The Carmel Forest fire: when the government failed its citizens
On 2 December, Israel’s Carmel Forest caught fire. For days, the flames ripped through the drought-parched woodlands with shocking speed, killing 41 people on the first day and forcing the evacuation of thousands from their homes. On the first day of the fire, it became apparent that Israel did not have the resources to fight the fire on its own. The prime minister issued a call for help, and countries around the Mediterranean – including Turkey and Jordan – answered that call by sending firefighting planes and firefighters. Even the Palestinian Authority came to Israel’s aid.
For Israelis, the fire was a painful tragedy. People mourned the loss of life and prayed for the recovery of the wounded, identified with the suffering of those that were forced to evacuate their homes and those that lost their homes to the fire, and anguished at the loss of so much of the Carmel National Park. Ami Kaufman, who grew up in Haifa, explains in this post, the Carmel Forest is his city’s backyard – a green canopy visible from every point of the city, and a place where everyone goes for picnics and recreation.
The mourning and shock were exacerbated by the horrible understanding that this tragedy could have been avoided – or at least mitigated – if the state had lived up to its basic responsibilities toward its citizens. The treasury has starved the fire department of funds, depriving it of firefighting chemicals and reducing fire fighting squads to skeletons, even as Israel suffers year after year of drought. The minister of interior, Eli Yishai, who is directly responsible for the fire department, fails to take responsibility for the situation. Instead, he claims he is being unjustly targeted because he is Mizrachi and ultra-Orthodox.
This Friday, 10 December, is International Human Rights Day. In Israel, we will march not only for human rights and social justice and democracy, but also in protest of the continued trends of responsibility-shirking of our leaders. As ACRI’s president and Haifa resident, author Sami Michael said, “The fire was caused by human beings… and so are the government’s shortcomings.” Michael will be one of the speakers at the human rights rally at Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, immediately following the march.
Read MoreAlert, determined, optimistic: we march for human rights!
As the date of Israel’s second annual Human Rights March approaches, the writer, who is the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), lists the many blows Israel’s democratic society has suffered over the past year.
By Hagai El-Ad
One year ago, when we came together to organize Israel’s first Human Rights March, we did so under the banner “No Way!” The message was clear – there was no way we would accept the continued deterioration of our democracy, human rights violations, the ever-widening social gaps, and the increase of racism in our society. There was no way we would allow our democracy to lose.
One year ago, we took to the streets on our day – Human Rights Day: some five thousand marchers and more than one hundred civil society organizations linked arms and joined together, representing a broad spectrum of struggles – unprecedented in diversity – for equality, social justice, an end to the occupation, democracy and human rights.
One year ago, we witnessed – perhaps for the first time ever in Israel – groups of Muslim women from the Negev holding green flags marching alongside groups of gay activists from Tel Aviv with rainbow pride flags. Different flags, different struggles, proclaiming a single message of shared values: all human rights for all people! The Human Rights March is an expression of partnership between multiple groups marching under a host of different banners, finding commonality in their difference and unity in our shared values. These different voices combine and resonate with a message of humanism, pluralism, and democracy – declaring that these are the defining values of our society.
A year has since passed – a bad year for human rights and democracy here. As it turns out, we weren’t totally right when proclaiming “no way”, when stating that it cannot happen here. As a matter of fact, it can happen here.
Read More14 hours of labor: what rights for migrant workers in Israel?
The following is a segment of Shuki Tausig’s daily media review for 22 November in the Seventh Eye, which is sponsored by the Israeli Democracy Institute. The review deals with media coverage of how migrant workers are treated in Israel. It seems that employers prefer to hire foreign workers over Arabs for manual labour, because the Arabs actually think they should receive a lunch break and a 10-hour workday. The nerve..!
Translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service. Click here to read the Hebrew original.
Fourteen hours of labor
Israeli framers have declared that they will cease delivering their produce to the markets until there is an increase in the number of migrant workers available to them. That protest touches every newspaper reader in an immediate and a direct way. But nevertheless the protest has been shoved down to a lowly place in the papers’ priority lists. They prefer to keep on digging up the sexual harassment case at the top echelon of the police and dealing with other not-so-ground-shaking items.
Not that nothing has been written. “’Tomato strike” is the somewhat idiotic headline on the cover of Yediot Aharonot.” The double-page spread on the subject focuses on the direct and immediate impact on consumers (will there or won’t there be any vegetables in the markets). The coverage in Ma’ariv is identical; the same box in the same location on the cover and the same degree of idiocy in the headline with market is in shock (a great alliteration in Hebrew). The report focuses on the short-term effects and not the protest or its causes.
Read MoreDo unto others: Israeli gov’t approves plan to build a detention camp for African refugees
On Friday, 19 November, Yedioth Aharonoth published a shocking feature story called “Hell in the middle of the desert.” Journalist Einat Fishbein reports on camps in the Sinai desert, where refugees from Sudan and Eritrea who are trying to flee to Israel are held by Bedouin smugglers and tortured. Survivors describe women beaten and systematically gang-raped over days and weeks; others were burned with white-hot iron rods; subjected to electric shocks; or held for days in tiny, airless containers until they lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. Many died. Hundreds of female rape survivors have undergone abortions in Israel, with the help of Physicians for Human Rights (PHCR). One survivor describes being forced to call a friend in Sudan and beg for ransom money while her captors beat her until she was unrecognizable. Then they took her away and raped her.
In Tel Aviv, one sees African refugees concentrated around the Central Bus Station, where they live. Peek into any restaurant kitchen and you’ll see at least one black man, whose job it is to wash dishes, haul out the garbage and clean the floors. Some of them earn enough for food and clothing, but not shelter. So they sleep outdoors. You can see them at night in Levinsky Park – dozens of men, sleeping in neat rows on thin foam mattresses.
How desperate these people must be, to risk torture or death as they travel from Eritrea to Israel by foot, putting themselves at the mercy of smugglers, just so they can get to Israel, where they do the dirtiest work that nobody else wants, so they can earn enough to live. Refugees are not treated particularly well in Israel. Often they are picked up by army desert patrols and taken to Ketziot Miliary Prison, where they are kept for weeks or months before being released with refugee papers and left to fend for themselves in the gritty, drug-infested streets of south Tel Aviv. They have few rights, receive fewer benefits and rely on human rights NGOs like PHCR, the Hotline for Migrant Workers and ACRI to help them with access to basic services, and to advocate for them. But at least they have some freedom of movement and autonomy.
Read MoreYou seem like a nice Arab, but we don’t want you as a neighbour
In the second season of the Israeli commercial television hit Arab Labor, series creator Sayed Kashua, a well-known Palestinian-Arab-Israeli writer, has his Arab characters move into a Jewish neighborhood in West Jerusalem. As soon as they sign the contract, the Jewish landlord rushes outside and screams at his neighbours: “So you didn’t want to give me permission to enclose my balcony, eh? No problem! So now you have Arab neighbors. Ha!” (Click here to watch excerpts from the show with English subtitles on LinkTV.)
Reality is sometimes worse than television drama. Or perhaps Kashua, author of Dancing Arabs and Let It Be Morning, is a prophet.
Last month a Knesset committee approved a bill that would give small communities the right to reject applicants for residency if they fail to meet a vaguely defined set of “suitability” criteria. Arab MKs walked out of the discussion sessions, saying the bill was obviously meant to prevent Arab citizens of Israel from living in Jewish communities.
Blogger Yossi Gurvitz called it “ethnic segregation” in this post; and an outraged Ami Kaufman compared the right-wing MKs who backed the bill to the Ku Klux Klan.
In the clip below, someone imagines how an interview between the head of a residency committee and an Arab residency applicant would play out. Let’s say the Arab is a secular, educated professional who earns a good income and lives the same type of lifestyle that the Jewish residents lead. Would he be accepted? If not – why not?
Read MoreJews are breaking the taboo on criticism of Israel
During a recent trip to New York, an American Jewish friend said to me, as we scuffed through piles of autumn leaves in Central Park, “You know, when we hung out last year I was really dismayed by your criticism of Israel. I thought you had become radicalized, or that you were exaggerating. But now I see that things are even worse than you said.”
I looked up at Cleopatra’s Needle, silhouetted against the bright blue sky, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the background, and thought to myself that my friend’s words should have made me feel a bit of vindication for all the blog posts and demonstrations I’d poured so much energy into.
But all I felt that day in Central Park was emotional weariness - and a desire to talk about anything but the situation in Israel. The massive infestation of bedbugs in Manhattan struck me as a vastly more relaxing topic for conversation.
Read MoreThe Ariel Cultural Center: a crucible for Israeli democracy
Back in 1941, shortly after the United States entered World War Two, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously articulated the Four Freedoms in his State of the Union address, as a means of describing the essential democratic values for which Americans were being asked to fight.
Roosevelt’s freedoms are:
1) Freedom of speech and expression
2) Freedom of worship
3) Freedom from want
4) Freedom from fear
Later, the iconic American artist Norman Rockwell painted a set of four illustrations for each of the four freedoms. They were published on four sequential covers of the Saturday Evening Post, with an accompanying essay to describe each of the freedoms. The US War Treasury Department adopted Rockwell’s illustrations and used them to help raise money for war bonds. “Save freedom of speech: Buy war bonds!”
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