Trading in Death

In April this year, a Tel Aviv court rejected a petition from an Israeli lawyer to release documentation of arms exports to the Hutu government in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Over 100 days in 1994, members of the Hutu majority acting with the Rwandan government killed hundreds of thousands of the Tutsi minority. The killing was carried out with machetes and light weapons. Israeli-made 5.56mm bullets, grenades and rifles were involved, according to human rights groups and Israeli arms dealers.

In 2014, lawyer Eitay Mack filed a freedom of information request with the Israeli defence ministry for details of exports to Rwanda. The request eventually found its way to the Israeli high court, which has just rejected the petition citing risks to national security and Tel Aviv’s foreign relations.

According to the newspaper Haaretz, the motive of Israeli arms dealers in Rwanda was “pure greed" and some arms dealers have even argued that supplying light weapons to Hutu murderers was a good deed because it meant that the victims would die more quickly from a bullet wound than from being hacked apart with a machete.

Given the deep connection between the Israeli defence ministry and the defence industry, it would be nearly impossible that senior members of the Israeli government weren’t aware of the arms deals with Rwanda.

Israel’s relationship with Africa, whereby the country profits from the continent’s conflicts and refuses to accept asylum seekers, demonstrates that there is no morality in statecraft.

http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/israeli-arms-deals-in-africa-reveal-defeat-of-moral-judgment

In Limbo in Israel

As Europeans argue over whether to call new arrivals migrants or refugees, Israel’s government calls the Africans “infiltrators”, a word loaded with negative connotations.

“We are a country of refugees,” says Anat Ovadia, a spokesperson for the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, one of the non-governmental organisations that petitioned for the detainees’ release. “It is very shameful that Israel forgets its history.”

Israel has about 45,000 asylum-seekers, 34,000 of them from Eritrea and 9,000 from Sudan. Most entered via Egypt’s Sinai desert up to 2013, when Israel completed a formidable steel fence at the frontier. The Africans live in Israel in legal limbo. They have visas that allow them to stay but that bar them from working. The visas must be updated at least every three months. Holot is an “open” facility in Israel’s southern Negev desert, where detainees are required to report for regular roll-calls to prevent them from working in Israel, where many Africans have menial jobs.

Israel has granted only a tiny number of asylum requests, and offers cash incentives for Africans to leave.  Refugee experts say that Israel’s policies toward migrants reflect both political pressures to do something and demographic anxieties in its rightwing governing elite about maintaining a strong Jewish majority in the country.

“This week’s events reflect once again the lack of a policy of the Israeli government when it concerns non-Jewish immigration to Israel,” says Jean-Marc Liling, an Israeli lawyer specialising in refugee law. “There is a complete incapacity to deal with the fact that Israel has become a country of immigration and not only a country of Aliyah [Jewish immigration].”

Israeli Racism Ignites

There are 135,000 Ethiopian Jews (the Falasha Hebrews) living in Israel.

Police in Israel have fired tear gas and stun grenades in clashes with ethnic Ethiopians protesting about what they say is police brutality and racism. Israeli police on horseback charged demonstrators. Thousands of Israeli Jews of Ethiopian origin had taken part in a rally in Tel Aviv. They shouted “not black, not white, we're all human beings.” Police didn’t deploy officers of Ethiopian descent, fearing a conflict of interests.

The protests came after a video emerged last week of an Israeli soldier of Ethiopian descent being beaten by police in Tel Aviv. Israeli community leaders' are making comparisons of the incident to police violence against blacks in the United States. Ethiopian Jews living in Israel have said in the past that they are subject to discrimination, and similar protests in 2012 followed reports that some Israeli landlords were refusing to rent out their properties to Ethiopian Jews. Ethiopian Jews' income is considerably lower than the general population, and they are much more likely to face limited educational opportunities and to end up in prison. In 2013, Israel also admitted to forcibly administering birth control injections to Ethiopian Jewish women without their consent or knowledge.

One demonstrator told Israel's Channel 10 television channel: "Our parents were humiliated for years. We are not prepared to wait any longer to be recognised as equal citizens. It may take a few months, but it will happen."

Prison or Poverty – The Choice of the Israel Deportees

For Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers facing deportation from Israel's Holot detention centre, the future is bleak. Those who have gone before describe a hand-to-mouth existence in Uganda or no freedom of movement in Rwanda.

"There was no difference with the life in Israel," Abush Mekonen, one of eight Eritrean asylum-seekers deported to Rwanda in July 2014, told IRIN. Mekonen said they had been promised jobs in Rwanda but instead were confined to a hotel. "We were not allowed to move or go out."

Israel has been encouraging asylum-seekers to leave the country for the past year by offering them one-off grants of $3,500 and one-way tickets home or to "safe" third countries in Africa. At the end of March, Interior Minister Gilad Erdan gave asylum-seekers 30 days to return to their own countries or accept "voluntary" deportation. Refusal to do either will result in a hearing followed by possible indefinite detention in a prison for irregular migrants called Sa'aronim. In the past year, about 7,000 have opted to return home, while 1,500 accepted so-called voluntary deportation to third countries, according to immigration figures. Although the government has not named the third countries being used for deportations, testimonies gathered from deportees suggest they are Uganda and Rwanda.

Returning to Eritrea was not on option, he added. "If I agreed to go back home, I would be heading straight away to prison. We had no choice; we opted to be deported to Rwanda." Miki Bereket, another Eritrean asylum-seeker deported last July, said the group was originally offered two options before being told it had to be Rwanda. "When we reached there, we realized we were not wanted in Rwanda either," he said.

The Hotline for Refugees and Migrant Workers spoke with asylum-seekers already sent to both Rwanda and Uganda. Reut Michaeli, the hotline's executive director, said their testimonies showed neither Uganda nor Rwanda should be considered "safe" countries. "Documents and money are taken from the asylum seekers when they arrive from Israel and they are not granted any legal status or given formal protection from deportation," he explained. "They are forced to keep searching for refuge in other places and are exposed to abuse and exploitation." He described the transfer of asylum-seekers to other countries without agreements and commitments to ensure they will be protected as "a blatant violation of international law."

"Uganda is a free country," said Bereket, speaking in the capital, Kampala. "But it's hard to cope with life and survive in Uganda without money."

The Israeli Cash-for-Africans Deal

Israel and Rwanda confirmed reports that the African country was working to finalize a multimillion dollar deal with Jerusalem to take on some of Israel's African immigrants and asylum seekers. Rwanda's President Paul Kagame said a deal was in the works and Israel's Interior Minister Gilad Erdan confirmed the report. Both however failed to disclose exact details but the agreement between Israel and Rwanda will see Israel deport hundreds of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers to both Rwanda and Uganda. In return, Rwanda will receive millions of dollars in grants and sales from Israel.

Israel's Interior Minister Gilad Erdan explained that the individual asylum seekers will be given a flight and $3,500 “ no small sum in these countries.” He added.  “They will be given visas and will be allowed to work," he said. Rwanda is a poor rural country with about 90% of the population engaged in (mainly subsistence) agriculture with 45% of the population under the poverty line. The unemployment rate in Rwanda was 28.6% female and 14% males in 2012.

Israel’s Interior Ministry promises that:

“When you arrive at the third country, people will receive you at the airport and give you information about life in the country and other important information. The Sudanese and Eritreans who left with the help of the Israeli government to the third country said they are living a good life, studying English and have a good work. According to them, some have opened businesses and are living well,” the Authority’s notice to the African asylum seekers continued, adding that the asylum seekers would stay in a hotel for their first night in their new unnamed country and will each be given a visa there.”

However, the truth is that the reception in their new country was nothing like what Israel promised it would be and asylum seekers felt abandoned and were now alone in yet another strange country with no one to help them. 

As Israel celebrates the Passover, the treatment of political asylums seekers is passing-the-buck.

Israel To Throw Out African Refugees

There are currently about 42,000 citizens of Eritrea and Sudan in Israel, of which some 2,000 are being held in the Holot detention facility in the Negev. According to data the state provided the High Court, 5,803 citizens of Sudan and Eritrea left Israel last year, 1,093 of them to third countries. Until now, Israel has not revealed the names of the third countries or the nature of the agreements, if any, reached with them, but it is known that asylum seekers have been sent to Rwanda and Uganda. A Haaretz investigation published last April revealed that those asylum seekers who left Israel for Rwanda and Uganda had no basic rights and no legal status in those countries. This made survival virtually impossible, prompting them to leave Rwanda and Uganda and resume being refugees once again. According to the United Nations refugee convention, asylum seekers cannot be sent to any country unless there is an agreement with that country that ensures safeguarding their rights and welfare, notes Oded Feller, an immigration lawyer with the Association of Civil Rights in Israel.

“The government of Israel has refused to expose any agreements with the governments of Uganda and Rwanda, and it is doubtful if any such agreements exist in writing. Those countries deny there are agreements at all,” added Feller. 

Israel will begin to deport Eritrean and Sudanese citizens to countries in Africa –  without their consent – under a new policy in the works at the initiative of the Israel Population and Immigration Authority, a branch of the Interior Ministry which along with Justice Ministry representatives have been discussing a policy change. The authority believes that there is no legal barrier to forcing Eritrean and Sudanese citizens to leave Israel for a third country that is not their native country – even if this is done against their will. The Justice Ministry is expected to permit their deportation to neutral states.

According to Asaf Weitzen, the head of the legal department at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrant Workers, the new policy is the state’s way of circumventing a recent supreme court ruling that limits detention to 20 months.

Mutasim Ali, a detainee in Holot who fled Darfur and is a leading activist in Israel’s African asylum seeker community, said, “This is just another technique Israel is using to make our lives miserable and force people to leave,” he said. “There is not a big difference between being detained in Holot and being imprisoned in Saharonim [a prison in the Negev desert]. If we had other options we wouldn’t be in Israel.” 

Israel - the aspiring neo-colonialist

South African intelligence dismisses a tour of African countries by the Israeli Foreign Minister in 2009 as "an exercise in cynicism."

It says Avigdor Lieberman's nine-day trip to Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya laid the groundwork for arms deals and the appropriation of African resources, while hiding behind "a philanthropic façade". South African intelligence analysts took a jaundiced view of the exercise. "While Liberman [sic] talked with African leaders about hunger, water shortage, malnutrition and plagues afflicting their nations," they wrote, "Tel Aviv's promises to African states could be seen as the gloss on an exercise in cynicism." The South African document said "Israel's military, security, economic and political tentacles have reached every part of Africa behind a philanthropic facade".

Israel has long maintained ties with African countries based on its own security and diplomatic needs. Its ties with the old apartheid regime in South Africa were strongly based on military needs, and reportedly included cooperation in the development of nuclear weapons.

Israeli media hailed Israel's deepening ties with President Goodluck Jonathan for putting an end to a December 30 UN Security Council resolution setting a timetable for Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories. Nigeria had signaled it would support the Palestinian-backed resolution, but its switch to an abstention denied the resolution the necessary majority in the Council.

South Africa's "Geopolitical Country and Intelligence Assessment" of October 2009 accused Israel of pursuing "destructive policies" in Africa that include:

Compromising Egypt's water security : Israeli scientists, the report claimed,  "created a type of plant that flourishes on the surface or the banks of the Nile and that absorbs such large quantities of water as to significantly reduce the volume of water that reaches Egypt." The report offers no additional evidence for this claim.

Fueling insurrection in Sudan: Israel is "working assiduously to encircle and isolate Sudan from the outside," the report  wrote, "and to fuel insurrection inside Sudan." Mossad agents have also "set up a communications system which serves to both eavesdrop on and secure the security of presidential telecommunications." Israel had long been at loggerheads with Khartoum, and supported the secessionist movement that eventually broke away and created South Sudan, with which it has diplomatic ties. Khartoum continues to accuse the Israelis of being responsible for attacks in Sudan.

Co-opting Kenyan intelligence: "As part of Mossad's safari in Central Africa it had exposed to the Kenyans the activities of other foreign spy networks". In return, the report wrote, Kenya granted permission for a safe house in Nairobi and gave "ready access to Kenya's intelligence service".

Arms proliferation : Israel has been "instrumental in arming some African regimes and allegedly aggravating crises among others, including Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and South Africa", according to the document. Today it "is looking for new markets for its range of lightweight weapons" and covertly supplies armaments to "selected countries inter alia India" including "nuclear, chemical, laser and conventional warfare technologies".

Acquiring African mineral wealth : Israel "plans to appropriate African diamonds", the South African spies alleged, as well as "African uranium, thorium and other radioactive elements used to manufacture nuclear fuel".

Training armed groups: "A few Israeli military pensioners are on the lookout for job opportunities as trainers of African militias," the reported said, "while other members of the delegation were facilitating contracts for Israelis to train various militias."

Lieberman further annoyed the South African government in November 2013 when he warned the country's 70,000-strong Jewish community that it faced a "pogrom" and could only save itself by immigrating to Israel "immediately, without delay, before it's too late."

"The government of South Africa is creating an atmosphere of anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Semitism," Liberman said, "that will make a pogrom against Jews in the country in just a matter of time".

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies dismissed Liberman's comments as "alarmist and inflammatory", and noted that South African Jews experienced comparatively low rates of anti-Semitism.

Israel's Africans

Israel was one of the first nations to ratify the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Today, the fate of its non-Jewish refugees, including 50,000 African asylum-seekers remains unclear. Some 2,300 refugees from Africa are currently living at the Holot camp in the Israeli Negev-desert. This year has been rainy and cold, and the barracks have no heating. An Israeli human rights organization has been trying to raise awareness about the plight of Africans stuck in the camp. But the refugees, many from Darfur and Eritrea, have little hope of getting accepted as refugees in Israel. The asylum-seekers have protested against Israel's treatment, hoping to get rights based on the United Nation Convention on Refugees. But chances seem slim they will be granted refugee status in Israel and be allowed to start a new life.

Listen to this report by Deutsche Welle

http://www.dw.de/african-asylum-seekers-in-israel-stuck-in-limbo/a-17720969

Uganda and Israeli Racism

 A century ago, Theodor Herzl - the father of modern political Zionism - proposed Uganda as a temporary refuge for persecuted Jews. Uganda is now on the receiving end of other persecuted peoples, this time African refugees who have sought asylum in Israel only to be imprisoned in detention facilities and then returned to the Africa.

 The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in a February 2014 article titled "Israel secretly flying asylum seekers to Uganda", harsh conditions in the detention centres plus nominal financial compensation have facilitated the deportation of many migrants under the guise of "voluntary departure". Uganda's denial of the existence of any deportation agreement with Israel renders accountability for human life even less of an option

The Israeli director of the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants on this non-solution to refugee plight: "It is known that Uganda deports asylum seekers to their countries of origin." The organisation also said that " 'voluntary departure' is the result of heavy and illegal psychological pressure on detained, isolated and desperate asylum seekers, which more than once has included threats and lies....the position of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees is that people cannot be considered to be acting of their own free will if the choice they have is between detention and being sent back to their country".

One  reason for the disingenuous rendering of a "voluntary" exodus of refugees is, of course, to prevent an already precarious demographic balance in Israel from tipping in favour of non-Jewish non-whites. There has been political incitement to anti-African violence and the forcible injection of Ethiopian women with contraceptives.  The Israeli regime insists on referring to African asylum seekers as "infiltrators", which connotes criminality and facilitates the illusion of a steady stream of enemies that must be combated. Between November 2012 and May 2013 the Jewish state had approved only one asylum application from a population of approximately 60,000 non-Jewish African asylum seekers in Israel. The applicant happened to be an albino.

"When Israel rounds up and deports African refugees, it makes a mockery of the millions of Jews who died during World War II because no one would grant them shelter,"  Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen noted.

Apparently so indistinguishable from one another in their blackness that they can be repatriated to any old place in Africa.

 What does Uganda stand to gain from participating in outsourced inhumanity? A 2013 Vice magazine report details the perks of the arrangement: Weapons discounts and military training for African countries willing to take on Israel's dirty work.  Uganda's interest in Israeli weapons is perhaps less than surprising given the behaviour of its own army and security forces, often characterised by torture and other human rights violations. In 2003, Haaretz ran a story on Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's visit to Israel for the purpose of "arms shopping", an excursion that was said to have been "arranged by an arms merchant, Amos Golan of the Silver Shadow company, who represents IAI [Israel Aircraft Industries] and other Israeli defence industries in Uganda".

 A Vice magazine article notes that, as of September of last year, approximately 40,000 of the African "infiltrators" were from Eritrea, "a country with one of the worst human rights records on Earth". The author goes on to comment, with well-directed sarcasm, that "these people aren't coming to Israel because they fancy upping their matzah intake or living on Palestinian land illegally; they're genuinely trying to escape persecution and find a way to survive".

From Al Jazeera

Israeli Racism

Recently we have witnessed the shameful rounding up and deportation of Africans from Saudi Arabia.  In 2011 in Tel Aviv, a thousand Israelis ran rampant through the streets, smashing and looting African-operated businesses and physically assaulting any dark-skinned person they came across.

The rioters were encouraged by the likes of lawmaker Miri Regev, who announced that African migrants are "a cancer in the body" of the nation.  Regev "apologised” after the violence, not to African asylum seekers, but to Israeli cancer victims, for comparing them to Africans and was appointed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu to head the Knesset Interior Committee, the very body that decides the fate of those asylum seekers.  Netanyahu has pledged to rid the country of its "tens of thousands of infiltrators" from Africa.

The persecution suffered by  Africans often occurs in the countries from which they have fled and to which Israel has no qualms about illegally deporting them.  Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen, who reports relentlessly on the hazards to African existence in the Jewish state,  remarks: "When Israel rounds up and deports African refugees, it makes a mockery of the millions of Jews who died during World War II because no one would grant them shelter." Since Israel took over responsibility for reviewing refugee status requests from UNHCR, out of the 60,000 non-Jewish African asylum seekers living in Israel, Israel has approved only one single solitary application. And that one African woman that the State of Israel… has deigned to bequeath refugee status upon - is an albino.

Although the fundamental reason for restricting African access to Israel is to prevent a tipping of the demographic balance in favour of non-Jews, the circumstances facing Ethiopian Jewish immigrants indicate that religion only gets you so far. Lest the target national colour scheme be irreparably disrupted as well, Israel has been known to forcibly inject Ethiopian females with contraceptives.

Former Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari declares: "We are waging a war against the phenomenon of assimilation."

Israel's racism and militarism

A blog describes Israel’s latest refugee deportation ploy policy.

Ynet reports that the government is close to inking a deal with three African states (who are likely Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda) who will take “tens of thousands” of ‘undesirable’ African refugees from Israel in return to Israeli weapons and training.  Isn’t that neat and tidy!?  Israel gets rids of what Israeli politician  Miri Regev called a “cancer in its midst” and contributes to the rising tide of mayhem and violence in countries like South Sudan and Eritrea, already beset by instability and civil war.

The Israeli government revealed there are 7,000 registered arms merchants plying Israeli weapons to precisely these sorts of unstable states, making Israel the sixth largest arms merchant in the world.  

islam and judaism

It hurts too much to lie on his back, so the 7-year-old has spent the past month stretched out on his stomach. His two grandmothers sit on the hospital bed beside him, fanning the pink flesh left exposed by his teacher's whip.

The Quranic teacher who did this to him is behind bars.

But what is most significant is that the boy's father — a poor farmer who sold part of his harvest to pay for the bus fare to the hospital — filed the charges against the teacher himself. In doing so, this man with cracked lips and bloodshot eyes braved the wrath of his entire village, including his own father, who considers all teachers in Senegal's Islamic schools to be holy .Even hospitals have become wary of treating beaten talibe, or Quranic students, for fear of retaliation from the religious community.

In hundreds of these schools in the mostly Muslim West African country, children are made to beg in the streets and are beaten if they don't bring back enough money. One 10-year-old was beaten to death with his hands tied behind his back and his mouth stuffed with rocks. Despite laws passed to protect children, the courts have convicted only a handful of Quranic teachers and quickly cave in the face of powerful clerics. The respect for Islamic schools comes from a centuries-old tradition of families sending their sons to study the Quran and till fields in exchange for food. In the 1970s, as drought devastated West Africa, schools moved to the cities and Islamic teachers sent children out to beg in the streets. These days, boys as young as 3 are beaten not for failing to master the Quran, but for failing to bring back enough money — a change families often are unaware of.

The boy also had to beg for food. Some days all he got was a discarded fish head, or a spoonful of rice.By the second week, he was hungry all the time. On July 2, he begged until dark and got the 50 cents, but spent part of it on biscuits. When the marabout found out, the boy says, he got whipped until the skin on his back fell off. Hospital officials believe the whip was laced with metal.With around 30 children in his care, the marabout was netting $430 a month, three times the salary of an average citizen and as much as a government official.

"Ask yourself, what is this money used for? The kids are not fed, so it's not for food. They wear rags, so it's not for clothes. They don't have mattresses, so it's not for their beds," says Paul Ndiaye, of the Swiss aid group Sentinelles, who has spent the last 10 years trying to get courts to take action against abusive marabouts. "This is a sham on a grand scale under the cover of religion."

In Senegal that the word for "to educate" — "yaar" is the same as the word for the stick to discipline students.

Meanwhile , Israel's Law of Return guarantees citizenship for any Jew in need, and these days the country is especially concerned about boosting its Jewish population to compete with the Arabs. But the Ethiopians have proved the hardest immigrant group to absorb, and the Falash Mura, some critics feel, is pushing the limits. As a whole they are poor, plagued by crime, violence and substance abuse, feeling shut out of a world very different from rural Africa. But despite all the preparations, most Ethiopian immigrants over age 35 go straight onto welfare after reaching Israel, according to the Jewish Agency.

That's no reason for shutting out the Falash Mura, says Mazor Bahyna, an Ethiopian in the 120-member Knesset, or parliament.

"I think Israel has an obligation to prove that it is not a racist state," he says. "If everyone was blond-haired and had blue eyes, they would bring them."

"There is no end to reunification," said the Jewish Agency's Konforti.

Israel has struggled for years to figure out which Ethiopians should be allowed in. Each time it has attempted to end the immigration by emptying the Gondar camps and airlifting their inhabitants to Israel, thousands more have flooded into the camps, scrambling to prove their Jewishness.The argument now seems to have come down to numbers: Israel says the last of the Falasha Mura who qualify for immigration arrived in Israel earlier this month, while the American groups say some 8,700 have been left behind.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has upheld the Israeli list, effectively marking the end