The Labor party requested Monday that the government grant full Israeli citizenship to 1,200 children who were born in Israel to foreign workers. In addition, Labor officials asked that at least 600 parents of the children be granted citizenship as well.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel has a “Jewish, national, moral and human obligation” to allow the children to remain in Israel.
At the same time, the party called to locate and expel illegal workers in Israel. Their place should be taken by Israeli citizens, Labor politicians said.
While Labor and other left-wing parties have enthusiastically campaigned on behalf of foreign children living in Israel, several veteran activists have warned that the issue of Israeli-born foreign children is being used to manipulate public sentiment for anti-Israel purposes.
Political activist Yosef David of the Likud party's Jewish Leadership faction warned Monday that the children of foreign workers are being used by Israel's left as a demographic weapon. The far-left “New Israel Fund” is behind the legal and public relations campaigns aimed at keeping foreign workers and their children in Israel, he said.
Those who wish to allow foreign workers to stay, hoping to see Israel become a “state of its citizens” instead of a Jewish state, have succeeded in tying the army and police's hands through a number of minor reforms, he warned. Among other things, only those police officers specially trained to deal with foreign workers may arrest illegal workers, and an illegal worker who claims to have a child in Israel may not be deported unless he or she can be proven to be lying.
Colonel (res.) Gad Durlecher voiced similar concerns. In this week's B'Sheva weekly, Dulecher warned that organizations funded by anti-Israel parties in Europe and elsewhere were behind the campaign to assist foreign workers and other non-Jewish migrants in their struggle to remain in Israel.
Those who wish to allow foreign workers, illegal entrants and others to remain in Israel “argue that we must separate ourselves from the Arabs of Judea and Samaria in order to maintain a Jewish majority,” Durlecher noted.