form of bulldozers or firebombs, the goal is one – the preservation of Jewish privilege in a “Jewish and democratic” state.

A measured spring in Jordan

by adminin Middle East, Writing

The Caravan, May 1, 2012

Friday noon prayers find the faithful spilling out of al-Husseini Mosque in downtown Amman. They crowd the street and sidewalks, bowing between vendors. Four men kneel alongside a folding table loaded down with silver faucets, showerheads and handles. Others prostrate themselves next to a display of cheap plastic shoes. Those who can’t afford prayer rugs kneel on crushed cardboard boxes.

Some men don’t even have cardboard: They bow and put their heads on the asphalt.

As prayers end, the people rise—and the protest begins. Members of the Jabhat al-’Amal al-Islami (Islamic Action Front—IAF—a powerful political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Jordan’s biggest opposition party, which Parliament is now seeking to ban) organise the demonstrators in neat lines which, slowly, make their way down the street. The crowd, which numbers about 1,000, comprises mostly men. A small group of women brings up the rear of the procession.

Mufida Shakra, a mother of five, is among them. Shakra studied law and sharī’ah (Islamic law) in Kuwait and “Alhamdulillah,” she says, “I work as a teacher [of] sharī’ah.”

Shakra’s thanking God that she has a job. While 92 percent of Jordanians are literate, and many attend university, the official unemployment rate hovers at 13 percent. Unofficial estimates put joblessness at a staggering 30 percent.

In much of the Arab world, men are expected to provide for their family, and do not marry until they are financially stable. But, because Shakra has an income, she was able to help her unemployed 26-year-old son start a family.

“I gave him the money to marry,” she says, touching her hand to her chest. “He’s a graphic designer [with a university degree]—and he doesn’t have work. No job. He’s sitting at home. It’s a very bad situation here, really.”

Even if he had found a job, it probably wouldn’t have been of much help. Wages in Jordan are low compared to the cost of living, and Jordanians are finding it increasingly difficult to buy basics, including food.

The country’s distribution of wealth is just one of the protesters’ troubles. Demonstrators are also calling for greater government transparency, elections and an end to the corruption that they blame for their economic woes.

While concern about corruption isn’t new, what is new is that Jordanians are not limiting their criticism to government officials. They’ve taken the unprecedented step of critiquing the monarchy itself, a move equated with sedition and punishable by jail time.

In a February 2011 open letter to the ostensibly reformist King Abdullah II, Jordanians accused Queen Rania Al Abdullah of “stealing money from the Treasury”. It also called on the king to return the properties that have been given to the queen’s family. “The land belongs to the Jordanian people,” the authors wrote.

The letter reveals anxieties not just over the distribution of wealth but over who gets to control Jordan itself. Its signatories were 36 East Bankers from prominent Bedouin tribes; it took aim at Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian descent.

Perhaps because Jordan is a young state, still forging its national identity, sharp lines divide who’s in and who’s out. Those who were here before or during Jordan’s establishment in 1946 as a sovereign state are considered native ‘East Bankers’ with far more entitlements that those who came later—the outsiders. And they include the Palestinian refugees who arrived in the wake of Israel’s creation in 1948 and during other crises in the Middle East. Today, Palestinians constitute a majority of Jordan’s population. East Bankers fear that reform will mean increased Palestinian involvement in Jordanian political life. They also worry that the Palestinians will turn Jordan into their national homeland.

The thrust of the letter to the king was that Palestinian Jordaninans, his wife included, don’t care about the state or about public interests, a common sentiment among East Bankers.

Shakra and her husband are children of Palestinian refugees who were driven from their homes when the state of Israel was created. Even though she speaks to me in English, Shakra calls her parents’ hometown, Jerusalem, by its Arabic name, Al-Quds.

Her fingers trace the edge of her white hijab, tucking in stray hairs as she says, “I am from Al-Quds. I don’t want any country but [Palestine].”

And she wants the Jews out of Palestine, she adds. In the meantime, however, “Jordan is important to me.”

Despite her many grievances, Shakra is quick to add that she feels the king has done a lot for the people—she just wants him to do more.

Her comment points to one of the crucial differences between the protests in Jordan—which began in January of 2011—and those that brought down the regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. In Jordan, people simply want reform—they do not want to topple the king.

This Friday’s protest reflects that. Chants—led by three men standing on the back of a pickup truck draped with the Jordanian flag—do not include calls to overthrow the monarchy. They run the gamut from a demand for a Jordan free of corruption to a free Palestine to “the Jews are pigs” to solidarity with the Syrian people.

The scattershot of slogans points to another reason why Jordan’s revolution is yet to take off. The energy that could be harnessed into a broad-based, popular movement is largely being channelled in multiple directions towards specific demands. In December, a small group of women protested the Citizenship Law, which does not allow Jordanian women married to foreigners to pass their Jordanian citizenship on to their children. In February this year, 20,000 teachers rallied in Amman to protest stagnant wages. The next day, hundreds of Jordanians demonstrated against changes made to the Social Security Law.

While Islamists led the recent protests, their participation in demonstrations has been inconsistent. They were in. Then they were out, and the unions and leftist organisations were running the show. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood’s IAF is back in. But for how long? And to what end? No one seems to know.

There’s another reason that Jordan is yet to see its spring: people here fear a revolution. Throughout all strata of Jordanian society, there is a consensus that widespread unrest would only exacerbate Jordan’s divisions, throwing a match on the proverbial tinderbox.

It’s not just the Palestinians who are causing apprehension. The number of Syrian refugees is growing daily. And many also find the East Bankers’ tribal Bedouin affiliations worrisome. A revolution could turn into a messy power struggle like that being played out next door, in Iraq.

Faced with unrest, the Jordanian government has played on the country’s fault lines to keep the small protests from snowballing into a bigger movement. So for now, Jordanians are making only modest demands. But, according to Hamed El Eid, a 47-year-old engineer and a member of the IAF, the people are getting impatient.

“Several months ago, the government promised us that it will make a big improvement,” he says. Improvement, however, has been “very, very slow”.

El Eid wears glasses, a crisp blue dress shirt and a navy windbreaker. His gray beard is neat and close-clipped. As we walk down the street, El Eid explains that while the Muslim Brotherhood has bounced in and out of the protests, he, personally, has stayed with them from the start.

“And I will continue,” he adds. “I will not stop until [the government has] satisfied all our requirements.”

He ticks the demands off on his fingers: “A parliament that will be elected in a transparent way without any corruption; we want to take out the corrupted people and put them in prisons because they have stolen from the country.”

Because a majority of the IAF’s supporters are Jordanian Palestinians, I ask El Eid about his national origin. He seems slightly offended. He straightens his glasses and answers, “Regardless of whether [our] grandfathers are from Palestine or Jordan, we are all Jordanian citizens. [The family’s roots are] meaningless when we are working on this issue [of reform]. We want to improve Jordan.”

Just as Palestine is not just for Palestinians, El Eid explains, “All Arab people are requesting [the liberation of] Palestine,” and Jordan is not just for East Bankers.

When asked if Amman will become Cairo, El Eid, like others, says he doubts it. The economy is a little bit better in Jordan than in Egypt, the situation a little less desperate. “Here, our requirements are for improvement; [in Egypt] their requirements are for change.”

By the time we reach the end of the street, the 1,000-strong crowd has thinned. Most of the demonstrators have dropped out of the lines and have taken refuge from the midday sun under the awnings that hang over the sidewalks. “Look,” one protester says, pointing at a group of men who have stopped to buy some sweets, “they’re getting a snack.”