topic by
Revealer
6/10/2002 (11:50) |
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Children are subject to the law but not protected by it
One of the groups most discriminated against in Israel is the 60,000 Bedouin children living in the unrecognized settlements in the Negev and the Galilee. Most of them are denied basic services and infrastructure such as water, electricity and transportation
Between the end of September 1987, when the first intifada broke out, and the end of March 2002, 457 Palestinian minors under the age of 17 (of whom 123 were under the age of 13) were killed by Israel Defense Forces soldiers and Jewish settlers in the territories. During that same period, 67 Israelis under the age of 17 (17 of them under the age of 13) were killed in shooting incidents and suicide attacks by Palestinian terrorists (source: B'Tselem). For as long as the conflict, the violence and the occupation continue, Israeli and Palestinian children's right to life will be violated, their economic situation will grow worse and the blood price they continue to pay will grow higher.
This is the main conclusion of a comprehensive report prepared by Defense for Children International (DCI) Israeli Section and the Israeli Children's Rights Coalition, an umbrella organization of more than 60 NGOs active here. The report will be presented tomorrow to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which is meeting in Geneva to discuss the first periodic report submitted by the State of Israel, in October of last year, on the way the UN covenant on the rights of the child, which has been signed by Israel, is being implemented.
The first part of the organizations' report, consisting of 290 pages, determines that the state's official report focuses excessively on legislation with little emphasis on its actual implementation. In recent years, progressive laws have been legislated in Israel in the area of children's rights (such as the law to prevent domestic violence and the law on single-parent families). However the regrettable reality, according to the organizations' report, is that the effect of this progressive legislation is often not felt. Their assessment regrets that, 'The first state report hardly devotes attention to the situation of Palestinian children in the territories,' and therefore their report provides supplementary material from findings of Israeli and Palestinian organizations indicating violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child with respect to Palestinian children in the territories.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child determines that a minor is anyone who has not yet reached the age of 18. In 1998, more than 2 million children lived in Israel: 1.5 million Jewish children, 440,000 Muslim children, 42,000 Druze children and about the same number of Christian children. In the territories of the Palestinian Authority there were 1.4 million children under the age of 18. (The Israel Defense Forces defines a minor as anyone who has not reached the age of 16.)
Dr. Philip Veerman, the head of the DCI Israeli Section, who is representing the coalition's report in Geneva, will say, among other things, that 'the preference given to security needs is blocking the plans for progress in the implementation of the rights of the child in Israel as resources are, inevitably, directed toward the military effort.' Veerman will give as an example to support this claim the two cuts this year in the National Insurance Institute allowances for children, which will increase the number of children living below the poverty line and increase the discrimination against Arab children. According to him, 'Without a cessation of the violence and without a peaceful solution to the conflict, children, tragically, are among those who will be the main victims of the situation.' This article reviews some of the findings of the report.
480,000 poor children
The organizations' report was completed before it could take into account the negative effects of the latest cut in the NII children's allowance, but even without this update the picture is bleak: In 2000, the number of poor children reached 480,000 - that is, one out of every four children lived below the poverty line. The proportion of poor children in the Jewish population reached 19.5 percent, and among the Arabs - 37.7 percent, more than one-third.
According to the data in possession of the New Family organization, in 2000 there were 171,000 children living in single-parent families, as compared to 132,000 five years earlier. That means 12 percent of the children in Israel were living in single-parent families. Among immigrants from Russia the proportion reached as much as 18 percent.
The report cites the Latet organization, which claims that poverty in Israel is far worse than indicated by the NII Poverty Report. This is because the poverty report examines only how much money is in the hands of every family in Israel and does not examine how much of this money goes on essential expenditures of poor children. The poverty report does not take into account, for example, that in some families with incomes that place them above the poverty line, some of the money is spent on drugs. Another figure in the report shows that 450,000 families are in need of immediate housing solutions.
The organizations' report notes that poverty among Palestinian children in the territories of the Palestinian Authority and in East Jerusalem is far worse because of the effects of the war, the closures, the confiscation of lands and the unemployment. The demolishing of Palestinian houses by the Israel Defense Forces in the course of punitive actions and military actions, and by the Jerusalem municipality, on the grounds that construction had been undertaken illegally without the necessary permits, has made many families and their children homeless.
Ethiopians on a separate floor
One of the groups most discriminated against in Israel is the 60,000 Bedouin children living in the unrecognized settlements in the Negev and the Galilee. Most of them are denied basic services and infrastructure such as water, electricity and transportation and they suffer from a low level of health and education services. Bedouin children in the unrecognized settlements live in homes and attend schools where there are no shelters.
To demonstrate the discrimination against the Arab citizens, who constitute about one-fifth of the population of this country, the report presents a table showing the low proportion of Arab students at universities in Israel. In 1999, the proportion of Arab students for the BA degree was 8.7 percent of the total number of students in Israel. The proportion of students for the MA degree was 3.6 percent, and for the Ph.D. 3.5 percent. Of the approximately 5,000 lecturers at Israeli universities, only about 45 were Arabs.
This is described as 'discrimination on a national basis.' To demonstrate this, the organizations' report cites Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who in an interview to the CNN television network on April 16 of this year declared himself 'the prime minister of the Jewish people.' The authors of the report conclude that this statement by Sharon transmitted a message to the younger generation of Israeli Arabs that 'discrimination against you will not end in the near future.'
The report also points to ethnic discrimination, of which the victims are mostly Ethiopian children and children of Mizrahi origins (Jews of Middle Eastern descent). As a blatant example of such discrimination, the report mentions the state-religious school in Ashdod, where Ethiopian students studied on a separate floor of the building apart from the rest of the students and had recess at different times from the other children. In this way they were able to have no contact with the other students. The school justified these measures on the grounds that the level of religious observance differed between the groups, but in the opinion of the writers of the report, this is discrimination.
In the education system there is ostensibly equality between the sexes but in fact, claims the report, the education system is flawed with stereotyped perceptions that perpetuate gaps in educational achievement between girls and boys, especially in the area of the sciences. Thus, for example, in 1999 the number of boys who took the bagrut (matriculation) exam at the 5-unit level in mathematics was double the number of girls who took the exam. To this day, religious families in the Jewish and Muslim sectors deny adolescent girls the right to continue their studies, and the state does nothing about this.
Children in transit camps
One chapter in the organizations' report is devoted to a survey of basic rights that are denied to groups of children in Israel. The rights to registration, citizenship and an identity are denied by the Interior Ministry to immigrant minors, especially from the CIS, as the religious establishment casts doubt on their Jewishness. The Interior Ministry refuses to enroll Palestinian children from East Jerusalem in the Population Registry on the grounds that their parents have lost their right of residency. If they are not registered, the children are denied their right to medical insurance and NII allowances.
Another common phenomenon is the denial of the right to family reunification. Affected by this are Jews from Ethiopia who have had to leave behind family members not permitted to immigrate to Israel because their Jewishness is in doubt, immigrants from the CIS whose Jewishness is in doubt, Israeli families in which one of the members of a couple is not Jewish or Israeli and families from East Jerusalem in which one of the spouses is not a resident of the city. In certain cases, such a husband or wife is defined as an illegal resident and is a candidate for deportation or could even be thrown in jail.
The report reveals that at the transit camps in Addis Ababa and Gonder in Ethiopia, 6,000 children are waiting in dire circumstances to immigrate to Israel, without food, medical supervision or education. There are 18,600 Ethiopian children who have registered to immigrate at the Embassy of Israel in Addis Ababa. A request by the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee to bring over to 800 to 1,000 of these children has had no response.
Nighttime arrests of minors
The organizations' report states that the government of Israel discriminates mostly against Palestinian children with respect to the implementation of laws and special measures to protect children and minors during military operations and violent confrontations. Lawyer Mahmoud Rabbah of the DCI complained of the continuing practice whereby arrests of Palestinian minors are carried out late at night on the grounds of 'protecting the force that carries out the arrest.'
According to the report, in most cases the interrogation of minors under arrest is also carried out late at night. Rabbah believes that the nighttime interrogations are aimed at breaking the minor's spirit - especially if this is his first arrest - with the aim of extracting a confession from him of crimes he did or did not commit. The hour of the interrogation makes it impossible for the minor to meet with a lawyer and, in the vast majority of cases, he is not informed of his right to remain silent.
The Public Defender is informed of the arrest only on the following day, after the minor has made a statement and perhaps even confessed. Palestinian minors have complained that they have been tortured and humiliated during arrest and questioning. The organizations' report notes that recently the Israeli military authorities have been justifying the tough policy toward Palestinian boys and girls of 16 and 17 by the fact that in recent months suicide terrorists of these ages have been sent out.
The final chapter of the organizations' report discusses the lack of protection of minors from economic exploitation and sexual exploitation. In September 2000, the Noar Haoved Vehalomed youth movement found that in Israel about 20,000 girls and boys were employed in violation of the youth employment laws. Palestinian minors, including those under working age, work in the fields of kibbutzim and of Jewish settlements in the territories, in disgraceful conditions of exploitation. Some of them are exploited by labor contracting bosses who smuggle them into Israel.
news.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=174655&contrassID=2&subCont...
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