* Right wingers fear Christians, Muslims will swamp Jews
By Allyn Fisher-Ilan
JERUSALEM, June 3 (Reuters) - Israel may jail illegal immigrants for up to
three years under a law put into effect on Sunday, an Interior Ministry
official said, a measure aimed at stemming the flow of Africans entering
Israel across the porous desert border with Egypt.
"The law takes effect from today," said Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine
Haddad. The controversial law was passed by parliament in January and
denounced at the time by liberal politicians and human rights activists.
Haddad noted that Israeli leaders had said they would try to reduce an
influx they view as a threat to Israel's Jewish character, and quoted
Interior Minister Eli Yishai as saying last month he wanted to jail or
deport illegal immigrants.
Tens of thousands of migrants, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, have arrived
in Israel in the past three years, and the pace has picked up to about 2,000
a month since December, for a total of 60,000 since the influx began.
Many migrants say they are fleeing persecution or war, but few have been
granted formal asylum or refugee status, leaving many with temporary visas,
subsisting on wages from menial jobs, swelling the ranks of the poor.
"The problem of the infiltrators must be solved and we will solve it," Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month, in remarks aimed at calming
protests against migrants in Tel Aviv.
Yishai, of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, told the newspaper Maariv on
Friday he saw the African arrivals, many of whom are Muslims or Christians,
as a demographic threat.
"The infiltrators along with the Palestinians will quickly bring us to the
end of the Zionist dream," Yishai said, adding that Israel had its own
health and welfare issues. "We don't need to import more problems from
Africa."
"Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country
doesn't belong to us, the white man," Yishai said in the interview with
Maariv.
Aryeh Eldad, a right-wing lawmaker, urged Israel to order its troops to open
fire on any infiltrators who penetrated its borders, rather than only at
those suspected of being armed.
Dov Henin, a left-wing legislator, said the measures Israel was taking
against the migrants were "immoral," echoing the opinions of Israelis who
feel that Jews, often victims of persecution in the past, should show
compassion to the migrants.
Some Israelis wondered if jails near the Egyptian border could accommodate
all the migrants flowing in.
Israeli media reports said the detention facilities already used to hold
thousands of migrants for a number of weeks after crossing the border before
they were freed, were not large enough to accommodate more than about 5,000.
Israel has not yet completed a larger facility whose construction was
approved late last year, when $167 million was earmarked for it and for a
fence being erected along the Egyptian border to block migrants and armed
Islamist militants from infiltrating from Egypt's Sinai peninsula. (Writing
by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Tim Pearce)
C Thomson Reuters 2012 All rights reserved
----[Mailing List for Eritrea Related News ]----
Received on Sun Jun 03 2012 - 21:04:24 EDT
