Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumPoll: 52% of Jewish Israelis say illegal African migrants a 'cancer'
More than half of Jewish Israelis polled in May agreed that Africans living illegally in Israel are a cancer in the body of the country, backing the controversial words of an Israeli lawmaker.
The new poll from the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University is a sign of how deep the backlash against African migrants goes in Israel, a country founded by refugees that has seen angry and sometimes violent resistance to the new influx from Eritrea, Sudan and elsewhere in Africa.
The Times Edmund Sanders has recently reported on a string of attacks and harassment against migrants such as 60-year-old Berhun Gergrehra, a former Eritrean soldier:
Leaning against the charred remains of his fence, Gergrehra said the recent attack was the second time his house had been firebombed in a year.
"We're thinking about leaving," he said. "This country just won't accept us."
Though the attacks spurred outcry against racism and xenophobia in Israel, the new poll showed strong support for the recent Tel Aviv protests against African immigrants, with more than four out of five Jewish Israelis saying they backed the demonstrations.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/06/poll-jewish-israelis-african-migrants.html
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)I suspect this 52% would feel right at home here in Arizona.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)But that will only get us in trouble, and it doesn't go anywhere.
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Indydem
(2,642 posts)Why do so many people have sympathy for those breaking the laws?
I will never understand it.
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)Could that be because some people have problems with unjust laws?
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)Rejecting a petition by human rights groups that had delayed the interior ministry's deportation order of 1 April, the Jerusalem district court ruled the state was not obligated to extend de facto asylum to the estimated 1,500 migrants from South Sudan.
The court said petitioners had not proven that deportees would face "risk to life or exposure to serious damage", supporting assessments by Israeli diplomats in South Sudan, which declared independence last year after decades of fighting with northern neighbour Sudan.
Most of the approximately 60,000 Africans who have walked into Israel through its porous desert border with Egypt are from Sudan, an overwhelmingly Arab-Muslim nation that does not recognise the Jewish state, and from war-ravaged Eritrea.
The Israeli government sees the migrants as an economic and demographic threat to the country's already ethnically strained population of 7.8 million, and anti-African street protests in urban centres have turned increasingly violent.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/07/israeli-court-deportation-south-sudan