Israel’s non-Jewish non-Palestinian residents
Israel’s effort to remain a Jewish state with the trappings of democracy rather than become a real democracy for all its citizens has many ramifications beyond the refusal to extend full equality to its Arab citizens. The Taiwan News reports that Israel’s one-time only residency offer has some fretting about national identity:
Dennis Sarpong used to live in fear that his mother, a Ghanaian on an expired work visa, would be deported. He would walk her to her cleaning jobs every morning because Israeli law bars police from arresting parents in their children’s presence. Now 16-year-old Sarpong is among 150 Israeli-born children of foreign workers who recently were granted Israeli residency. His new status also shields his mother from deportation and he can sleep an extra hour before heading to school. But some Israelis are uneasy that what the government insists is a one-time gesture will become a threat to the identity of the Jewish state.
The issue reveals conflicting impulses that go to the core of Israel’s self-image. A state founded as a haven for Jews worries that its Jewish character is being diluted by a growing Arab minority, lately augmented by up to 300,000 migrants from Africa and Asia. Schooled in the virtues of Jewish self-reliance, it has seen the foreigners become dominant in whole sectors of its economy, chiefly construction and care for the elderly. But the spectacle of helpless children being threatened with deportation has also touched a nerve, and Israeli human rights groups are waging a court battle to let at least some of them stay in the land where they go to school and whose Hebrew language they speak like sabras - native-born Israelis.
Foreign workers have been coming to Israel since the 1980s, but their number has increased in the last decade to replace a Palestinian work force shut out by Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Estimates range between 100,000 and 300,000, and in a nation of nearly 7 million, granting their children citizenship would not change Israel in any fundamental way, says Roby Nathanson, chairman of the Israeli Institute for Economic and Social Research. Israel is already 25 percent non-Jewish, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.
But Eli Yishai, the former interior minister who heads Shas, an orthodox Jewish political party, says granting residency to children such as Sarpong has done “very serious damage to the Israeli identity.” The government should not grant residency to non-Jews, even if they are born here, he said. “Otherwise, we will stop being Israel, and become a country like other countries.”
That last quoted sentence goes to the heart of Israel’s dilemma: exclusivity or normalization. The choice seems simple when we deplore racist immigration and citizenship policies more generally around the world, as a matter of principle. It remains a puzzle why Israel’s supporters assume Israel is different and that democratic principles don’t apply.
