We are collected signatures from organizations. Below is an introduction followed by a petition:

REQUEST FROM ORGANIZATIONS TO SIGN PETITION AGAINST INFILTRATION PREVENTION BILL:

Introduction:

Humanitarian and human rights organizations, youth groups, and civic groups throughout Israel and abroad ask the Israeli public and members of the Knesset to oppose the Infiltration Prevention Law. While the bill will be discussed in the Committee of the Interior and Environment, it will soon be voted on in a consecutive second and third vote, without a discussion period between votes, as is standard with most bills. We understand that every organization invests its time and energy in promoting its own particular, important causes. However, because the bill is inherently anti-democratic, goes against basic Jewish values, and opposes the principles by which the state of Israel was founded, we ask that organizations take some time to reach an agreement to sign this petition to prevent passage of this bill.

If this law is passed and enforced, countless refugees—including survivors of genocide, rape, and other crimes against humanity on the part of governments and private militias—will be deported back to areas where they are likely to be imprisoned, tortured and killed because of their ethnicity, religion, political views, and/or gender. Others may be imprisoned in Israel for up to 20 years. This bill makes no distinction between those who are innocent refugees escaping for their lives, on the one hand, and terrorists and those who seek to compromise Israel’s security, on the other. Volunteers in Israel, including volunteers from abroad who come to assist refugees, may also find themselves behind bars, as the law’s punishment for any who assist “infiltrators” is identical to the punishment given to refugees.

This petition will be presented to the Minister of Defense whose office initiated the Infiltration Prevention Bill and who is appointed for its enforcement. Our hope is that representatives of your organizations will support this petition and sign it in order to assist us in preventing the passage of this bill, in order to uphold our judicial and moral obligations to the state and its democratic and Jewish values.

If your organization would like to be a signatory of the petition below, please send the organizational representative’s name, position, telephone number and e-mail to: Sigal@hotline.org.il

Petition:

The state of Israel is one of the 147 nations in the world that is a member of the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Refugees of 1951. In light of the Holocaust, Israel saw great importance in being involved in the wording and adoption of this convention, and Israel is a member until this day. Israel even signed the Protocol of the refugee convention of 1967, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), which includes the deportation of asylum seekers.

Even though Israel signed these international conventions, and even though the right to request asylum in Israel was established since 1948, there has yet to be a legal process established in Israel that recognizes the status of asylum seekers in Israel. The rights of asylum seekers are currently inconsistently given and taken away by clerks of government offices. A bill to establish a process for receiving recognition and rights for asylum seekers was rejected by the Knesset in a preliminary vote in 2008, while the government of Israel was attempting to pass other bills that directly contradict the international agreement and conventions that the State of Israel has signed.

The Infiltration Prevention bill directly goes against basic principles of protection and care for asylum seekers. If this law is passed and enforced, many refugees—who have escaped genocide, rape, and other crimes against humanity at the hands of governments and private militias—will be deported, likely to their deaths, because of their ethnicity, religion, political views, and/or gender.

Volunteers and representatives of organizations that give as much as a glass of water to a thirsty refugee may, if this law passes, find themselves “guilty of assisting infiltrators” and face years in prison, as the law’s punishment for any who assist “infiltrators” is identical to the punishment given to refugees.

Even today, the Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces are enforcing some of the clauses of Infiltration Prevention Law in a policy entitled “Coordinated Return Procedure.” The asylum seeker victims of this procedure, if they survive it, are imprisoned in Egyptian prisons or in camps in Eritrea and Sudan. Since August 2008, this policy has been enforced in the Egyptian border. Some of the refugees, who survived crossing the Egypt-Israeli border, where Egyptian soldiers regularly open fire on refugees, were blindfolded by Israeli border patrol and forcibly returned to Egypt and into the hands of Egyptian soldiers. Reports from human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, found that many who are deported by Israel to Egypt are deported by Egyptian authorities back to their country of origin, blatantly going against the principle forbidding the deportation of a person to a country where he is likely to suffer from persecution. Others have disappeared within Egyptian prisons and denied access to a representative from the United National High Commissioner for Refugees.

We, civic organizations in Israel and abroad, call on the Minister of Defense to withdraw this bill and we call on all Members of Knesset to vote against this bill and to do everything in their power to ensure it does not pass.
At the same time, we call on the government of Israel to differentiate between infiltrators who threaten the security of the state, and those who have fled to Israel for protection from persecution that is no fault of their own. We call on the government to establish a policy that applies her judicial and moral responsibilities as outlined in the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Refugees—responsibilities that reflect the State of Israel’s value for human rights, and the basic Jewish and democratic values upon which the state was founded.

Name of the organization:______________________________
Name or Organization’s representative: ____________________________
Number of members/volunteers in the organization:___________________________
Position in the organization:_____________________________
Phone Number__________________________________
E-mail:________________________________

This is why the latest Israeli government-backed proposed law is problematic! It does not create a system where asylum seekers can be questioned and inspected to check if they are refugees, in which case they have the right to asylum, or migrant workers, in which case they do not have this right.

The bill assumes that all should be immediately deported or imprisoned. The defense is that some are not refugees, ignoring the fact that surely many are. UNHCR does not have the resources to efficiently check all, and the Israeli government refused to put aside a budget to address the increase in refugees and/or migrant workers entering Israel.

The Geneva Convention for the Protection of Refugees of 1951 does not require countries take all who claim to be refugees. It demands that countries give all the opportunity to prove that they are refugees, through vigorous questioning, and to not deport those who are proven refugees.

This is the argument that human rights groups in Israel are making, and the reason we so object to the government “Vilnai Law” proposed by the government and supported by MK Vilnai and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

A guy I spoke to from the UN said that that may well be the case for some of the Eritreans now arriving in Israel.

I pity the plight of the Sudanese although part of the reason they end up in Israel in particular are: its porous borders + better conditions here than with their ‘brethren’ in Egypt

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1210668646476&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668646487&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

PS A lot of the Sudanese spent a few years in Egypt before coming to Israel where many have stories as chilling as those from their homeland…

I do not agree that the U.S. Jewish community is up in arms about Darfur “because we can’t come to consensus about the Palestinians.” I am up in arms, at least, because the genocide in Darfur (and especially world inaction) reminds me of how the world stood idly by when hundreds of thousands of people were massacred in Rwanda and Bosnia, and before that in Cambodia, Biafra, and yes during the Holocaust. For me knowledge of what was done to Jews has made me pay more attention when other peoples are victimized.

The American Jewish community is all up in arms about the genocide in Darfur, because we can’t come to consensus about the Palestinians. What are the perpetual apologists for Israeli policy in our community going to do if Israel takes such a wrong-headed course on Sudanese refugees? Can we pretend this doesn’t matter?

Or is it so hypocritical for anyone who lives in the US to worry about how another country treats refugees that my head should be exploding from it?