Netanyahu cries foul as court protects asylum-seekers from indefinite detention
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is framing a recent ruling to limit detention periods for asylum-seekers as further evidence of the threat they pose to Israeli society.
How often can one incite against liberals and dump on the media to divert public attention? It seems that every so often, the repertoire of fear and hatred must be diversified to continue distracting the public from the tightening noose of criminal investigations against the Netanyahu family.
On Aug. 28, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was handed a golden opportunity to spread some hatred. Five Supreme Court justices, known among the populist right as “elites,” issued a ruling that showed consideration for asylum-seekers, or as the famously law-abiding Israeli premier calls them, “illegal infiltrators.” A petition had been submitted by human rights activists to limit detention of this population. To hear Netanyahu tell it, all these asylum-seekers had joined forces to make life miserable for the downtrodden residents of southern Tel Aviv’s disadvantaged neighborhoods so dearly cherished by the prime minister and his wife.
In response, the nation’s top court sinned by limiting to two months the incarceration of those among an estimated 40,000 asylum-seekers, the vast majority (92%) from Eritrea and Sudan, who refuse to leave Israel. That’s all it takes to stand with the good guys — the impoverished Jews living in depressed neighborhoods — against the bad guys — the unfortunate Africans dumped in the heart of those neighborhoods. Absent permission to make an honest living, some are mixed up in crime. Nonetheless, according to data compiled by the Knesset’s research center, the crime rate among asylum-seekers is significantly lower than that of Tel Aviv’s wider population. Actually, in 2010, the number of criminal files opened for asylum-seekers in Tel Aviv was less than a fifth of the number of criminal files opened for Tel Aviv Israeli residents (one criminal file for every 15.9, compared with one for every 84.7 asylum-seekers).
The prime minister’s busy schedule was cleared after this ruling. His associates organized a high-profile visit to mark the opening of a new police station in a low-income southern Tel Aviv neighborhood where migrants have congregated. “I’ve heard the residents, and what I hear is pain and crisis,” cried Netanyahu, who could have financed an elderly couple in an impoverished southern Tel Aviv neighborhood for a whole year for the price of the cigars, champagne and pistachio ice cream flowing to his home. “We are here on a mission to give southern Tel Aviv back to the Israeli residents,” the prime minister promised local residents, who had been riled up by targeted right-wing incitement against the “liberal” Supreme Court. Netanyahu failed to tell them that two among the five justices who ruled on the petition had proposed that the state consider easing the burden of southern Tel Aviv’s residents by spreading the asylum-seekers throughout other parts of the country.
