Category: Writing

Al Jazeera English, July 17, 2010

For most children summer is a carefree time. But for the children of Israel’s undocumented migrant workers, deportation looms on the horizon.

It has been a hotly contested issue since last July, when the Oz Unit, a strong arm of the interior ministry’s population and immigration authority, first hit the streets.

As the state took aim at Israel’s 250,000 illegal labourers, 1,200 children were marked for expulsion along with their parents.

The move, a sudden reversal of Israel’s long-standing policy against deporting minors, sparked public outrage. Protests and media scrutiny delayed the deportations but only temporarily.

In October, Eli Yishai, the interior minister, indicated that the families would indeed be expelled. The following month, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, announced that the children would be allowed to finish the school year.

Roei Lachmanovich, a spokesman for Yishai, commented: “The government’s decision is that Israel should minimise the number of foreign workers in Israel. It is nothing against those 1,200 children – the decision is against the illegal workers who think getting pregnant gives them permission to stay here.”

Continue reading “Israel’s ‘illegal’ children”

Al Jazeera English, July 10, 2010

Mahmoud Alami, a Jerusalem taxi driver, knows the city like the back of his hand. He knows the neighborhoods, the streets. And he knows the stop lights.

There’s one in particular that troubles him not professionally but personally. It stands between Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood, and Pisgaat Zeev, a Jewish settlement. “It stays green for [settlers] for five minutes. But to go in and out of Beit Hanina? Only two or three cars can pass,” Alami says. “It’s too short. It causes a lot of traffic jams.”

Al-Jazeera English found that stoplights that lead to Jewish settlements and neighborhoods stay green for an average of a minute and a half. In Palestinian areas, it’s 20 seconds. One light in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem is green for less than 10.

“[Palestinians] are stuck,” says Amir Daud, another taxi driver. “It reflects a very bad situation for the people.”

Continue reading “Israel’s ‘street apartheid’”

Al Jazeera English, June 21, 2010
Maan News Agency, July 10, 2010

Jewish settlers storming the garden of an elderly Palestinian woman– it seems like a page from Hebron’s book, not that of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. But that’s exactly what happened to Zeinab Rachayel, an Arab resident of Tel Aviv’s mixed suburb, Yafo.

Rachayel was in her courtyard on a Sunday afternoon when several buses full of settlers from the West Bank arrived, parking nearby. Armed with Israeli flags, young men lined the sidewalk outside her home chanting “This is our land.” One by one, they entered her garden. Rachayel, a grandmother, was soon facing dozens of settlers in their late teens and early twenties.

“Another one entered and he said, ‘Listen, you’re not staying here. Yafo is just for Jews. Get out of Yafo,'” Rachayel says. The men continued to threaten and intimidate her, repeating over and over that the Arab presence in Yafo is only temporary.

Continue reading “Settlers target Israel’s “shared cities””