Justice Minister Yaakov Ne'eman said Monday that giving work to African infiltrators, as suggested by Israel's police commander, contradicts Zionism.
He also revealed that the government is in contact with foreign officials to arrange for deporting the illegal immigrants, whose numbers have reached tens of thousands, either to their home countries or to a third party nation.
Israel must giver the infiltrators basic needs, “as required by international law," Ne’eman told the attorneys at a conference in Eilat. He immediately added that Zionism precluded giving them jobs, which “would create more unemployment among the citizens of Israel.”
Police chief Yohanan Danino has urged giving the African infiltrators employment as a way to reduce the crime rate. Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld added, "The community needs to be supported in order to prevent economic and social problems.”
Interior Minister Eli Yishai (Shas) last week rejected the suggestion. "Why should we provide them with jobs? I'm sick of the bleeding hearts, including politicians. Jobs would settle them here and would only encourage them to reproduce and attract hundreds of thousands more to come over here….The Zionist dream is dying,” he said.
Mainstream media have quoted statistics that the crime rate in the community of illegal infiltrators is declining when compared with 2010, but the statistics do not take into account that the total population now includes hundreds if not thousands of new babies and that the crime rate in specific communities is rampant.
Tel Aviv’s beaches have been hit by a literal rampage of petty thefts by illegal African immigrants, who work in groups to steal wallets, purses and cellular phones from swimmers or napping sunbathers.
Few of the infiltrators are classified as “refugees” and there is growing support in the government to take swift action to end the incoming stream before it become a flood, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday.
He said the current estimated number of 60,000 illegal immigrants could grow to 600,000 if action is not taken soon.
Mainstream media have somewhat softened their opposition to deportation as the infiltrators increasingly pose a demographic threat to metropolitan Tel Aviv. Left-wing groups, particularly human rights groups that are fighting the growing numbers of the nationalist and religious sectors, promote absorbing them and giving more benefits to African infiltrators and other non-Jews, especially Bedouin.
The Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers on Monday expressed near unanimity about the need to deport the infiltrators. Meretz Knesset Member Nitzan Horowitz called the government “racist," while committee chairman MK Danny Danon of the Likud labeled the illegal immigrants “enemies.“