Read it and weep

Another facet of Israel’s regime in the occupied territories has come to light – and it’s tearing families apart

Friday September 12 2008

A disturbing report published this week highlights yet another facet of Israel’s regime in the occupied territories that is seeing Palestinian lives ruined and families torn apart. As if the alienation of the Palestinians from their pre-1948 homelands wasn’t crushing enough to those affected, the Hamoked-B’Tselem study reveals an alarming increase in forcible transfers of West Bank residents to the Gaza Strip, effectively making refugees twice over of those falling victim to this punitive policy.

Palestinians whose registered address is in Gaza are now prohibited from living in the West Bank, regardless of how long ago they made the move eastwards. Thanks to Israel’s flouting of the Oslo agreements, the process of updating Palestinians’ addresses on the population registry has been indefinitely frozen, making criminals of everyone who falls foul of the rule.

• The effect has been to separate husbands from their wives and parents from their children, and to add yet another layer of hardship to the already gruelling circumstances in which the Palestinians live.

According to the authors of the paper, the reason behind the Israel authorities’ recent escalation of enforcing this law is based on a desire to do everything within their power to drive a wedge between the West Bank and Gaza, and to turn them into separate entities. This is, again, in direct contravention of the Oslo Accords, which state that the two areas are to be treated as one geographical unit; but at the same time it is entirely in keeping with Israel’s strategy of cutting off Gaza as a way of punishing the Hamas government.

The wrong sort of immigrants.

Israel encourages immigration by Jews from Europe and the US, but those from Ethiopia are now less welcome

Tuesday August 19 2008

The Israeli government’s decision to halt immigration from Ethiopia prompted angry scenes in Jerusalem on Sunday, during a protest outside the prime minister’s house. Around 5,000 demonstrators voiced their condemnation of the authorities’ actions, with the chairman of the Organisation of Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel describing the situation as “a crime against Zionism, and the original Zionist idea of saving Jews from around the world”.

Israel is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to absorbing new olim [immigrants], largely thanks to the small print in the country’s immigration policy.

• Mirroring Hitler’s assertion that anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent was to be considered untermenschen, the founding fathers of Israel declared that anyone with similar ancestry would therefore qualify for full citizenship of the newborn state.

Over the years, millions of Jews have taken up this offer, and today around 15% of Israel’s seven million population is made up of first-generation olim. Of that number, the vast majority come from the former Soviet Union, and the next largest group hail from Ethiopia, a country which has seen a mass migration of its native Jews to Israel dating back to the 1970s.