The national emotional debate over foreign workers and their children continues: the Interior Minister’s decision to expel 1,200 children has not yet been accepted, a Knesset committee went to see things for itself, and farmers protested.
Ilan Peretz, Director of Moshavei HaNegev, Israel’s largest agricultural company, said that the shortage of foreign workers and the “sad fact” that Israelis don’t want to work in the fields is “liable to lead to a shortage of fruits and vegetables in Israel.” Farmers protested the intention to cut back on foreign workers from Thailand by throwing out vegetables and driving slowly on highways on Sunday.
On the other hand, the members of the Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers toured the Israeli-Egyptian border on Thursday, and noted that the problem of foreign workers from Africa is reaching crisis proportions. Noting that 7% of the population of the southern port city of Eilat are foreigners, the members were told by army officers that no fewer than one million Africans are waiting in Sinai to be smuggled across the Egyptian border into Israel.
Left, Right agree on fence
The committee is headed by MK Yaakov Katz (Ketzaleh), head of the National Union party, who said, “I salute the residents of Eilat and Arad, and their leaders, who must deal with the flooding of their cities with thousands of illegal entrants whose presence destabilizes the towns in terms of both security and economics.”
Katz was accompanied on the visit by MKs of Kadima, Meretz, and the Likud. They all agreed that the government must implement the previous government’s decision to build a fence on the Israel-Eygpt border to deal with this “strategic existential problem for Israel’s future.”
Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) has taken a strong stand on the matter, resolving to deport 1,200 children of foreign workers by the end of this school year. The decision has not yet been ratified by the government, however, and a number of ministers have voiced their opposition.
Auto-anti-Semitism?
Many organizations have come out against the decision to deport the children. Some have said that having gone through the Holocaust, the Jewish People must cease threatening to deport children who have been born in Israel. Dr. Ruby Natanzon, head of the Macro Center for Social Economics, said, “Government statements justifying the deportation of the foreign workers and their children for employment and demographic reasons are statements that should not be made.”
Col. (res.) Gad Durlecher of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu wrote in this week’s B’Sheva weekly that the campaign on behalf of the foreign workers is designed merely to neutralize the growth of the religious sector in Israel’s population. “Twenty years ago,” he wrote, “the Israeli left understood that with an average of 5-6 children per religious family and only 1 in their own, a solid religious-Jewish majority would develop within a generation. They therefore decided to declare war against a Jewish state in which the religious were a majority. Some of them were truly afraid of [the changes that would result], while others were motivated by regular auto-anti-Semitism.”