Most of the 55,000 non-Jewish African people who have moved to Israel in recent years claim that they fled political persecution in their homelands and came seeking safety in a democratic country. Instead of considering their cases and providing safe haven to those who deserve it, why does the Israeli government criminalize them, contain them and try to kick them out as soon as possible?
In the country’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding fathers vowed that it “will be open for Jewish immigration.” In order to secure the support of the United Nations, they added that, “it will ensure complete equality of social and political right to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”. Since its establishment, however, 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.
The vast majority of the non-Jewish population in Israel consists of the indigenous Palestinians, and they have borne the brunt of the Israeli government’s demographic engineering policies for most of the last 66 years. What began with the Nakba in 1947 and the refusal to allow non-Jewish refugees of the war to return to their homes continues today with barring the Arab spouses of Israeli citizens from unifying with their families and moving to the country.