Israel's Jewish-State Law is a Threat to the Human rights of its non-Jewish citizens
On 19th July 2018 Israel’s parliament past new public administrative law that declared Israel a Jewish –state. This law jettisons outrighly the standards which Israel established in its own declaration of independence in 1948. The concept of the nation-state law, a project put forth by the Israeli far right, was passionately debated for more than five years. But on 19th July 2018, the Knesset, Israel's parliament, passed it into a law. The law codifies the fact that Israel is a Jewish national state and includes measures that cement the discrimination of non-Jewish minorities in the country.
It was so conspicuous that right-wing Israelis close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed through this new act of self-determination for the state of Israel without concern for establishing a broad consensus within their multi-racial society. Thelaw also shares the neo-nationalist tempo with the legislative spirits behind Brexit, the new Turkish constitution and the political authenticity of Donald Trump in America. But unlike the Brexit, Israel’s Jewish-state law immediately divided the Jewish people; with resistance in the diaspora even greater than in Israel itself.
Even though this law aims at excluding Arabs and Africans in Israel from benefitting in the state sponsored social economic advantages , the Arab world was too busy with its own internal conflicts to give its full attention to the plight of the Palestinians to the degree to which it did when hundreds of thousands of them were displaced during the foundation of the state of Israel.
Something fun is that Israel's declaration of independence set new standards at the time by emphasizing democracy and equality for all without regard to religion or ethnicity. But neither democracy nor equality are mentioned in the new-Jewish state law. Instead non-Jewish minorities have lost the right to self-determination, the Arabic language has been downgraded and the creation of purely Jewish settlements has been declared an issue of national interest. That is not a policy of equality;it is a policy of superiority, one that does not shy away from conflict. A political move provoking the question; where is Judaism in Israel’s politics towards immigrants and its citizens of non-Jewish origin?
This Jewish superiority legislation has also coincided with Israel’s attempt to inhumane deportation of the African immigrants back to Africa. Israel had earlier-on promised to give a free air-ticked to any African asylum-seeker that would willfully accept to be deported out of Israel. But, for those that decline the deportation offer, they are to face an imprisonment of indefinite term in what looks like an intensive labour concentration camp in the hostile Southern hot areas of Israel. Most of the asylum-seekers in Israel are refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eretria, Somalia, Egypt, Djibouti, Rwanda, Uganda and Somaliland. There are also some few cases of refugees from war-torn Eastern European countries like Ukraine and so forth.
Reasons why these refugees ran away from their countries are;war, starvation, environmental dangers, disease, poverty, multiple-destitution, abandonment, fear of imprisonment for political and religious reasons, religious hostility, gender hostility, personal preference, fear of being conscripted as a child soldier, hunger for opportunities of personal development, search for amenities of personal talent, lack of parents, droughts and disasters, diseases and search for medical care. Most of refugees from North Africa ran to Israel because of geographical proximity of the state of Israel to North Africa.
Unfortunately, African refugees in Israel are treated as illegal migrants. On their arrival in Israel, they are first confined in an open air detention camps under the hot sun for days, months and years. Evidence from the Mainstream media around the world and Human rights watch institutes have often confirmed that most of the African asylum seekers in Israel never succeed to get the refugee status. Instead they remain in a detention camp for very long time. Some die while at detention camps without any medical attention. Sometimes Israel government authorizes for recruitment of the young African asylum-seekers into the compulsory free national service to serve the state for three years, only to return them back to the detention camp at the end, into the old conditions of illegal migrants. Such and several other brutalities have been happening to the asylum seeker in Israel.
The UN conventions and International law on refugees require the host countries to treat the refugees in a fair manner that is fully backed up with unblemished recognition of the basic human rights. The International laws about refugees beautifully resemble ethos and core teachings of Judaism, the national religion of Israel. Reading the English translation of the Talmud, a book which teaches Judaism the way the Bible teaches Christianity, you come to very clear and humane focused teachings on how a Jewish-judaist has to deal with a refugee. The Talmud cautions the Jews that profess Judaism not to oppress the strangers (migrants), not to oppress the orphan, widows, the poor, the lame, the unfed and the enemy who have not begun the war. The inspiration for this Jewish religious philosophy is based on the historical fact that the Jews were also migrants in Egypt and Babylon.
Surprisingly, Israeli government under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu have boldly gone against this age-long religious conscience of Judaism by ignoring the call by several Jewish Rabbi’s to the state about respect for the African migrants, only to initiate and then implement the cruel act of deporting African refugees to the countries that they never came from. Netanyahu and his government have been hiding behind a false cloak of argument that Rwanda government and Uganda government have signed a treaty with Israel, accepting Israel to deport the 70,000 refugees into their countries. Canada has strongly faulted the government of Israel on these, and also several consultations by several human rights watch organizations in these two countries show that there is no clear evidence of such agreement. Thus Israel is only playing a trick like the ones played by the White Americans in the past to dupe and con the black liberated slaves into deportation to Novia Scotia and Siera Leone as narrated by Napoleon Hill in the Book of the Negroes.
Even if there were such like agreements between or among Israel, Rwanda and Uganda, then they would only be social deals devoid of feasibility and moral authenticity. This is so because of very many technical reasons .First, Uganda is already emasculated economically by the dead weight of huge populations of refugees from Southern Sudan. Rwanda is surrounded by two countries having internal wars; Burundi and Congo. If anything Rwanda has to focus on assisting throngs and throngs of human destitution from security as experienced in these two countries. In fact if Rwanda and Uganda can be attracted into such agreements then this would be nothing else but only International politics with an eye on harvesting of cheap populism.
Israel is a developed country, in fact counted as one of the Western powers even if it is geographically located in the Middle East. Israel has enough; technological, economic and political machinery to host over a million internationally displaced persons. There is no challenge for it to host only 70,000 African immigrants. Economics aside, one spokesperson of the government of Israel in charge of deportation argued that the presence of African migrants in Israel are a threat to the racial purity of the Jewish people, that the migrants might one time in the future contaminate the purity of Jewish blood in Israel. May be he meant through marriage. Just like the way Hitler, pejoratively, called an Aryan with Jewish blood as Mischelin , Israel Culture derogates an Israel citizen with African blood as misrachi. The spokesperson of the Israel government in charge of deportation of Africans also argued that one of the reasons for deportation of Africans is the fear of upswing in the Misrachi population. In politics and literature such arguments are dismissed as anachronisms-social thinking overtaken by time. Niall Ferguson in the Wars of the World points out that such type of exclusive social thoughts were the main collective force behind upsurge in Nazi politics in German. Similarly, Seth Vikram in Two Lives a biography of his uncle Shanti Seth narrates about thoughts of social hatred that led to Auswisch massacre. They resemble the thoughts of Israel about African migrants and its Arab citizens.
Alexander Opicho: Mail;[email protected]