Israel to put 50,000 Africans in detention camps

[jimmy olsen]

How did this not get posted her yet?

http://news.yahoo.com/israel-put-thousands-africans-detention-camp-184419459.html

Israel to put thousands of Africans in detention camp

AFP – Fri, Jun 8, 2012

Israel's interior minister said on Friday he hoped to soon start moving tens of thousands of illegal African migrants from Tel Aviv and elsewhere to a detention camp being built and a planned "tent city."

An Israeli court cleared the way on Thursday for the deportation of an estimated 1,500 South Sudanese, after ruling that their lives were no longer threatened in their homeland.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai told public radio 40,000 Sudanese and Eritreans were next in his sights.

"There are still about 15,000 from north Sudan and some 35,000 from Eritrea," he said. "I am not allowed to get them out at the moment."

He said he expected legal obstacles would be removed and that the government was also offering a grant to those prepared to leave voluntarily.

"They are close to being expelled either willingly or against their will," he said. "This is a number that threatens the Jewish identity."

As a first step, he said, illegals would be rounded up and moved to a detention centre being built in southern Israel at a projected cost of 250 million shekels ($6.7 million, 5.4 million euros).

"As soon as the facility is completed, which could be in a few months -- and alongside it we plan to put up a tent city with all the accepted conditions -- then we shall start moving migrants from south Tel Aviv, from (the Red Sea town of) Eilat ... wherever they are."

The rising number of Africans in Israel has hit the headlines in recent weeks, after a spike in racial tensions led to a riot in southern Tel Aviv, where tens of thousands of migrants live.

Interior ministry statistics show that approximately 60,000 African immigrants have entered Israel illegally, the vast majority of them from Sudan and Eritrea.

Some are refugees fleeing persecution in their home nations, but others are economic migrants.

Yishai said he estimated a further 6,000 may have sneaked across the border from Egypt undetected.

"I hope that in the coming months we shall be able to move all the infiltrators to detention facilities and allow Israeli citizens in south Tel Aviv and others to live in a proper way ... in quiet and security," he added.

Israel is building a giant, hi-tech security barrier along its 240-kilometre (150-mile) border with the Egyptian Sinai.

So far 170 kilometres have been erected and the project is due to be completed later this year.

[The Brain]

 

[Sheilbh]

That's not as bad as other of his comments 'most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn't belong to us, the white man'.

The Foreign Minister, Lieberman, said that he was close to doing a deal with many African nations on deportation.  He said that inflammatory language like Yishai's made diplomacy more difficult.  I can't think of any other Israeli cabinet minister that could apply too

[DGuller]

I can't really fault Israel on this one.  With today's commodity prices, 1,500,000 pieces of silver is nothing to sneeze at.

[Martinus]

That's not as bad as other of his comments 'most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn't belong to us, the white man'.

That's funny - a Jew thinking he is white. 

[Sheilbh]

That's not as bad as other of his comments 'most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn't belong to us, the white man'.

That's funny - a Jew thinking he is white. 

On the point of race and specifically Sephardi identity I found this quite interesting:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/07/white-like-me.html
A snippet:

Yishai's comments illustrate the awful paradox of contemporary Sephardi (or more accurately, Mizrahi) identity. As in my own family, Jews from Arab lands were long seen by their haughty Ashkenazi cousins as, well, Arabs. Intra-Jewish bigotry has certainly declined since Israel's early years, when David Ben Gurion said that Israel's Mizrahi immigrants had "no Jewish education." But it persists. A Mizrahi friend who speaks Hebrew with the guttural pronunciation indigenous to the Middle East recently told me that he is routinely hassled at Ben Gurion airport because his Hebrew sounds too much like Arabic. In her fascinating book, We Look Like the Enemy, Rachel Shabi tells of swarthy Mizrahi Jews who in order to avoid being mistaken for Palestinians by the Israeli police begin wearing kippot or Jewish stars.

And historically, Israel's Mizrahi Jews haven't just been deemed Arabs. They've been deemed black. In Israel's early years, Shabi notes, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews sometimes called their Mizrahi counterparts "Schwarz." In 1971, a group of radical Mizrahi activists even appropriated the term, calling themselves the "Black Panthers."

Now along comes Yishai, the leader of Shas--a party born to give voice to the very Mizrahi Jews long considered black--to declare that Israel must expel its African migrants because Israel is for "us, the white man." (As you might imagine given the gendered language, Yishai doesn't have particularly enlightened ideas about women either).

[Viking]

I'm sorry but jews rounding up people and putting them in camps is just not right. If any group with a racial or cultural memory should know not to do this it is them.

[11B4V]

Joos be hatin on the black folk.

[CountDeMoney]

I'm sorry but jews rounding up people and putting them in camps is just not right. If any group with a racial or cultural memory should know not to do this it is them.

They get a pass on this one, as nobody enjoys living with a shitload of Sudanese and Eritreans.

[11B4V]

I'm sorry but jews rounding up people and putting them in camps is just not right. If any group with a racial or cultural memory should know not to do this it is them.

They get a pass on this one, as nobody enjoys living with a shitload of Sudanese and Eritreans.

Besides, they stink and eat up all the chickens.

[CountDeMoney]

I'm sorry but jews rounding up people and putting them in camps is just not right. If any group with a racial or cultural memory should know not to do this it is them.

They get a pass on this one, as nobody enjoys living with a shitload of Sudanese and Eritreans.

Besides, they stink and eat up all the chickens.

And they're loud what with all their tribal bunga-bunga shit, and they're similar to Tribbles, born pregnant.

[katmai]

And Seedy says he's a friend of the community, tsk, tsk.

[garbon]

I'm sorry but jews rounding up people and putting them in camps is just not right. If any group with a racial or cultural memory should know not to do this it is them.

Sounds like a poorly managed (operationally and PR-wise) detention and deportation scheme.

[garbon]

That's not as bad as other of his comments 'most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn't belong to us, the white man'.

That's funny - a Jew thinking he is white. 

On the point of race and specifically Sephardi identity I found this quite interesting:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/07/white-like-me.html
A snippet:

Yishai's comments illustrate the awful paradox of contemporary Sephardi (or more accurately, Mizrahi) identity. As in my own family, Jews from Arab lands were long seen by their haughty Ashkenazi cousins as, well, Arabs. Intra-Jewish bigotry has certainly declined since Israel's early years, when David Ben Gurion said that Israel's Mizrahi immigrants had "no Jewish education." But it persists. A Mizrahi friend who speaks Hebrew with the guttural pronunciation indigenous to the Middle East recently told me that he is routinely hassled at Ben Gurion airport because his Hebrew sounds too much like Arabic. In her fascinating book, We Look Like the Enemy, Rachel Shabi tells of swarthy Mizrahi Jews who in order to avoid being mistaken for Palestinians by the Israeli police begin wearing kippot or Jewish stars.

And historically, Israel's Mizrahi Jews haven't just been deemed Arabs. They've been deemed black. In Israel's early years, Shabi notes, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews sometimes called their Mizrahi counterparts "Schwarz." In 1971, a group of radical Mizrahi activists even appropriated the term, calling themselves the "Black Panthers."

Now along comes Yishai, the leader of Shas--a party born to give voice to the very Mizrahi Jews long considered black--to declare that Israel must expel its African migrants because Israel is for "us, the white man." (As you might imagine given the gendered language, Yishai doesn't have particularly enlightened ideas about women either).

No words.

[CountDeMoney]

And Seedy says he's a friend of the community, tsk, tsk.

My community ain't Djibouti, babe.