VIEWPOINT:'White' Israel and its migrant workers
20 July 2010
Carmel Gould
The picture painted by Mya Guarnieri in her Guardian Comment is free article, ‘Children are just Israel's latest victims’ is stark. Readers unfortunate enough not to know better would doubtless reach two false conclusions: first, that Israel treats its migrant worker population exceptionally badly; and second, – and perhaps the most demonstrably untrue – that Israel is a ‘white’ country, which does not like non-white people.
The trigger for these accusations is a decision by Israel in 2009 to deport back to their countries of origin a group of illegal migrant workers, including up to 1,200 children who were born in Israel. The story’s headline, standfirst and opening paragraph together implied that the children were to be sent away alone but the second paragraph actually admitted that the minors were in fact due to be sent back ‘along with their families’.
Guarnieri’s central complaint is that the children were born in Israel and that sending them to their parents’ countries of origin would be an act of ‘inhumanity’ completely out of step with civilised behaviour. This provides the context for her accusation that the policy is born of a racist country.
But deporting migrant children controversially is by no means unique to Israel. The European Union has gone out of its way to make legal its planned deportation of thousands of lone Afghan asylum-seeking minors, including by committing to build ‘reception centres’ in war-torn Afghanistan ‘that can provide care for minors when the family cannot be found’. The Guardian itself reported these measures last month when the UK announced that it would be participating in the scheme, although the issue of race was not mentioned.
Little ought need to be said about the dire predicament of migrant workers in the wider Middle East. In Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. they are widely documented to be treated more as slaves, not to mention the notorious Lebanon, where, as Human Rights Watch reported last year, Asian and African workers are only allowed to enter private beaches when accompanied by their employers and are usually banned from the swimming pools because “people are not used to the sight of workers swimming.”
But Mya Guarnieri is incensed by the alleged racial nature of Israel’s decision to deport families which include children born in Israel. She cites an Israeli activist complaining that ‘the expulsion would not only damage the families of migrant workers, it would be harmful to Israel, as well, making the country "so white and so ugly"’. Given that most Israelis are ethnically non-European and not white-looking, it is hard to understand how someone can get away with saying something like that. It is also difficult not to view with incredulity the author’s reference to ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a blatant misapplication of the concept merely aimed at evoking moral outrage.
Regardless of the rectitude or otherwise of Israel’s intention to remove this group of people, the presumptions of exceptionalism regarding race and migrant worker policy in Israel contained in ‘Children are just Israel's latest victims’ should be challenged on the facts.