By Noa Yachot and Adi Lerner

The last year hasn’t been a good one for refugees and asylum seekers in Israel – or for those advocating on their behalf. Since an amendment to the Prevention of Infiltration Law was passed in January 2012, almost all change in the field of refugee rights has been for the worse, with the nascent asylum system in Israel making way for an unyielding detention regime. All asylum seekers arriving in Israel can now be detained for an unknown period, despite the fact that a vast majority of them cannot be deported. The law allows for a vague “humanitarian” exception – but despite the tireless work of refugee rights advocates, the state has adamantly refused to recognize the humanitarian grounds of even the most vulnerable of cases. When it comes to African refugees, the detention regime does not discriminate; as a result, small children are imprisoned, as are scores of survivors of unimaginably brutal torture at the hands of human smugglers in the Sinai Peninsula.

A view of the new section in Saharonim prison destined for imprisonment without trial of asylum seekers and refugees, August 31, 2012. (photo: Activestills)

The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the law next month. But in the meanwhile, advocates have scored some important victories in lower courts in recent weeks. And while up to 2,000 bona fide refugees remain imprisoned, leaving much work to be done, these victories are worth both reporting and celebrating.

Release of imprisoned children

One particularly exciting win came in the case of a mother and her two daughters, 8 and 11, from Eritrea. The three had been imprisoned in the Saharonim detention center for about 10 months. In their case, brought by Raya Meiler of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, the Be’er Sheva District Court held that the children, by virtue of being minors, have “special humanitarian grounds” justifying their release. Since the passage of the amended Prevention of Infiltration Law, the state had allowed only for the release of unaccompanied minors, while children who arrived with a parent remained in the vast desert prison.

Judge Yosef Alon rejected this position, and stated that the release of all minors on humanitarian grounds should be subject to judicial discretion. In this particular case, he determined that the girls’ young age – in addition to the length of their imprisonment and the fact that they cannot be deported to Eritrea – constitute humanitarian grounds. (It is hard for us to imagine a child remaining in indefinite detention without triggering a humanitarian ground, so we’re thrilled that the judge seemed to agree.)

In light of the new precedent, the Hotline requested the reexamination of other cases of parents detained with their children, and last week, nine more woman and 10 children, all Eritrean, were released.

An Eritrean refugee hugs his wife and children, as they arrive to the central bus station in Tel Aviv on May 6, 2013, after they were released earlier today from the “Saharonim” Israeli prison. (photo: Activestills)

Torture as a humanitarian ground

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of another appeal submitted by Raya Meiler of the Hotline, regarding victims of torture. (We won’t go into detail here about the extensive network of torture camps to which refugees are subjected on route to Israel; for more on the issue check out this report.) Earlier this year, the Be’er Sheva District Court judge ruled that torture and abuse suffered by asylum seekers en route to Israel cannot constitute “special humanitarian grounds.” Thankfully, on April 18, the Supreme Court rejected this disgraceful position.

An asylum seeker shows the scars he acquired as a result of torture en route to Israel. (photo: Sigal Rozen)

The Supreme Court decision also grants discretion to the Detention Review Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body that carries out monthly reviews of the cases of all detained asylum seekers, to release rape and torture survivors, even if they are not considered victims of trafficking and slavery (a legal category that enjoys some protections in Israel).  Until that decision, the tribunal did not believe it had the authority to do so. The Hotline is now working to secure psychological evaluations for all the torture victims known to the organization.

Applying for asylum from jail

Israel is a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, but the state makes it notoriously difficult for people to access the asylum procedure – that difficultly is particularly pronounced for imprisoned asylum seekers, even more so since the implementation of the amended anti-infiltration law. The Hotline works to locate asylum seekers and convey their requests to the state – but the organization is not allowed access to all the prisoners, and without intervention, they can easily languish for months without being given the opportunity to state their refugee claim before a government authority. But a recent decision by the Be’er Sheva District Court might make things a bit easier on that front as well.

According to the law, if the Interior Ministry does not process asylum requests within three months of their submission, the asylum seeker may be released from detention. Until now, however, the Interior Ministry did not begin counting when it received requests from the Hotline on behalf of those in prison. The recent ruling, in a case brought by Asaf Weitzen, determined that the Interior Ministry must indeed start counting as soon as it is notified that a given asylum seeker claims refugee status. This is especially significant considering the detainees do not have any access to actual asylum application forms (which is clearly a grave problem in its own right).

Unfortunately, despite this principled success, the Hotline has not managed to help fulfill the monetary conditions set for the release of this particular asylum seeker, and he remains in prison, despite having applied for refugee status six months ago.

Tribunal authority regarding asylum seekers involved in criminal proceedings

As +972 has reported in the past, a government regulation instated last year empowers the state to strip the residence permits of asylum seekers who have been suspected of criminal involvement, and to indefinitely detain them under the Prevention of Infiltration Law – even if they were never actually convicted or even charged. While the Hotline requested the release of those asylum seekers on the grounds of the illegality of the regulation, tribunal judges have thus far rejected those requests, claiming they do not have the authority to rule on its legality. But a Be’er Sheva judge, in a case brought by the Hotline, ruled on May 5 that the tribunal can do just that, and also exercise discretion in considering a range of other circumstances justifying release. This means that all of those asylum seekers, many of whom had hired private attorneys in order to appeal to the district court, can now turn to the tribunal through the Hotline, in a simpler (and free) process.

Next step: Strike down the law

A mobile home unit is transported into the new prison facility under construction near the current Saharonim Prison in the Negev Desert, near Kadesh Barnea, October 10, 2012. Israel is building a new facility that could hold thousands of additional asylum seekers. (photo: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org)

The State of Israel is actively pursuing a detention regime meant to snare as many asylum seekers as possible. Considering the nearly 2,000 who remain imprisoned, these victories might seem minor. But they provide some critical rays of light in what has been an increasingly dark reality for asylum seekers and refugees in Israel. And they could herald a much bigger victory: the Supreme Court, which is set to rule on a challenge to the amended law, has already indicated that the state has some explaining to do (the state, in response, continued to insist that the law is constitutional). The court should go much further, by striking the law and undoing the detention regime. Protecting refugees is not optional – not for Israel or any other country.

Adi Lerner is the Crisis Intervention Center Coordinator at the Hotline for Migrant Workers, whose activists visit detention centers regularly to provide paralegal aid to asylum seekers and other detainees. Noa Yachot is an editor at +972 Magazine. 

Tel Aviv Municipality officials showing an asylum seeker out of his resturant (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

A group of municipal officials led an operation to close African asylum seekers’ illegal businesses in the south Tel Aviv neighborhoods of Neve Sha’anan and Shapira at around 7 p.m. Sunday night. The municipal officers were accompanied by Border Police officers, a photographer and several large moving trucks complete with African workers.

Splitting into groups, the law enforcers went to several bars, restaurants and grocery stores owned by asylum seekers. As their legal status in Israel forbids them from either working or owning a business, most Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers are forced to make a living illegally, which leads authorities to chase them down and either punish their employers or close down their shops.

A policeman and an attack dog watch over African workers emptying an asylum seeker’s store (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

Such was the case Sunday evening. All the goods, furniture and other equipment in all the businesses were inventoried and confiscated, and the doors were welded shut. In none of the locations photographer Oren Ziv and I visited was there any resistance by the shop owners and the armed policemen (and one police attack dog) were left without much to do. Several Israeli bystanders cheered the officials for helping pushing foreigners out, while other muttered insults at them for enforcing racist policies.

Workers emptying a bar in south Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighborhood (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

Estimates have it that asylum seekers are running hundreds of small businesses in south Tel Aviv, mostly serving their own communities and naturally, authorities cannot possibly close them all down. However, owners often complain about police brutality, as Border Police patrols force people out of bars at midnight, at times using batons and even pepper spray. The municipality, too, is working hard at combating this small world of business and leisure, but operations on today’s scale are not a common sight.

Welding a shop’s door shut (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

It is possible that Mayor Ron Huldai’s administration pushed the operation forward as part of preparations for the upcoming October municipal elections. Many Israeli residents of south Tel Aviv are likely to be supportive of such actions, as the feeling is that asylum seekers are burdening the already weak physical and social infrastructure and poor services provided to the mostly working or lower-middle class population in the neighborhoods. This feeling is strengthened as some asylum seekers are pushed into criminal activities and the press gives extensive coverage to the criminality. Tensions between the communities has already led to several individual and mob attacks on asylum seekers by Israelis.

Municipal officials and private movers take a fridge out of an asylum seeker’s resturant (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

UPDATE, May 13, 10:30 a.m.:

Aladin Abaker, a Sudanese refugee, published pictures from Sunday night’s raid showing municipal Ministry of Health inspectors pouring bleach into pots of food in a restaurant, allegedly because the establishment is “a danger to public health.” He writes the following:

Friends meet in this place, the most delicious restaurant with a smell of home, to eat and remember our families in Darfur. Suddenly health inspectors and police forces swarmed in and destroyed the food we had ordered and the food in the pots, with no sensitivity to the people whose culture sees food as a sacred thing to be treated with respect. We tried to tell them that this place has been open for four years now, it’s where we eat all our meals, and not once has anyone gone ill. Even whites come to eat here…

Everybody present was in tears. The waitress told us: “I’ve seen some horrible things in my life, including torture in Sinai, but this has humiliated me more than torture.” I told her they were doing it to make our lives miserable and try to encourage us to return to Africa “willingly.”

Offical pouring bleach into food as Sudanese restaurant (Photo: Aladin Abaker)

When Oscar Wild wrote his in essay, “The Truth of Masks,” about the metaphysical significance of costumes and props in Shakespeare’s plays, he likely didn’t imagine that lesbians seeking asylum in the United Kingdom would need to familiarize themselves with his writing and with props of a different type (which were likely not used in Shakespeare’s plays). But it turns out that a lack of knowledge of his work, or of the use of dildos, could send lesbians to their deaths.

Let’s take a few of steps back. The UK asylum system is considered quite strict, relatively to many others in the “West.” (It goes without saying, of course, that compared with the State of Israel’s asylum system, it is an asylum seeker’s dream – last year, the refugee recognition rate in the UK was 25.1 percent, or 5,461 in absolute numbers, as opposed to less than 0.1 percent in Israel.) In contrast with Israel, where not one person, to date, as been recognized as a refugee on the grounds of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity, quite a few asylum seekers were recognized on those grounds in the UK. However, until 2010, asylum seekers who claimed persecution on sexual orientation or gender identity grounds were forced to pass tests with utterly arbitrary results. Asylum seekers who claimed persecution on the grounds of their sexual orientation had to prove that concealing their orientation in their country of origin, if it meant evading persecution, was “unreasonable” in their case. Only in cases where this concealment was unreasonable would the state authorities grant asylum. The test was dubbed by many the “Anne Frank principle” – i.e. in which circumstances would it have been reasonable or unreasonable to require that Anne Frank hide in an attic to avoid persecution?

All that changed in 2010, when the UK’s supreme court struck down that test. In a ruling in the case of an Iranian and a Cameroonian asylum seeker, it was determined that asylum seekers should not be obligated to hide their sexual orientation in order to evade persecution. The court also ruled that an asylum application should not be rejected even if the applicant, upon being deported, could be expected to avoid persecution through living “discretely.”

The new standard established by the supreme court for determining asylum requests on sexual orientation grounds has its own problems, but we can’t go into that here and will have to deal with it in a separate post. Let’s just say that even the new standard swings between the dichotomy of “closet” and “out,” and between “discretion” rooted in persecution and “discretion” rooted in “other social or family grounds.” It makes additional distinctions that probably don’t represent the experiences of persecuted sexual minorities or those doing the persecuting. But we’ll deal with all that another time (maybe).

Despite the difficulties that the new standard presents, the ruling significantly improved the lots of those seeking asylum on sexual orientation or gender identity grounds, and neutralized the idea that a person who can avoid persecution through concealment should do so, and isn’t eligible for asylum. One of the amusing parts of Lord Hope’s ruling was the paragraph where he wrote:

…just as male heterosexuals are free to enjoy themselves playing rugby, drinking beer and talking about girls with their mates, so male homosexuals are to be free to enjoy themselves going to Kylie concerts, drinking exotically coloured cocktails and talking about boys with their straight female mates.

Other more humorless writers criticized the “Kylie Minogue principle” as stereotypical and irreconcilable with rational refugee law (for example, the unbearably serious article by James Hathaway, “Queer Cases Make Bad Law”). But it’s clear that this is about the illustration of the right the ruling addresses – the right to live openly and freely and to act in a way that may not correspond with what is considered heteronormative behavior. Beyond that, it’s clear that at least some of the cases of persecution are not a result of a person’s sexual acts, but rather social behavior that does not fit in with the gender role assigned to him or her.

But now it seems that after the supreme court expanded the rights of LGBTQ individuals to asylum, the British authorities are seeing new ways to reduce the numbers of those eligible. The “discretion principle,” which was replaced by the “Kylie Minogue principle,” has now been replaced by the “dildo principle.”

A study based on interviews with lesbian asylum seekers, published recently by Claire Bennett of the University of Southampton in Britain, suggest that the “dildo standard” is achieving new heights of popularity. In order to prove that they are lesbians, women asylum seekers are asked by an immigration officer and an immigration judge to describe which sex toys they use. An asylum seeker from Pakistan was asked by an immigration judge to tell him which nightclubs she frequents, and he even expressed doubt she was a lesbian after she said that she does not participate in the gay pride parade. An asylum seeker from Uganda was asked questions about Oscar Wilde, an asylum seeker from Jamaica was told that she doesn’t “look like a lesbian” – and it doesn’t end there.

Speaking of creative ways to test sexual orientation, until recently, the Czech Republic tended to assess the credibility of asylum seekers who claimed they were homosexual through phallometric testing – by attaching their sex organs to instruments that measure changes in blood flow in reaction to pornographic pictures of men and women.

Here’s a cat.

A Sudanese woman shows her UNHCR Refugee card from Egypt during a refugee protest in front of the government’s offices in center Tel Aviv October 14, 2012. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills)

Breaking news: the Interior Ministry’s Refugee Status Determination (RSD) Unit, which deals with asylum seekers, will recommend – for the third time in three and a half years – that an individual be recognized as a refugee. The refugee slated to be recognized is an albino Nigerian national who may be persecuted if he is deported due to his albinism.

To date, from the thousands of requests that have been reviewed, the RSD unit has only provided the certifying bodies with two positive recommendations to recognize individuals as refugees; out of those two, only one was recognized as a refugee. In that case the individual was an albino girl from the Ivory Coast (a recommendation to recognize a Libyan national as a refugee was rejected by the Advisory Committee for Refugees).

A few days ago, the Population, Immigration and Borders Authority published its annual report with misleading data regarding the rate of refugee recognition by the RSD unit. The report details the number of asylum seekers recognized as refugees every year since the unit was established, in 2009 (a total of 22 refugees). The innocent reader will surmise that since its establishment the RSD unit reviewed 22 cases and recognized those individuals as refugees. However, of the 22 asylum requests that were approved, 21 were not reviewed by the RSD unit. Prior to 2009, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reviewed asylum requests in Israel, and in July of that year this responsibility was transferred to the Interior Ministry’s RSD unit. UNHCR continued to handle open cases, and many of them were stuck for extended periods of time, and their approvals were unrelated to the establishment of the RSD unit. Only one approved asylum request – the albino girl from the Ivory Coast – was the result of a positive recommendation by the RSD unit, and now the unit is recommending that another albino asylum seeker be recognized as a refugee.

Spread the word – albinos of Africa unite and come to Israel, you’ll be recognized as refugees here. On the other hand, if you’re black Africans, you’ll find nothing here. Thousands of Africans’ asylum requests were reviewed by the RSD unit, and not a single one had a positive recommendations. Albinos – In. Blacks – Raus.

Aside from the symbolic significances, it can be explained thusly: the RSD unit is a production line for simulated contradictions in interviewees’ remarks. The unit has never found a trustworthy person. Those interested in reading abundant examples of this can peruse the Hotline for Migrant Workers report on the RSD unit. If you can’t remember the color of the bus you took from Darfur to Khartoum – you’re a liar and not a refugee. If you couldn’t tell how many Ethiopian police officers raided your house and kidnapped your father at 3:00 a.m. when in was pitch dark – you are unreliable and are not refugee. If you forgot the birth date of one of your seven brothers – you’re a liar and not a refugee. If you didn’t know that your good friend was active in an illegal group in Colombia – you’re a liar and are not a refugee. Albinos have a hard time lying about the color of their skin, and therefore if albinos are persecuted in their country of origin, there’s no choice but to recognize them as refugees. But if you’re black, you’re just a liar, work infiltrator or economic migrant.

The RSD unit is programmed and calibrated to detect a lie in every word. The Interior Ministry successfully instilled a sense in RSD unit members that they are the Population, Immigration and Borders Authority elite, as the unit has requirements unheard of in other units: you must have an undergraduate degree, English letters are used in the unit name, there is a course taught by some Americans, and there is a distinct dress code (you haven’t seen unit pride until you’ve seen some RSD members in uniforms that are too small). At the end of the day, the unit uses the same techniques to produce lies as the other Interior Ministry units, with some improvements. Asylum interviews in the unit feel like police interrogations, in which every other sentence is met with a hostile look, an impatient outburst, or anything else meant to convey to the asylum seeker that he or she is being held as a liar until proving otherwise. Any person who sits in on such an interview can, at any point, stop believing themselves.

Inside the RSD unit, no one speaks the truth. There are only liars. When everything an individual says is a lie, unrelated to the question of whether he or she is describing something that really happened, a distinction can no longer be made between the truth and a lie. Asylum systems are meant to distinguish between refugees and those who are not refugees, but when the the system is so sick that it can’t identify a refugee if they hit them in the face (unless he or she is albino), the distinction that the unit makes is insignificant. If a person faces no danger in his or her country of origin, it is dangerous for everyone in their country of origin. If no one is a refugee, then everyone is a refugee. If everyone is a liar, everyone is telling the truth.

The asylum world created by the Interior Ministry is nearly post-modern, in this respect, but it isn’t really. When every asylum seeker is a liar, the terms “truth” and “lie” lose any rational meaning. And therefor the Interior Ministry can follow that same line of thinking – it can tell the public that on the one hand, all of the Sudanese and Eritreans will be in danger if they are returned to their countries of origin, yet they are not refugees but rather economic migrants. It can tell the Supreme Court, through the State Prosecution, that all of the Eritreans will soon be deported, and it is therefore fine if some of them are held in prison for an undetermined amount of time, even though they will not be repatriated any time soon.

Here’s a cat.

White cat and a tabby (Photo: Flickr / Tiger Girl / CC)

We have discussed in the past the ways that the Supreme Court rules on refugee-related matters without any reference to refugee law. Since then, many similar decisions have been taken, and if it seems that we neglected to report on these rulings, it’s because they have become, in our eyes, trivial – courts are disinterested in refugee law. Judges purport to rule in accordance with international law without bothering to any document except for the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Their manner of analyzing the cases before them indicates a lack of will to bother learning the relevant material, the many international documents on the subject and decisions handed down all over the world interpreting the Refugee Convention. Israeli courts, of course, aren’t bound to other countries’ interpretation of the Refugee Convention, but they don’t even try to research how the Convention is generally interpreted.

The decisions that reach the review of district courts and of the Supreme Court are those taken by the Ministry of Interior’s unit that processes asylum seekers in the Ministry of Interior, which decides on the recognition of asylum seekers as refugees. This unit, a “kingdom of lies,” is an administrative body that is not credible or professional in anyone’s eyes except for its own and those of the Justice Ministry. Oh right, and in the eyes of a few judges, who have ruled that this body is professional, based on statements of state prosecution officials who say it’s professional. So according to some judges, if they claim they’re professional, they probably know what they’re doing. But the Unit for the Treatment of Asylum Seekers, which has examined thousands of asylum requests in the three years and has only approved one (making it the lowest refugee recognition rate in the “western” world), is already famous in Israel and in the world for its lack of credibility and professionalism, and even groups that have participated in training its employees admit their failure.

As for the legal system, it is also losing credibility on everything related to asylum applications. To this day, of hundreds of petitions and appeals heard by the Supreme Court and district courts, the yield is as follows: zero rulings by the Supreme Court recognizing someone as a refugee; one ruling in which the Supreme Court overturned a Ministry of Interior decision not to recognize someone as a refugee (due to deficiencies in the translation, the Supreme Court ruled another interview should take place, and following the interview – surprise, surprise – the Interior Ministry again rejected the asylum request); one ruling in which the district court ordered the Ministry of Interior to recognize a woman as a refugee; and an additional ruling in which the District Court ordered the Ministry of Interior recognize someone as a refugee, only to be overturned by the Supreme Court. There is no other “western” country whose legal system is so passive toward asylum seekers. There is no doubt that the Ministry of Interior and the courts suffer the terrible phenomenon coined by attorney Omer Shatz from We Are Refugees as “denial of refugeeness.”

As we have written in the past, there is no connection between Israeli court decisions and refugee law. In fact, in most cases, the Supreme Court doesn’t even allow an applicant to stay in Israel pending a ruling on whether or not his deportation may put him at risk. See for example, the decision [Hebrew] handed down last Thursday by Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Amit.

Justice Amit rejected the Nigerian asylum seeker’s application against his deportation, pending a decision on an appeal to the Supreme Court against the rejection of his asylum request. The asylum seeker claimed that a Nigerian militant group attacked him and is likely to kill him, and that the authorities of his state are unable to offer him protection. Among the explanations for rejecting the request for an interim injunction was that the asylum seeker “did not bring any evidence supporting his claim that he experienced violence at the hands of the members of any group or that he is being persecuted by them.”

We’ll never know what evidence Justice Amit expects someone being persecuted by a militant group to bring forward. Should he have been expected to supply a letter with the group’s letterhead, stating, “To Whom it May Concern, I hereby acknowledge that we intend to murder the person referred herein.” Did he expect the asylum seeker to fly witnesses in from Nigeria to Israel, if there even are any? Or did he expect to receive a memo from the Nigerian police, stating, “We are unable to provide the applicant with protection.” Exactly because there is often no way to supply objective evidence for persecution, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees states there is no requirement for such evidence in order for a person to be recognized as a refugee. The UNHCR handbook explains that a refugee who has escaped from his country will often be unable to present evidence of his persecution. This places the burden on the body examining the applications to find evidence, but also extends the benefit of the doubt to the asylum seeker in cases where it was not possible to supply such evidence. That is also the practice of the rest of the “western” countries that are party to the Refugee Convention.

Justice Amit also explained his decision with the fact that “the applicant could not explain why he did not pursue alternative living arrangements in Nigeria, which is a country that extends over enormous territory, and what is stopping him from living in other regions in Nigeria.” Indeed, a person who can find protection from persecution by relocating within his country is expected to return, since the international protection provided by the Refugee Convention is meant to substitute that of the country of citizenship. However, Amit’s decision (and countless other Ministry of Interior decisions) instructs us that in the State of Israel, an asylum seeker must positively prove that he no way to live anywhere in his country. This demand – that an asylum seeker who comes from a specific area must meet the burden of proving he will not enjoy state protection in every single city, town and village in his country – cannot stand.

For exactly this reason, the UNHCR position is as follows: when it is claimed that someone should not be recognized as a refugee on the grounds that he can receive protection in a different area in his country of citizenship, the burden of proving the existence of such a place falls on the state, which must identify the place in which the person can enjoy protection, and provide evidence that this alternative place constitutes a reasonable alternative.

The Interior Ministry declares from time to time in courts and in the media that it employs the same standards that UNHCR does in examining asylum applications. But this Supreme Court decision indicates two – of many areas – in which the Interior Ministry entirely ignores basic UNHCR standards in interpreting and implementing the Convention. The Supreme Court is not obligated to accept UNHR’s interpretation of the Convention, which it can say it is interpreting incorrectly. But such a determination cannot be a serious one. Nor is it serious to entirely ignore these standards, or for the Supreme Court to display a total lack of interest in how UNHCR and other countries interpret the Convention. As we wrote here, the State of Israel is a signatory to the Convention, which states in Article 35 that states are to cooperate with UNHCR, and enable it to carry out its supervision of the implementation of the Convention’s provisions.

For now, the Supreme Court continues to mostly help the Interior Ministry bring the State of Israel’s asylum system down to new lows.

Related:
An open letter to the incoming interior minister
Who cares about the UN?
Israel’s newest national project: Ridding the country of ‘foreigners’
Myths, facts and suggestions: Asylum seekers in Israel

Following coalition negotiations, free of Natan Eshel and other evils, you will be sworn in as Israel’s interior minister. Having seen the hardships faced by a number of Israel’s interior ministers, let us give you three recommendations to ensure that your tenure is pleasant:

1. Don’t let lawyers shape policy for you. As we are afflicted with the severe defect of legal thought and reasoning, let us assure you that the lawyers around you will always try to take the reigns to determine policy and dictate your conduct, under the guise of legal advice (sometimes in the form of binding legal advice). Former attorney-general Elyakim Rubinstein provided an extreme example of such conduct with former interior minister Avraham Poraz. When Poraz sought use the authority legally vested in him to decide on the status of migrant workers’ children, who had resided in Israel for many years, Rubinstein interfered and determined, with no legal basis, that it was inappropriate for the interior minister to make a decision on this matter.

Rubinstein’s blatant interference on this matter is in many ways reminiscent of his practice during his tenure as attorney-general to publish public and non-legal opinions on public figures who would not be criminally prosecuted, or his recent conduct as the chairman of the Central Elections Committee, when he disqualified – in an inconsistent manner – certain billboards, as well campaign ads produced by Balad and Otzma l’Israel, simply because they were not to his liking. Granted, the current attorney-general is not likely to interfere on this matter, but previous interior ministers had to deal with senior Justice Ministry and State Prosecution officials.

Relying on lawyers while you are shaping policy is debilitating. What begins as consultations on policy quickly devolves into them dictating legally obligated policy. Therefore, if you want to have any influence in your ministry, make it clear to the attorney-general and his deputies, to the State Prosecution and the legal bureau in the Population, Immigration and Borders Authority, that you do not intend to include them in consultations during the policy formulation stage. Make sure to inform the lawyers only after the policy design phase and request that they limit their opinion to one question – legal or illegal. They need not explain why one method rather than the other is preferred or why something is or is not appropriate. They need to state whether it is legal or illegal, and if it is illegal they should explain why and how they propose to implement the policy legally.

2. Drop your predecessor’s racist rhetoric. The interior minister’s dangerous verbosity was prevalent these past four years. So much was attributed to the “foreigners” in Israel: diseases, violence, crime, the destruction of the Zionist dream. Your predecessor believed that lowly rhetoric would attract voters. He was wrong. His party did not gain any additional seats in the recent elections, and may even find itself outside of the coalition. Michael Ben-Ari’s party, which fed into the hatred and racism against “foreigners” in Israel, did not gain a thing from its pathetic statements. In fact, Ben-Ari, who believed that he would find new voters in southern Tel Aviv, was surprised to discover that few in those neighborhoods voted for him. The overt racism is not electorally advantageous (and even if it was, it could not be justified), and it positions Israel as a racist country whose ministers dare say things that would be condemned in the public and political discourse anywhere else in the world.

3. Review a sample of decisions made by the Population, Immigration and Borders Authority. The devil is in the details. Even if you overcome the lawyers and are able to advance the policy that you seek, the individual decisions will be made by clerks who have undergone many years of indoctrination, according to which the “foreigner” is an enemy, and everything should be done to prevent him or her from gaining legal status in Israel. You won’t be able to understand how the Interior Ministry implements your policy if you don’t review random Population, Immigration and Borders Authority decisions. When you review them, you’ll find that woe be unto an Israeli who dares marry a foreign partner. Partners will face many obstacles until they are granted permanent status in Israel (that is if they are granted status). You’ll find that over the course of three years the Interior Ministry granted one person refugee status, as the system has become abusive, does not properly uphold the Refugee Conventions, and leads to the deportation of individuals to countries where their lives are in danger. You’ll find that your ministry randomly jails thousands of asylum seekers in conditions that are not suitable for human beings. You’ll find that the Interior Ministry strips migrant workers, who were brought to Israel to work in the hardest sectors for minimum wage (or less), of their status simply because they had the audacity to fall in love and be in a relationship. You’ll find that same-sex couples who seek to establish their status in Israel are treated as second class citizens because they can’t get married. You’ll find that your ministry tears families apart – parents, partners and children – because they are Palestinian. You’ll find that despite the Supreme Court’s rejection of the policy that binds migrant workers to their employers, in practice the Interior Ministry makes sure to create a link binding the workers to their employers in a manner that infringes on individuals’ basic rights as employees. If you randomly review the Population, Immigration and Borders Authority’s decisions you’ll find that if the political leadership does not monitor the bureaucratic echelon, nothing will change.

Good luck.

Established in 1972, ACRI is Israel’s oldest and largest human rights organization and the only one dealing with the entire spectrum of rights and civil liberties issues in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Read more about ACRI here. 

An Israeli woman shouts at an African immigrant during an anti-immigrant demonstration organized by right-wing activists in south Tel Aviv on December 31, 2012. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org)

As 2012 came to an end, the situation of the thousands of migrant workers and asylum seekers in Israel remains as uncertain as ever. As a grim reminder of the past year and an omen for what is yet to come, MK Michael Ben-Ari and his extreme-right supporters held another protest calling for the immediate expulsion of all “infiltrators” as a supposed solution to all of South Tel Aviv’s problems, leading to the deployment of a massive police force meant to prevent any trouble from spoiling a night of partying.

MK Micheal Ben-Ari shouting slogans during an anti-immigrant demonstration, organized by members of his political party as part of their election campaign, in south Tel Aviv on December 31, 2012. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org)

Israeli police prevent right-wing protestors and residents of south Tel Aviv from marching to Levinsky Park during an anti-immigrant demonstration  on December 31, 2012. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org)

On December 30, police released information about the rape of an 83-year-old that had taken place a week earlier. For reasons unknown, the police also choose to release the suspect’s background, identifying him as an Eritrean national. Oblivious to numerous police statistics indicating that the migrant population has lower crime rates than the general Israeli population, a demonstration against African refugees and asylum seekers was immediately called, sparking fears of another race riot, such as the one that took place last May in the Hatikva quarter.

 

An Israeli confronts at an African immigrant during an anti-immigrant demonstration in south Tel Aviv, on December 31, 2012. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

 

A human rights activist (holding the sign), arguing with a right-wing protestor during an anti-immigrant demonstration in south Tel Aviv, on December 31, 2012. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Ben-Ari, the self-appointed defender of the poor and dispossessed of South Tel Aviv, was at the forefront. It is interesting to notice that many in the protest were heard shouting slogans against Interior Minister Eli Yishai and his Shas party. As right-wing politicians continue to verbally assault Africans in order to score electoral points, and as violent attacks against the migrant community keep on going unpunished, the debate on Israel’s immigration policies keeps shifting further to the right.

 

An African man hiding near his belongings during an anti-immigrant march in south Tel Aviv, on December 31, 2012. At the far end of the frame, a Border Police officer and a right-wing protestor with a megaphone, escorting the march. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

 

An African immigrant looks at an anti-immigrant demonstration held by right-wing activists in south Tel Aviv on December 31, 2012. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Notwithstanding a year marked by increasingly violent racist demonstrations, arson attacks and even a full-scale pogrom in the Hatikva quarter, many migrants took to the streets of south Tel Aviv to celebrate the new year. For a few moments, between December 31 and January 1, the Neveh Sha’anan pedestrian mall was illuminated with fireworks, as many danced in the streets amid police horses and border police patrols.

 

Immigrants celebrating New Year’s Eve in Tel Aviv’s southern neighborhood of Neveh Sha’anan, January 1, 2013. Police forces were patrolling the area following an anti-immigrant right-wing demonstration that took place earlier in the evening. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

 

Immigrants celebrating New Year’s Eve in Tel Aviv’s southern neighborhood of Neveh Sha’anan, January 1, 2013.  (Photo by: Shiraz Grinbaum/ Activestills.org)

 

Immigrants celebrating New Year’s Eve in Tel Aviv’s southern neighborhood of Neveh Sha’anan under police surveillance on January 1, 2013. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

 

Immigrants celebrating New Year’s Eve in Tel Aviv’s southern neighborhood of Neveh Sha’anan, January 1, 2013. Police forces were patrolling the area following an anti-immigrant right-wing demonstration that took place earlier in the evening. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

 

Kids lighting fireworks and celebrating New Year’s Eve in Tel Aviv’s southern neighborhood of Neveh Sha’anan, January 1, 2013. (Photo by: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

By Rami Gudovitch

African asylum seekers sit in a bus, handcuffed, after being arrested in South Tel Aviv, December 22, 2012. (photo: Oren Ziv / Activestills)

Friday was a rainy day in Tel Aviv. The head of the immigration authorities, Amnon Ben Ami, had issued a press release promising to cease all arrest operations for the duration of the Christian holidays and New Year’s Eve.

The Levinsky Park multi-lingual library, an open library located at the center of the park, was closed due to the rain. Its regular visitors, children from asylum-seeking families, were left in the rain, wandering between the many homeless asylum seekers residing in the park. One of the girls, 9 years old, from a South Sudanese family, seemed worried. Her father had not returned home. While I was aware that her family had been granted temporary protection on humanitarian grounds (unlike most South Sudanese residents, who were deported this past summer), I was concerned, knowing all too well the “Oz” immigration unit often arrests people despite their protected status.

My concern was heightened because, only a couple of hours earlier, I was informed through a phone call from Juba that of the 700 deportees to South Sudan, 17 had died already, most from illness or violent attacks. My girlfriend Saranna and I decided to help the girl look for her father. Walking down Levinsky Street, we came across one Christmas procession after another, each of a different community: a Nepali, then a Philippine, and finally, an Eritrean procession. The girl accepted offers from the revelers, cheerfully joining the marches one after another, leaving her worries behind for a moment. Luckily, we found her father looking for her down the street.

The next day, Saturday evening, the neighborhood filled with Oz immigration vans. A major operation was going on. The public statement informing the communities that no operations would take place over the holidays turned out to be a deception designed to create a sense of comfort within the communities, thereby facilitating a major arrest operation. Perhaps some bureaucrats in the Ministry of Interior even enjoyed the little joke: no operation on the holiday, but a major operation on the eve of necessary preparations for the holiday. What a grotesque image: a group of Philippine ladies, dressed in their Christmas costumes, the contents of their shopping bags full of presents for their kids spread out in the street around them, as they desperately searched for their documents, the absence of which would result in detention and deportation. For the first time in over five years of activities in the neighborhood, the immigration officers even made an attempt to detain Saranna, proving their skills in discerning even a minute trace of non-Jewish origin.

Soon, we learned that they were trying to fill a bus with arrestees. A brave group of activists with cameras, threatening to take the pictures to the front pages, successfully chased the bus away with only 15 detainees inside, many of whom are apparently asylum seekers. Why did the bus leave? Because what the government wants is to feed the public with numbers and statistics on its success in “cleaning” the streets from African migrants before the coming elections. They don’t need heartbreaking images of frightened asylum seekers.

An immigration officer makes an arrest in South Tel Aviv, December 22, 2012. (photo: Oren Ziv / Activestills)

What is likely to be the destiny of the asylum seekers detained? Possibly, like many others in recent months, they will be put in a detention camp under the new law allowing at least three years detention for any asylum seeker who crossed the Egyptian border. The premise for these arrests is still unknown to us. A new regulation allows the detention of any asylum seeker accused of criminal activity, even in the absence of sufficient evidence for an indictment. We have observed in recent months that this regulation is being abused by police to arbitrarily arrest asylum seekers, only to withdraw the criminal accusation and place them in detention for at least three years under the new law.

Incidentally, Israel is the democratic country with the lowest refugee recognition rate, close to zero percent, compared to between 35 and 70 percent for certain groups in other countries. “We will make the lives of the refugees miserable until they will choose to leave,” said Interior Minister Eli Yishai in a recent public statement explaining the rationale behind the new law and the construction of a camp designed to accommodate at least 16,000 asylum seekers. And there, in the camp, they are given the “option” of signing a “voluntary deportation” order releasing Israel from the commitment to protect them. Many choose to leave, and from new testimonies we gather daily, there is genuine reason to fear the worst for the destiny of many of the deportees who have simply disappeared.

“Do not compare what we do to what was done to us,” it is commonly said. While writing these lines, I hear on the radio that the Jewish man who was convicted of providing the petrol bomb thrown into a kindergarten of asylum seeker children in south Tel Aviv will not serve a single day in prison. Indeed, I do not think that Israel behaves worse than some other democracies, or at least that was the case until recently. However, in making a comparison, we draw a line: we distinguish ourselves from “them,” stating that there are certain things we cannot accept. Refraining from acting in certain ways delineates our identity – as persons, as moral agents, even as Jews. But in the last year, Israel has turned blind to the lives of others, betraying its commitment to refugees and by extension, to its own history and identity. Merry Christmas.

Dr. Rami Gudovitch is a social activist working with migrant communities in southern Tel Aviv and a philosophy instructor at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya.