On Tuesday, December 10, people across the planet marked United Nations Human Rights Day, while global leaders convened in South Africa to mark the death and celebrate the life of its former president Nelson Mandela and his fight for racial equality. The Israeli Knesset, however, spent that day a different way altogether: passing a new law which would authorize the government to round any of the 55,000 African asylum-seekers currently in the country off the streets and into a desert detainment camp.
After all nine Supreme Court justices unanimously struck down the centerpiece of the government’s anti-African legislation in September, the amendment was rapidly replaced with another. The High Court ruled then that to jail without trial people who have committed no crime except to seek asylum is an unacceptable violation of their human rights. To circumvent the ruling and keep the Africans behind bars, the government said it would allow them furloughs lasting a couple of hours at a time, and thus the place in which they would be held by force could no longer be properly called a jail.
In other respects, the new amendment is even more barbaric than its earlier version. While the January 2012 legislation mandated three years of incarceration, the December 2013 legislation allows for indefinite detention. As with the officially-designated prisons where asylum-seekers have been held until now, Israeli officials openly declare that the detention center is designed to convince the Africans to give up all hope of a normal life in Israel and convince them to take their chances back in the countries they fled from.
”The government has not only worked to increase the amount of Jews living in Israel, but also to decrease the amount of non-Jews in the country.”