Saturday, June 6, 2015

Israel Uses U.S. Immigrant Child Welfare Model

If it does not work in the U.S., what makes Israel think it will work for them.

Here is a report on shattered families in immigration and it is not pretty.

Here is a bit of U.S. history on child welfare.


Black Infants Are Dying In Israel’s ‘Baby Warehouses’ — Five Babies Dead So Far This Year

There has been outcry at the deaths of five babies this year – each only months old – in Israel’s network of unsanitary, unregulated (but perfectly legal) ‘baby warehouses’ for the infants of African immigrants.

Dozens of unlicensed daycare centers have opened across Tel Aviv to offer “affordable” childcare for the thousands of African immigrants awaiting their legal right to remain in the Jewish state. They have become known as ‘baby warehouses’ by rights groups due to their filth, squalor and the vast numbers of infants confined to small spaces with minimal staffing.
The authorities don’t shut them down, because otherwise the migrants would be unable to afford proper childcare and therefore also unable to provide their cheap labor.

Israel is the only country with a decent standard of living reachable by foot for African refugees fleeing Eritrea and Sudan, and the UN states that 53,000 such immigrants now populate the state. But Israel doesn’t want them to stay, leaving the majority in legal limbo. So they end up exploited for wages for below minimum wage, and their children are left in the kinds of appalling conditions to which we would not subject farmyard animals.

As  writes for AFP as she stands in one such center:
“…dirty feeding bottles lie in the sinks…
About a dozen babies, many of them crying, cling to the bars of their cots without drawing the slightest attention…
A pungent smell of dirty nappies fills the room, which is about 10 square metres, where another dozen or so toddlers are huddled on the floor, their eyes glued to a television set.”
“The number of adults is totally inadequate to feed each child individually. They are sometimes propped up against a pillow with a bottle attached to their neck,” said Maya Peleg, director of Unitaf. “That is how one of the babies recently died, choking.”
But even those infants lucky enough to survive the neglect and unsanitary conditions of the centers are likely to suffer developmental consequences for their entire lives. Yael Meir, a researcher in psychology at Tel Aviv University recently co-authored a study on the impact of such “baby factories,” which captured these devastating consequences.
“After several months or several years spent in such babysitters, children suffer sometimes irreversible developmental setbacks,” she told AFP.
“The lack of stimulation affects their development at all levels — motor, social, cognitive, emotional. These handicaps emerge when they begin to attend school and they often have to be placed in special education structures,” she said.
To understand the desperation that would have African mothers and fathers leave their children in such dire circumstances, one needs to understand just the seriousness of Israel’s abuses against immigrants – who are routinely called ‘infiltrators’ by leading politicians and the media.
Perhaps the keenest example of this abuse would be the story of Ethiopian Jews. Israel has for years run an immigration policy which involved the secret and compulsory sterilization of women of color. When these allegations were first made, the Israeli state responded with contemptuous denials but overwhelming evidence forced them to admit the disgraceful practice in 2013.
The state which defines itself as a safe haven for the world’s Jews has a decidedly frosty reception for Jews which happen to be black. Whilst facing heinous anti-Semitism in the post Haile Salessie Ethiopia (2,500 were killed, 7000 made homeless) Ethiopian Jews sought sanctuary is Israel. Instead, during the 1980’s and 1990’s thousands spent years and hundreds died in transit camps outside Israel while the state procrastinated over its welcome policy for these black Jews. When Israel finally started to let some in, they were thrown into an eye watering bureaucracy of what Israel’s Haaretz newspaper describes as ‘repressive, racist and paternalistic policies’. This involves going through state-run ‘absorption centers’ which manage every inch of their lives in Israel. The immigrant is tied to the state; overseen and controlled through these absorption centres which dictate where they live, where they can work, where their children can be educated, and other crucial elements of their lives. It was at these absorption centres that Ethiopian women were given contraceptive injections, without their knowledge, in state efforts to prevent the procreation of black Jews in Israel.
Suspicions were first raised several years ago by the Feminist movement in Israel, and more recently by investigative journalist Gal Gabay as part of the Vacuum documentary series. Gabay interviewed over thirty women as part of a study in a sudden dramatic birth rate decline in the Ethiopian immigrant community. It became clear that gynecologists were using theDepo-Provera contraceptive on Ethiopian immigrant women without their consent. Women were either told they were receiving harmless inoculations, or their consent was procured through force and coercion.
One of the Ethiopian women interviewed is quoted as saying:
“They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.”
In questioning why a nation founded in the blood and horror of the holocaust would employ such a policy of eugenics, one must look only to the comments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also holds the Health Portfolio. Speaking on Ethiopian immigration in 2012, he claimed it would “threaten our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”
It would seem Israel does not need any external agitator to threaten its democracy; it is doing a consummate job of destroying any pretense of democracy all on its own.
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