From the African Refugee Development Center:
On 30 January, the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC) submitted a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).
This report demonstrates that Israel continues to ignore its international obligations towards asylum seekers and refugees and that various laws, policies and practices are racially discriminatory at their basis against this vulnerable population.
ARDC documents, among other things, how Israel maintains its harsh policy of detention; tolerates segregation in the education system in Eilat; tacitly condones discriminatory edicts by state-employed rabbis; allocates temporary group protection to over 90 percent of the asylum seekers who arrive; and has reluctantly granted refugee status to only 140 individuals.
The root of this discrimination stems from the tension created by Israel’s sensitive political-demographic status as a Jewish state. Several of Israel’s high-ranking politicians have demonstrated an apparent lack of commitment in protecting the human rights of asylum seekers and eliminating racial discrimination. The coalition government, elected in 2009, is dominated by ethno-religious and extreme right wing parties and key positions are held by politicians openly hostile to asylum seekers.
Racially discriminatory, provocative and even inciteful language by influential public figures—wholly adopted by the mainstream media—is at least partially responsible for generating a community-wide backlash against the asylum seekers. The rise of this community hatred, partly fueled Members of the Knesset and councilors, towards the new population is closely recorded in this report.
You can download a PDF of the report here.
sent this to y’all the other day – not sure if you guys saw it:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7850
When the lady at the beginning shouts about “what is going on here?”, talking about the refugees selling goods, part of me feels that I would do something similar, meaning look how poor these poor refugees are, our good society should be helping them so they don’t live on the streets.
Doesn’t anyone else here feel that way? When you want to have a nice modern society and you see people being very poor and selling things on the street, doesn’t it make you feel that the society should be doing something to organize the poor sellers and help their economic situation? Part of me even feels that’s what she could mean, saying it’s worse than Gaza and Nablus, meaning it’s morally worse to have people living within your own borders and being very poor. But I don’t think she means that.
Umm…..is anybody really surprised to hear of racism in Israel? Racism is required in order for them to maintain a Jewish state Whether its coming from her citizens, settlers, rabbis, public officials, education system, transportation systems, current legislation, pre existing laws. Did I miss anything?
Rhetoric versus Reality – as per usual, the ‘winner’ is reality.
Yet the fantasy has prevailed that Israel is a compassionate heaven for assylum seekers. Fabulous accounts of Israel’s treatment of refugees, verging on the hagiographic, are part and parcel of the most recent wave of Hasbara efforts. The most frequent claim is that the Jews, themselves having been refugees so many times and in so many places, cannot deny shelter to other people who are also refugees. The reality, as reported by the refugees themselves, is quite different.