Here is an ugly story about a Florida family denied the right to travel from Israel's Ben-Gurion airport after they visited the West Bank. Why? They're Palestinian-American, visiting Palestinian relatives. The family have American passports; but for a couple of weeks they were compelled to stay in the West Bank. Now all have returned to Florida, with the exception of a 22-year-old who is staying in the West Bank, refusing to accede to Israel's terms. Wonder how that kid feels about Zionism now...
This forced ghettoization of American Palestinians must be contrasted with the incredible binationalism that Israelis enjoy with respect to the U.S. Many Jews have emigrated to Israel and then come back here to put out their ideas. Gershom Gorenberg, Hillel Halkin, Michael Oren, Max Singer, Dore Gold--I believe all made aliyah but publish their ideas here. Fine. This internationalism is crucial to Israel's public image as a great democracy (though I still don't understand why Gold gets $96,000 a year as a "scholar" from the American Enterprise Institute). Oh but don't ever compare it to South Africa...
Don't worry, no one ought to compare Israel to South Africa. As a matter of fact, there's absolutely no comparison. Israel welcomes Jews of all colors and persuasions. They have other rules for non-Jews. After all, why should they allow unrestrained immigration, especially of their enemies?
Or yes, buddy, there so much similarities, your head spins. South Africa is not the worst obe, by the way. You want to talk about immigration? You said "Israel welcomes Jews of all colors and persuasions. They have other rules for non-Jews"….
Same as Nazi Germany – in 1930-ies it welcomed all Germans from other countries (Folksdeuthsche). They have "OTHER" rules for non-Germans.
Racism and racial hatred is same everywhere. Similarities are astonishing.
Alex – I'm not sure if that comparison really holds up. Israel has taken in immigrants from other countries who are non-Jews. Non-jewish refugees from other countries have sought and received asylum in Israel. You are correct that Israel has a special immigation policy for jews. That is one of the reasons it was founded. Jews had been persecuted in many countries over the centuries and without a formal homeland they were often at the mercy of disinterested outside parties to provide them with protection. Israel was not just founded as some sort of special social club for Jews only. It was founded as a haven for a people who had been repeatedly victimized as scapegoats for the actions of others or a small subset of Jews. This does not excuse their behavior towards the Palestinians, but it is a critical point that seems to be conveniently overlooked in the comments I've read on this blog. Nazi Germany was a completely different animal. That the Israelis are careful to not allow entry to those who seek to end its existence as Jewish state is not surprising or morally wrong per se, although it is problematic and at least in the case you describe here rather foolish.
Switzerland: Europe's heart of darkness?
Switzerland is known as a haven of peace and neutrality. But today it is home to a new extremism that has alarmed the United Nations. Proposals for draconian new laws that target the country's immigrants have been condemned as unjust and racist. A poster campaign, the work of its leading political party, is decried as xenophobic. Has Switzerland become Europe's heart of darkness? By Paul Vallely
Published: 07 September 2007
At first sight, the poster looks like an innocent children's cartoon. Three white sheep stand beside a black sheep. The drawing makes it looks as though the animals are smiling. But then you notice that the three white beasts are standing on the Swiss flag. One of the white sheep is kicking the black one off the flag, with a crafty flick of its back legs.
The poster is, according to the United Nations, the sinister symbol of the rise of a new racism and xenophobia in the heart of one of the world's oldest independent democracies.
A worrying new extremism is on the rise. For the poster – which bears the slogan "For More Security" – is not the work of a fringe neo-Nazi group. It has been conceived – and plastered on to billboards, into newspapers and posted to every home in a direct mailshot – by the Swiss People's Party (the Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) which has the largest number of seats in the Swiss parliament and is a member of the country's coalition government.
With a general election due next month, it has launched a twofold campaign which has caused the UN's special rapporteur on racism to ask for an official explanation from the government. The party has launched a campaign to raise the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure to allow judges to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes once they have served their jail sentence.
But far more dramatically, it has announced its intention to lay before parliament a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as sentence is passed.
It will be the first such law in Europe since the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft – kin liability – whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for their crimes and punished equally.
The proposal will be a test case not just for Switzerland but for the whole of Europe, where a division between liberal multiculturalism and a conservative isolationism is opening up in political discourse in many countries, the UK included.
SWISS TRAINS being the acme of punctuality, the appointment was very precise. I was to meet Dr Ulrich Schlüer – one of the men behind the draconian proposal – in the restaurant at the main railway station in Zürich at 7.10pm. As I made my way through the concourse, I wondered what Dr Schlüer made of this station of hyper-efficiency and cleanliness that has a smiling Somali girl selling pickled herring sandwiches, a north African man sweeping the floor, and a black nanny speaking in broken English to her young Swiss charge. The Swiss People's Party's attitude to foreigners is, shall we say, ambivalent.
A quarter of Switzerland's workers – one in four, like the black sheep in the poster – are now foreign immigrants to this peaceful, prosperous and stable economy with low unemployment and a per capita GDP larger than that of other Western economies. Zürich has, for the past two years, been named as the city with the best quality of life in the world.
What did the nanny think of the sheep poster, I asked her. "I'm a guest in this country," she replied. "It's best I don't say."
Dr Schlüer is a small affable man. But if he speaks softly he wields a big stick. The statistics are clear, he said, foreigners are four times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss nationals. "In a suburb of Zürich, a group of youths between 14 and 18 recently raped a 13-year-old girl," he said. "It turned out that all of them were already under investigation for some previous offence. They were all foreigners from the Balkans or Turkey. Their parents said these boys are out of control. We say: 'That's not acceptable. It's your job to control them and if you can't do that you'll have to leave'. It's a punishment everyone understands."
It is far from the party's only controversial idea. Dr Schlüer has launched a campaign for a referendum to ban the building of Muslim minarets. In 2004, the party successfully campaigned for tighter immigration laws using the image of black hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports. And its leading figure, the Justice Minister, Christoph Blocher, has said he wants to soften anti-racism laws because they prevent freedom of speech.
Political opponents say it is all posturing ahead of next month's general election. Though deportation has been dropped from the penal code, it is still in force in administrative law, says Daniel Jositsch, professor of penal law at Zurich University. "At the end of the day, nothing has changed, the criminal is still at the airport and on the plane."
With astute tactics, the SVP referendum restricts itself to symbolic restitution. Its plan to deport entire families has been put forward in parliament where it has little chance of being passed. Still the publicity dividend is the same. And it is all so worrying to human rights campaigners that the UN special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diène, warned earlier this year that a "racist and xenophobic dynamic" which used to be the province of the far right is now becoming a regular part of the democratic system in Switzerland.
Dr Schlüer shrugged. "He's from Senegal where they have a lot of problems of their own which need to be solved. I don't know why he comes here instead of getting on with that."
Such remarks only confirm the opinions of his opponents. Mario Fehr is a Social Democrat MP for the Zürich area. He says: "Deporting people who have committed no crime is not just unjust and inhumane, it's stupid. Three quarters of the Swiss people think that foreigners who work here are helping the economy. We have a lot of qualified workers – IT specialists, doctors, dentists." To get rid of foreigners, which opponents suspect is the SVP's real agenda, "would be an economic disaster".
Dr Schlüer insists the SVP is not against all foreigners. "Until war broke out in the Balkans, we had some good workers who came from Yugoslavia. But after the fighting there was huge influx of people we had a lot of problems with. The abuse of social security is a key problem. It's estimated to cost £750m a year. More than 50 per cent of it is by foreigners."
There is no disguising his suspicion of Islam. He has alarmed many of Switzerland's Muslims (some 4.3 per cent of the 7.5 million population) with his campaign to ban the minaret. "We're not against mosques but the minaret is not mentioned in the Koran or other important Islamic texts. It just symbolises a place where Islamic law is established." And Islamic law, he says, is incompatible with Switzerland's legal system.
To date there are only two mosques in the country with minarets but planners are turning down applications for more, after opinion polls showed almost half the population favours a ban. What is at stake here in Switzerland is not merely a dislike of foreigners or a distrust of Islam but something far more fundamental. It is a clash that goes to the heart of an identity crisis which is there throughout Europe and the US. It is about how we live in a world that has changed radically since the end of the Cold War with the growth of a globalised economy, increased immigration flows, the rise of Islam as an international force and the terrorism of 9/11. Switzerland only illustrates it more graphically than elsewhere.
Switzerland is so stark an example because of the complex web of influences that find their expression in Ulrich Schlüer and his party colleagues.
He is fiercely proud of his nation's independence, which can be traced back to a defensive alliance of cantons in 1291. He is a staunch defender of its policy of armed neutrality, under which Switzerland has no standing army but all young men are trained and on standby; they call it the porcupine approach – with millions of individuals ready to stiffen like spines if the nation is threatened.
Linked to that is its system of direct democracy where many key decisions on tax, education, health and other key areas are taken at local level.
"How direct democracy functions is a very sensitive issue in Switzerland," he says, explaining why he has long opposed joining the EU. "To the average German, the transfer of power from Berlin to Brussels didn't really affect their daily lives. The transfer of power from the commune to Brussels would seriously change things for the ordinary Swiss citizen."
Switzerland has the toughest naturalisation rules in Europe. To apply, you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years, pay taxes, and have no criminal record. The application can still be turned down by your local commune which meets to ask "Can you speak German? Do you work? Are you integrated with Swiss people?"
It can also ask, as one commune did of 23-year-old Fatma Karademir – who was born in Switzerland but who under Swiss law is Turkish like her parents – if she knew the words of the Swiss national anthem, if she could imagine marrying a Swiss boy and who she would support if the Swiss football team played Turkey. "Those kinds of questions are outside the law," says Mario Fehr. "But in some more remote villages you have a problem if you're from ex-Yugoslavia."
The federal government in Berne wants to take the decision out of the hands of local communities, one of which only gave the vote to women as recently as 1990. But the government's proposals have twice been defeated in referendums.
The big unspoken fact here is how a citizen is to be defined. "When a Swiss woman who has emigrated to Canada has a baby, that child automatically gets citizenship," Dr Schlüer says. But in what sense is a boy born in Canada, who may be brought up with an entirely different world view and set of values, more Swiss than someone like Fatma Karademir who has never lived anywhere but Switzerland?
The truth is that at the heart of the Swiss People's Party's vision is a visceral notion of kinship, breeding and blood that liberals would like to think sits very much at odds with the received wisdom of most of the Western world. It is what lies behind the SVP's fear of even moderate Islam. It has warned that because of their higher birth rates Muslims would eventually become a majority in Switzerland if the citizenship rules were eased. It is what lies behind his fierce support for the militia system.
To those who say that Germany, France, Italy and Austria are nowadays unlikely to invade, he invokes again the shadow of militant Islam. "The character of war is changing. There could be riots or eruptions in a town anywhere in Switzerland. There could be terrorism in a financial centre."
The race issue goes wider than politics in a tiny nation. "I'm broadly optimistic that the tide is moving in our direction both here and in other countries across Europe, said Dr Schlüer. "I feel more supported than criticised from outside."
The drama which is being played out in such direct politically incorrect language in Switzerland is one which has repercussions all across Europe, and wider.
Ajax:
There is NO Jewish immigration into Israel. Jews have AUTOMATIC citizenship there, same as Volksdeusche in Nazi Germany. All OTHERS have to go through the process.
BTW, Apartheid has nothing to do with immigration. From immigration point of view, Israel is not a mere Apartheid, but a racist State where the members of the tribe which is defined in genetic and/or religious terms have not just preferential treatment, but legal guarantee of citizenship.
Apartheid comes to play when you are under Israeli rule in the Occupied Lands. There, Jews get not just preferential but Master Race treatment.
By the way, you do know that your tribal affiliation is stamped right into your Israeli ID card – if you are Jewish it states "Yehudi", if not – whatever the unfortunate tribe they decide to classify you as. Oh, yes, it does not matter if you are a citizen. Citizenship does not guarantee you full civil rights. Only the magic word "Yehudi" does. Do you know of any other country that does that? Please, let me know. Oh, yes, Soviet Inion did that, but after its demise, not anymore.
Alex – Your analysis ignores the fact that the Israelis are in a demographic "war" with the Palestinians. ie. Arab and Jews are tyring to become the most populous group in the territory. Recall that it was Arafat who said "The womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon." I agree that different laws for different people is undesirable and distasteful, but given that the Palestinians are in a struggle to wipe out Israel's existence (either through a one-state solution, or an eventual outright military victory) it is more understandable that the Israelis would limit immigration. I would hope and anticipate that once an Israeli state and a Palestinian state are both established, each with a minority of the other living in it, the level of equity will rise and mirror the other . Keep in mind that it has been historically the case in Muslim nations that non-Muslims are subject to different laws and taxes than Muslims. Try holding a public bible reading in Saudi Arabia or in the Tabliban controlled areas of Afghanistan.
Israeli police announced on Sunday the arrest of a gang of alleged neo-Nazis, all immigrants from the former Soviet Union, accused of waging attacks on foreigners and religious Jews, in a case that has deeply shocked the Jewish state.
The eight men, aged 16 to 21 and including the suspected leader of the group, were arrested after a year-long investigation, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP.
One of the members of the group has left the country and remains at large, he said, adding that the first suspect was arrested on July 23 and the last on September 6 when he returned to the country from a trip abroad.
A court in Ramle ordered seven of the suspects to be held for another 48 hours pending a review of the police evidence against them, and was to rule on the eighth suspect on Monday, judicial sources said.
"We want them to be charged with being involved in neo-Nazi activities," Rosenfeld said.
The youths are suspected of carrying out "attacks on religious Jews, Asians and foreigners" and having contacts with neo-Nazi groups abroad, Rosenfeld said.
"It is difficult to believe that Nazi ideology sympathisers can exist in Israel, but it is a fact," Revital Almog, the police official who directed the investigation, told public radio.
Searches of the suspects' homes turned up Nazi uniforms, portraits of Adolf Hitler, knives, guns and TNT, police said.
"We believe that this is the main gang working in the area … the main gang that exists (in Israel) that attempts to use Hitler's ideology," Rosenfeld said.
The police investigation that resulted in the arrests began in 2006, after someone spray-painted swastikas and Hitler's name on a synagogue in Petah Tikva, a city east of Tel Aviv.
The arrests deeply shocked the Jewish state, where memory of the World War II Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis runs deep.
The arrests topped the news on radio stations and news websites, and were discussed during the weekly cabinet meeting.
Some members of parliament called for amendments to Israel's Law of Return under which the youths immigrated, while Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai said convicted neo-Nazis should be stripped of their citizenship and deported.
"We have to rid ourselves of this Satan who lives in the heart of Israel," he told public radio.
Israel's Law of Return grants citizenship to anyone who has at least one Jewish grandparent. Under the law, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel in the wake of the breakup of the USSR in 1991.
Out of the nearly 1.2 million immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union, more than 300,000 do not consider themselves Jews, according to figures from the immigrant and absorption ministry.
Police accuse the suspects of going out and targeting "victims who they deemed too weak to complain" and video-taping the attacks, media reported.
One video allegedly shows the youths surrounding a heroin addict, a fellow immigrant from the former Soviet Union who says that he is Jewish.
He is made to get down on his knees and beg "forgiveness from the Russian people for being Jewish and a junky," the Ynet news site reported.
The number of incidents in Israel with a neo-Nazi, fascist or anti-Semitic streak has increased dramatically over the past 15 years, according to the Dmir Centre, which monitors and assists victims of such attacks.
There is no law explicitly banning anti-Semitism in Israel, because legislators never imagined it could ever arise.
Boris:
It is also have to be said that another fascist organization exist in Israel, also mostly Russian emigrants that is called Hyperzionist and is, among other things to expand Israeli borders to "between Nile and Euphrates" plus throw away all Arabs, etc.
link to zarodinu.org
In my opinion both fascist wings are the result of Israeli politics that favor one people against everyone else, thus giving the legitimacy for racist and fascist ideology in general.
Respectfully,
Ajax:
I see. So, since Hispanic population of USA is growing faster than WASP's and La Raza is vehemently anti-white, we can now start creating a different set of laws to "preserve America White"? Why, then, we put down the South African apartheid? They were also just preserving the White nature of their country!
What have you been smoking lately? When was it ever acceptable for a majority to justify racist and apartheid policies against a faster growing minority? If Israelis are that concerned about them being a majority, they may start some policies that would encourage Jewish women to bear more children instead of piling more and more psychology, art and ballet degrees. But oppressing a minority because they want to win a democratic war demographically? What is next? Sterilization?
Good thinking.
Once again the Israelis are playing us for suckers. In 1951 we signed a treaty with them to facilitate the travel of each others' citizens through our territory. Recently the Israelis have gotten their wish to be allowed to enter the U.S. without Visas. And this is how they repay us? They claim the right to decide who is, and who isn't a U.S. Citizen! Someone needs to put some stick about over this. After all, we have thousands of Israeli hostages under the Stars and Stripes. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.