Racism for all.. Have Ukrainian refugees fallen into the grip of Israeli discrimination?

From inside one of the Israeli settlements on the occupied territories, the camera of the Israeli “i24” channel showed a Lebanese refugee who had previously fought in the ranks of the South Lebanon Army* making some repairs inside an apartment in the settlement, which today also receives Ukrainian refugees who have come to “Israel.” And at the same time, it shelters some Russians who have fled the war now taking place in Eastern Europe, in a usual and recurring scene of Israeli propaganda.

The media message that Israel wishes to pass through this scene and its likes is clear. The doors of Israel are open to everyone, even those who are at war among themselves, and here is the evidence, Russians and Ukrainians living together in harmony in a settlement on the occupied land of Palestine.

(1) However, this rosy image that the Hebrew media constantly tries to promote ignores many aspects, and hides the racist face with which the occupying power deals with those wishing to trade in its land from the fires of wars and economic crises, starting with African immigrants, all the way to the displaced from Eastern Europe .

Asylum to Israel: For Jews only

Although Israel signed the International Convention on the Rights of Refugees in 1951, it waited until 2001 to activate special criteria by which asylum applications due to the war are processed.

From the beginning, Israel played a major role in declaring and signing the International Refugee Rights Convention in 1951, which prohibited returning people to any place where they would face danger to their lives, and granted rights to refugees fleeing persecution in their own countries.

The occupying power blessed this treaty to protect the Jews from deportation to countries hostile to them, and the memory of Nazi persecution was alive at that time after the end of World War II.

However, the Hebrew state did not show the same enthusiasm when it drafted the Geneva Convention in 1949, which deals with humanitarian conditions during wars. The agreement came after the first war with the Palestinians and the Arabs, and it was unwise for the nascent state to commit itself to an agreement of this kind in these circumstances.

(2)

Although Israel signed the Convention in 1951, it waited until 2001 to activate special criteria by which asylum requests are processed due to the war (especially since the Geneva Convention does not impose on countries specific criteria for dealing with this type of refugees).

On the level of Israeli law, the Law of Return of 1950 and the Citizenship Law of 1952 stipulated granting Jews the right to Israeli citizenship with their non-Jewish relatives, while Palestinians are already excluded from the Geneva Convention;

Because they are under the protection of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians "UNRWA" (UNRWA), the file of non-Jewish refugees was left subject to the government's political orientation and the Israeli public mood.

(3)

The occupying power did not provide any figures about the number of asylum seekers in Israel before 1970, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recorded 95 requests between 1970-1980, and then 237 requests in the period between 1980-1990, which is a relatively modest number due to restrictions on non-nationals. Jews.

(4) In the nineties, asylum requests rose to 753, and this number doubled in 2000, then doubled again by 2002. The occupation government did not rejoice in this matter, but on the contrary, it set clear standards and steps to combat it. Ariel Sharon, President At the time, the Israeli ministers launched a “closed sky” policy that not only stood in the way of asylum seekers, but also of those wishing to come to Israel in search of a living.

In addition, special security units of the occupation police have been active in monitoring refugees and removing them from the borders of the occupied Palestinian territories.

Refugees in the eyes of Israel .. "sick, criminals and rapists"

The city of Tel Aviv is the closest model to the image that the occupation government wants to market to the world, as it is a liberated and liberal city far from the Orthodox models that we may find in other Israeli cities.

However, Tel Aviv, despite its development and modernity, contains among its flanks an area in the south dominated by poverty, where non-Jewish refugees gather in search of humane livelihoods, and they often do not find it in the apartheid state that has been besieging the lives of non-Jews without distinction between Arab, African and European .

Israeli hostility to refugees was evident in October 2018 during the campaign launched by the then-ruling right-wing Likud party, headed by “Benjamin Netanyahu.” The party launched a propaganda campaign that included a banner of a Jewish man carrying an Israeli flag next to a black man carrying an Eritrean flag. We or them: the Hebrew city is infiltrated.

It is true that the banners were removed within days due to the criticism, but it revealed beyond any doubt that racism in Israel is not purely individual behavior, but rather a comprehensive policy pursued by the ruling class that views refugees as a demographic threat to the Jewish majority population.

Opinion makers in Israel usually use language that dehumanizes the refugees, not talking about them as fleeing genocide in Darfur in Sudan, for example, or from the conditions of military service similar to slavery in Eritrea, but rather as an occupying invader and a time bomb threatening Israel.

(5) It should be noted here that Israeli governments have always referred to refugees as infiltrators, a word chosen to have a negative impact on Israeli public opinion, as it automatically associates them with the “infiltrators” of the Palestinian guerrillas (as Israel calls them) who carried out operations inside occupied lands.

The refugees are often described in the Hebrew media as illegal residents, which is an inaccurate claim, because they live legally and with visas that are renewed monthly, although the visas do not give them the right to work or receive public services, especially health services.

(6) Although the Israeli authorities do not examine most asylum applications, their media promote the story that most of them came for inhumane economic reasons, statements echoed by Israeli officials and members of the Knesset.

(7)

Lying, pretending, and impersonation are not the only charges faced by refugees who dreamed of a better life in Israel, but rather they are the least serious charges compared to what the state, media and society accuse them of.

Although official data do not show a greater tendency to criminality among refugees compared to others, they suffer from the stigma that they pose a danger to society, as the media focus on incidents in which refugees are more involved than others.

In this context, we find a statement by Eli Yishai, the former Israeli Minister of the Interior, accusing the refugees of committing acts of violence and rape. In his view, the solution is simply to put all the refugees in prisons or in a detention facility until they are neutralized and their crimes prevented from society.

(8)

For its part, the Israeli media are following the same path, as they have considered on more than one occasion that the incidents of theft, breaking into homes and the high crime rate;

Phenomena arrived in Israel exclusively with foreign "infiltrators."

As for the Israeli government, it was not late in translating this aggression into actual steps. Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, gave orders to build an isolation wall whose construction work ended in December 2013 with the aim of stopping Africans coming to Israel through Egypt.

(9)

Besides being accused of criminality, refugees are also seen as a source of serious diseases and epidemics.

The Palestinian "Madar" center that specializes in Israeli affairs published a summary of a report issued by the "Foreign Workers Assistance Center" talking about refugees in Israel in 2012. The report quoted statements to "Eli Yishai" in which he considered that the number of complaints submitted by raped women against refugees was few. Because they fear being stigmatized as "carriers of HIV".

(10) The report also quoted the sayings of Israeli Professor "Ravi Karso", who said that 50-60% of HIV carriers are refugees, and that nearly 80% of tuberculosis patients in Israel are refugees as well.

Although objective numbers and statistics do not prove his statements, a number of Knesset members escalated in this direction, and considered that the presence of refugees in public places is a threat to the safety of Israelis and their children, who are now forced to share schools and clubs with refugee children.

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The threat to Jewish purity

By the end of 2019, the number of asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea had reached 32,000 people, and despite the support of these refugees by some Israeli civil society activists, the government, media and politicians in the country are calling for an end to this phenomenon as it poses a major threat to the structure of the Jewish community.

In 2018, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a plan to deport unmarried refugees, before he backtracked due to international pressure.

(12)

The specter of a demographic nightmare constantly hangs over the occupying power, as Tel Aviv fears any non-Jewish presence on the lands it has occupied since 1948, and those who hate any foreign presence see this as the greatest danger to the Jewish state since the so-called destruction of the Temple.

These "racist" warnings are not limited to politicians and media only, but are also present in religious discourse on the tongues of rabbis. Military Rabbi Achiad Eteniger called for sending the army and police to south Tel Aviv to clean the city of refugees who harass women, steal people and threaten Israel with a demographic revolution. .

(13)

In the same context, the famous Rabbi Yisrael Rosen wrote, commenting on the calls to treat refugees with the biblical commandments that urge treating the stranger with kindness, saying: “These are a group of strangers, who seriously disturb the fragile demography of Israel, and they are lazy who practice nothing but drunkenness, theft, rape and violence. They spread terror and fear in the places where they are."

(14) The integration of the new generation of refugee children raises the fears of defenders of Jewish identity. The refugee children speak Hebrew fluently, and they live like Israeli children to a large extent, after their families adopted the Israeli lifestyle in line with the surrounding society, and they receive a normal Israeli education In it, the teachings of Judaism occupy an important place, although the majority of them are Christians.

In parallel with the racial incitement, the Israeli authorities moved to limit the number of refugees by setting legal standards and adopting security steps that deter those wishing to search for a “European dream” within the occupied territories.

In 2013, the Knesset passed the Prevention of Infiltration Law, which allowed the detention of asylum seekers in the Holot detention center with the aim of motivating the fugitives to return to their countries voluntarily.

(15) The law stipulates imprisonment of asylum seekers for a period of three months, then transferring them to detention and imprisoning them for a period of up to 20 months with a deduction of 20% of their salaries. A refugee is not entitled to recover these funds unless he leaves the country.

This policy continued until 2020, when the Israeli Supreme Court imposed on the state to return these funds to 36,000 refugees due to the illegality of the move.

(16) In addition to the racist policies, the refugees suffer from the violence of a number of Israeli anti-immigration organizations and activists, as these groups organize night raids on the neighborhoods where immigrants gather to verbally and physically attack them and expel them from areas described as hostile to the state and out of its control.

(17)

This behavior comes to express an integration between the state’s racist policies and the movements of Israeli society, as the racism of Israeli groups towards Africans reveals a recurring pattern that occurs when the state fails to implement its policies, so settlers take over the task, as happens, for example, in the “Arab hunting” operations in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank. .

These practices began to appear in 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled for the second time that the law of imprisoning “infiltrators” was illegal, and the Israeli government was forced to release 2,200 African refugees at the time, in addition to 500 others who were being held in the Saharonim prison.

As a result of these decisions, hate crimes increased and calls were renewed to save the Jewishness of Israeli cities from the waves of the “African invasion.”

Racism campaign for all

Of course, Israel's racism towards foreigners is not limited to Africans.

It is true that the African refugee suffers in particular because of the color of his skin, but he suffers discrimination mainly because he is not a Jew, and this applies to all “gentiles” who land in Israel, even if they are white.

After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, about 18,000 Ukrainian citizens headed to Israel, and two-thirds of the arrivals were non-Jews, which sparked an internal debate and grumbling about the arrival of so many non-Jews to the Hebrew state, which is constantly trying to raise the percentage of Jews.

Jews constitute 74% of the population in the occupied territories, according to a census conducted last year, compared to 21% of the Arabs, and the rest are of other races and ethnicities, most notably non-Arab Christians.

(18)

For its part, the occupying power allowed Ukrainian Jews to enter it under the 1950 Law of Return, which guarantees all people with at least one Jewish grandfather the right to settle in Israel with citizenship and residency.

On the contrary, policies with non-Jews seemed more stringent. Last March, Ayelet Shaked, the Minister of the Interior, announced that the number of non-Jewish immigrants that the occupying power would receive at only five thousand, while giving the opportunity to stay for Ukrainians living in the occupied territories. - 20 thousand - until the end of the armed conflict and the stability of the situation.

This decision did not last for only five days, as Shaked retracted it, due to pressure from the left, which is pursuing a more open policy in this file.

(19)

This discriminatory policy angered the Ukrainian embassy in Israel, which criticized the occupying country's policies in dealing with its citizens after the Russian invasion, even after the Hebrew government announced "relaxation" of standards that surrounded asylum seekers fleeing the war.

In a statement, the embassy said that the Israeli measures are not commensurate with the difficulties faced by non-Jewish Ukrainian citizens due to the war, adding that “Russia is committing a massacre against the Ukrainian people, killing thousands of civilians, while the Israeli government is investigating the identity of every Ukrainian who has fled to it in an obstructive manner. ".

The Kyiv embassy also called on the occupying country to accept all Ukrainian refugees who have relatives living in Israel, and not to expel them until the end of the war.

(20)

The Ukrainian war, then, revealed the double standards adopted by the occupying power to receive foreigners. Despite its official support for Ukraine against Russia in a move that tried to restore its position within the Western alliance, it did not hesitate to show its rejection of the non-Jewish presence, despite its singing of slogans of democracy, diversity and difference in a region that controls It has religious and ethnic wars.

But unlike the case with the Ukrainians, Israel finds less embarrassment in its clear racist treatment of the Africans who want them to be expelled at any cost, whether by sending them directly to the countries from which they fled, or by finding a formula agreement with other African countries that accept hosting them in exchange for money instead, while it It finds no shame in intensifying its racist policies against Arabs and Palestinians, who remain the biggest and most visible victims of Israeli racism since the establishment of the occupying state more than seven decades ago.

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Margins:

The South Lebanon Army: Also known as the Lahad Army, it is a militia formed with the support of Israel from the people of southern villages and dissident units of the Lebanese army in 1976 with the aim of confronting Israel’s enemies, whether in the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Lebanese anti-occupation factions, such as the Amal Movement and the Communist Party, and later Hizb Allah.

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