African asylum seekers wait in food distribution line in Tel Aviv, June 2012. (Photo: Baz Ratner/ Reuters)
Two weeks ago Israel’s Health Department announced that the government will take over a program to segregate and medically test African migrants. Although the policy is not yet in effect, it was piloted by a Tel Aviv hospital director who gave orders to lock asylum seekers in separate rooms and force them to undergo blood and x-ray exams. Under state purview, the policy will be reshaped to skirt charges of racial discrimination: hospital staff will isolate those thought to be refugees on the basis of citizenship status, not skin color, Still the program will only affect African migrants.
The new regulations call to separate those without temporary permits from the normal hospital waiting room and screen the migrants for tuberculosis, measles and chickenpox. Hospitals must limit the segregation of refugees to a period of 24 hours, or until the results of their tests. Haaretz calls this a “softening” of anti-migrant measures, following a row before the new policy when patients were explicitly denied medical care based on race. From a report about a Ghanaian resident of Israel, Isaac Asiedeu ,who was locked in a locker room with his sick infant:
When they entered the hospital, after the baby’s details were recorded, a nurse wearing a face mask brought them face masks to wear, and took the four of them to an isolated room to await a doctor.
‘I told her that we had no serious illnesses in the family, and we don’t have HIV or hepatitis, but the nurse said that by law we had to be isolated.’ She then locked the door and left them inside.
After an hour two doctors came to examine the baby, ‘covered in plastic, even their eyes were hard to make out, as if he had some kind of deadly bacteria like Ebola,’ Asiedeu said. They took blood from the baby and left the room, leaving the door unlocked.
After hours had passed and no one came back with blood test results, Asiedeu went to the nurses station and discovered the results had come back long before. ‘The nurse refused to give me the results and ordered me back to the room. I said I wanted to know what my son had, and she threatened to call security.’
‘At that point I lost it and said this was racist,’ Asiedeu said.
The procedures followed orders from the Director of Ichilov Hospital, Gabi Barbash, to kick out or section off African-looking hospital goers under the pretext of preventing the spread of disease. Barbash argues peoples originating from Africa carry infections that threaten the Israeli population, including the hospital staff.
[W]e are all aware of the new reality forced upon us, due to the massive presence of the illegal migrant worker community in south Tel Aviv. This community numbers close to 100,000 refugees from Africa and lives in poverty, which increases the difficult health problems with which they arrive from their home countries and from their journey.
The shift from Barbash’s race-based policy to an expanded “country-wide procedure,” echoes racist health rhetoric during the 1940s and 1950s, when 100,000 Mizrahi children were exposed to harmful radiation under a plan to treat a relatively benign ailment: ringworm. Now known as the “ringworm children,” Jews of Arab descent under the age of 15 were bussed off to what they were told was a “summer camp,” where the government shaved their heads and administered toxic experiments to their scalps. Then, a week later the children were returned to their parents, traumatized and bald.
In other cases, upon arrival to Israel, youth were irradiated for ringworm in the state’s largest absorption center, Sha’ar Ha’aliya. And for Jews emigrating from Morocco, a transit center was opened in Southern France where masses of children were doused in poison. At the time, the risks of irradiation were not fully known, but today, cancer and sterilization rates in that population are staggeringly high.
Clip from The Ringworm Children (2007) by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias.
Israeli professor Dr. Rhona Seidelman is the foremost scholar on Israel’s hidden history of medical experiments and teaches a class on the subject at the University of Illinois. While researching in 2009, she found statements about the diseases of Mizrahi children made in 1955 that were being echoed in the burgeoning discourse of diseased African children:
I was busy doing research on the history of ringworm treatment at the Sha’ar Ha’aliya immigrant transit camp near Haifa. I found this interesting quote:
‘The Yishuv [pre-state Jewish community] is silent with its indifference … and doesn’t even grasp the extent of the danger facing not only children and their households, but the entire public …. Today ringworm is not only in the ma’abarot [refugee camps] … although it is found there in abundance. The truth is that today ringworm appears in every city and settlement. Metropolitan Tel Aviv is in fact surrounded by a belt of ringworm that is closing in …. The majority of the ill were new immigrants from Eastern countries; the overwhelming majority are from among the residents of the ma’abarot. But children of Ashkenazi ethnicity have already been seen [with the disease].’
At the time, Israeli minister of interior Eli Yishai had catapulted anti-migrant racism by making his first public remarks equating refugees to bacterial mules:
If hundreds of thousands of migrant workers come here now, they will bring with them a profusion of diseases: hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS and drug [addiction].
Yishai’s statements were made in the context of a government discussion regarding the impending deportations of asylum seekers. Yet it was Dr. Seidelman’s lone voice that pointed to the larger overhaul of rights that naturally accompanies racism “cloaked in the authoritative language of health and medicine.” In Haaretz in 2009 Dr. Seidelman wrote:
Yishai’s current use of this rhetoric is both ironic and alarming. The irony is that a person who is proud and vocal about his ‘Mizrahi’ heritage would resort to the same discriminatory, inflammatory rhetoric that was so painfully used against ‘Mizrahim’ in the past, including–in all likelihood–Yishai’s own family.
The alarm is that, coming from the interior minister, this rhetoric is no longer just inflammatory, but also dangerous; it instills irrational fear in the minds of the public and encourages further discrimination against an already socially marginalized group.
The interior minister is not ringing the alarm alone. The health department, doctors, and nurses are all infusing migrant discrimination as a day-to-day fact of life in Israel. Think of the housing departments that do not grant permits for Palestinians to build new villages. Or, military judges who do not release hunger-striking administrative detainees. And the state gets away with this trampling of rights by operating its legal framework through tiers of citizenship, which is legal, rather than racist discrimination as such, which is not. In forming the hospital segregation policy around persons “without temporary permits,” thereby excluding tourists (axing Jewish American visitors from the pull), Israel has created a new category ripe for continued oppression without any legal recourse.
In practical terms, once the policy officially starts it could mean that the African family that was firebombed last week would not be able to receive emergency care in the burn unit. The pregnant woman with scorched legs and smoke inhalation would have had to wait for almost a day in some cornered off make-shift treatment room while doctors wasted time running her medical tests, ensuring she would not spread chickenpox. In the meantime, she might have complications, or if her injuries were worse, she might even die. But it would not be called negligence, or malpractice– just policy.
Wonderful post, Alison.
“Now known as the “ringworm children,” Jews of Arab descent under the age of 15 were bussed off to what they were told was a “summer camp,” where the government shaved their heads and administered toxic experiments to their scalps. Then, a week later the children were returned to their parents, traumatized and bald.”
the means they used to ensure the Mizrahim were controlled by their Ashkenazi overlords were chilling- And it all worked until 1977 when the untermenschen got their revenge with the election of Likud. And they took out their trauma on the Palestinians. It is such a damaged and traumatised country when you think about it. Behind all the consumerism there must be a lot of broken people.
“100,000 Mizrahi children were exposed to harmful radiation under a plan to treat a relatively benign ailment: ringworm. “
wow.
I was in grade school during the Hungarian uprising & Revolution. Our neighborhood was working-class with lots of first-generation Americans (Irish, Polish, Italian) and “war brides” and WWII veterans. The Catholic parish was Polish.
Hungarian “DPs” (displaced persons) poured into our neighborhood and grade school. Many of the kids had ringworm; they wore stocking caps to school. To my eye, they fit right in: I had had eczema all over my body from the time I was born; my arms and legs were wrapped in white gauze until I was 11 years old. No big deal, until it was time for one of the pageants the Sisters arranged, and all the kids were dressed in suits and ties and taffeta gowns for the girls. The nuns would send notes home telling my mother to keep the bandages off for the pageant.
The DPs were pretty good at hide-and-seek and kick the can, and at pageants when we danced the Shivi Koin [sp??] , the Hungarian kids taught us the right moves.
Better than shooting them on-site like the Egyptian do to migrant attempting to cross the border.
This does not sound very different from Ellis Island, where all immigrants were checked for diseases, and those with certain ailments were either deported or held in quarantine for months at a time.
Since most people who travel to these parts of Africa have to be inoculated before they leave because of the prevalence of certain diseases, what is your plan, Alison, for screening the migrant population to avoid public health hazards? Do you really think Jewish-American tourists carry the same health risks as migrants from Sudan and Eritrea?
Here’s the British list for Eritrea.
link to nathnac.org
“Better than shooting them on-site”
Not as good as treating them as human beings. Or is it your view that non-Jews have nothing to complain about concerning how they’re treated, so long as the israelis aren’t actively murdering them?
“This does not sound very different from Ellis Island”
Except it’s very different. This isn’t a screening when people enter the country. Those people are specifically excluded. This is forced isolation and forced medical “treatment” when someone is sick enough to go to the hospital, and then actively mistreating them on account of the bigotry of the israelis.
“Do you really think Jewish-American tourists carry the same health risks as migrants from Sudan and Eritrea?”
Interestingly, the article points out that there have been outbreaks of measles — one of the diseases the zio government claims it is trying to affect with this discrimination — but it is in the ultra orthodox community. But, of course, they aren’t being quarantined, having treatment withheld and subject to forced medical sampling. They’re Jews and the migrants aren’t.
You’ve never answered why the Egyptians only shoot Africans who are leaving Egypt and entering Israel, and not entering Egypt.
Standard formula
1. Better than..
2. This does not sound very different from..
3 Give sample of a dysfunctional country and compare Israel favourably.
Is this what 2 millennia of Jews prayed for ? All those mitzvot so some schmuck can say that Erez Israel is better than Eritrea ?
Is that what Jerusalem meant all these years?
“Is this what 2 millennia of Jews prayed for ? All those mitzvot so some schmuck can say that Erez Israel is better than Eritrea ? ”
Huh?
Eritrea is one of the poorest countries on Earth. There are many diseases there that people carry that have been effectively eliminated in the West. And no one is saying Israel is better than Eritrea. It’s a public health issue.
Again, what policy would you propose? And can you point to a country with more African immigrants per capita than Israel?
“And can you point to a country with more African immigrants per capita than Israel”
South Africa.
“Again, what policy would you propose?”
a policy that treats non Jews with the respect afforded to Jews. I wouldn’t round Mizrahi Jews into detention centers in Sweden. I wouldn’t spin vile BS about public health risks in an attempt to slur Jews. I think we know how that ends,.
Before you jump on the bot bandwagon to defend the indefensible you should always ask yourself if you would like your wife to be treated like an African or Palestinian under Zionism.
It’s a hospital. I’m pretty sure most people entering the building are carrying a disease, not just the ones who happen to be migrant workers.
I’m sure too. Just not usually airborne diseases like TB.
The US screens all new immigrants for TB.
In this article, the chairman of the Royal College of GPs in Great Britain suggests that people coming to live in the UK from high-risk countries should be screened for TB.
link to guardian.co.uk
There’s a difference between screening when you enter the country and harassing and locking you up everytime you seek medical care.
People who have spent years in Israel and you bring up a TB non sequitur.
homphi is just upset because these Israeli policies have a whiff of Doctor Mengele to them, what with using health and medical concerns as pretext for racism and discrimination, not to mention the social Darwinism angle.
If poor old hophead had a bit of grey matter in the space between his ears, he could have looked a little further and discovered that the father of the family so abysmally treated had lived in Israel for 9 years. Both infant children (9mo and 21mo) were born there.
So, come again hoppy, what reason other than blatant racism could there possibly have been for the mistreatment of this AFRICAN, NON-JEWISH family?
In Bumblebye didn’t have blinders on, he could admit that Israel is not the only country with problems like these, and not the only country where you can find unhappy immigrants. See France.
“So, come again hoppy, what reason other than blatant racism could there possibly have been for the mistreatment of this AFRICAN, NON-JEWISH family?”
Do you think putting things in caps makes you more right? Or that posting one story proves that everybody has been treated that way or that Israel is the only country with unhappy undocumented workers?
Hophmi, yes injustice is ubiquitous. But the per-capita award for injustice in this day and age certainly goes to Israel.
It’s actually the Israeli government that has pressured the Egyptian government to do so.
link to csmonitor.com
And that was already discussed here on Mondoweiss, but you conveniently ignored it.
link to mondoweiss.net
You see, there is not a bone of honesty in you as there isn’t a single one in Israel and its spin peddlers like your clumsy buddy, shlumiel, on another thread.
“Better than shooting them on-site like the Egyptian do to migrant attempting to cross the border. ”
And there was only one incident where a migrant was shot by an Egyptian border guard.
So your statement painting Egyptian border guards in this fashion is anti-Egyptian bigotry no different than if someone said that all American Jews are spies for Israel because Jonathan Pollard was.
But what else can we expect from the likes of you?
“Since most people who travel to these parts of Africa have to be inoculated before they leave because of the prevalence of certain diseases, what is your plan, Alison, for screening the migrant population to avoid public health hazards? Do you really think Jewish-American tourists carry the same health risks as migrants from Sudan and Eritrea? “
Yup. Here in the US, with literally millions of visitors, would-be immigrants, and so on arriving yearly, we have to do this with all our Africans as well. Big containment wards at all the airports…
What? You mean we don’t?
…Honestly, must you defend everything Israel does? Even the most blatantly obvious examples of racist harassment? This clearly has nothing at all to do with disease. Israel got along without it just fine for decades. It starts now — and you’re going to pretend to not see the motive?
How can you expect anyone to respect anything you say?
“What? You mean we don’t?”
That’s not what Israel does either.
“Honestly, must you defend everything Israel does?”
Yes, because as usual, what is being described as ultra-horrible is not what it seems, and not exclusive to Israel. The reality is that one hospital – one – decided to start isolating African migrants because of the TB, measles and chickenpox risks, and the statistics suggest there was good reason; 13 out of 70 needed further screening for TB.
The Health Ministry stepped in because separating people by race that way in Israel is ILLEGAL. ILLEGAL. Alison omits this point.
So the health ministry tried to develop a policy that would not, in fact, separate people based on race, but based on immigration status. Have you been to America? We have lots of policies that effective separate people based on their status. We do a lot worse to people with no status here, like deny them a college education and a job on the books, subject them to status checks at traffic stops, and so on.
The idea that it’s simply a race-based thing is simply not supported by the facts. The reality is that most undocumented migrants are from Africa. Therefore, most of them are going to be black. It does not follow from this that a policy testing all undocumented immigrants is racist. Neither is the criticism at the end of the article that because there are measle outbreaks in the Haredi community, it isn’t fair to test isolate undocumented migrants, relevant. It essentially argues that we should do nothing because we can’t do everything.
they should go the next step and put shock-collars on them – if you’re going to treat human beings like animals why hold back? … here’s what it could look like
campy Star Trek version
Oh yes, screening people for TB is the same as treating them like animals. Next thing you know, they’ll be treating the migrants who have TB. Horrible.
Het zwarte gevaar [The black peril].
Ever notice how every bit of new data fits comfortably into the paradigm that Israel is a truly evil place?
What’s the test of whether a scientific theory is valid?
“Ever notice how every bit of new data fits comfortably into the paradigm that Israel is a truly evil place?”
Ever notice how when you already believe something is evil, you will look for any grounds to support your contention and ignore all evidence to the contrary?
When I read articles such as these I always wonder “Is this good for the Jews?”
Revolting.
I can understand that countries would test immigrants for certain communicable diseases to avoid wide outbreaks or plagues in the population. I don’t think that’s unreasonable or discriminatory.
But obviously that is not what Israel is doing, they are singling out races.
And in this day and time of millions of travelers being in and out of numerous countries where they can be exposed to anything by anyone they come in contact with tourist to Israel can be carriers of diseases also.
Almost every really bad bug I’ve ever picked up I got on some commerical airline flight.
“But obviously that is not what Israel is doing, they are singling out races.”
So is it your contention that if Eritreans were white, and Eritrea was the same as it is today in terms of the prevalence of communicable diseases, this wouldn’t be happening?
“And in this day and time of millions of travelers being in and out of numerous countries where they can be exposed to anything by anyone they come in contact with tourist to Israel can be carriers of diseases also.”
Sure. But you don’t have to get vaccinated for every country you visit.
It is indicative of the embedded racism in Israel, despite your desperately convoluted attempts to justify it with false comparisons and ignorant assumptions about people. The assumptions and hysteria that accompany a man going to hospital because he is black tell you all you need to know about social attitudes and the paranoid fear of Israeli Jews regarding anyone outside their enclosed little artificial world. The same attitudes which insulate them from any empathy or humanity with their neighbours, the indigenous people and non-Jewish citizens. It is nothing to do with the pathology of disease, and everything to do with the psychopathology of modern Israel.
Again, I posted an article about the exact same thing in Great Britain. You can carry on all you want. Israel is not a special case on this issue.
The way the hospital is treating them is equivalent to the old separate waiting rooms and entrances for blacks and whites.
16 years ago my dentist retired and a friend urged me to go to one that just opended a new practice in town. While I was waiting a black woman came in in obvious pain. She asked if she could see the dentist and she stressed to the receptionist that she had the ‘money to pay her bill”. The girl at the desk brushed her off and said they couldn’t work her in. IF she had been white that new trying to build a practice dentist would have seen her. It pissed me off so I left. What I should have done was stand up and say she can have my appointment and really put them on the spot but I guess I wasn’t thinking fast enough.
I have the feeling that’s exactly how Arabs and blacks get treated in Israel.