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Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Sunday
Flashback: Israel Forcibly Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control, Report Claims
By Elise Knutsen
Recently, a report revealing that African women immigrating to Israel were subjected to mandatory contraceptive injections, effectively amounting to forced (if temporary) sterilization made global headlines.
Some 130,000 Ethiopians, most of them Jewish, live in Israel. The community experienceshigher poverty and unemployment rates than the rest of the country’s Jewish population. In the past decade, the birth rate among Ethiopian-Israelis has declined by at least 20 percent. Advocacy groups now claim this decline is the result of a birth control regimen forced upon Ethiopian immigrant women.
According to an article in Haaretz, an Israeli news source, one Ethiopian immigrant said that the doctors who injected her claimed that “people who frequently give birth suffer.” While it is possible, if highly unlikely, that doctors genuinely had the women’s health in mind when they forcibly injected them with contraceptives, there is no excuse for depriving women sovereignty over their own reproductive choices.
Israel has acknowledged the issue (without admitting any wrongdoing) and has vowed institutional changes in healthcare for immigrants. By decree of Israel’s health minister, gynecologists have been ordered “not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.” Still, intense scrutiny should be applied by women’s groups and international organizations to make sure these changes are implemented in full. Moreover, more attention must be paid to the plight of vulnerable African immigrants around the world.
That Israel should allegedly engage in this activity is particularly shocking, considering the practice was widely used by the Germans throughout the Shoah. While the scale and effects of these operations cannot be compared, Israel’s implicit intent to limit ‘burdensome’ (read: undesirable) portions of the population recalls the dark eugenics experiments of World War II.
Immigration, legal and otherwise, is a difficult and invariably sticky issue for developed nations. Israel, like the United States, has struggled to find a way to secure its borders and its population while dealing with a constant stream of immigrants from neighboring countries and, increasingly, the African continent. While admitting the difficult security issues that Israel faces, the international community must loudly and unanimously rebuke the systematic violations of human rights inflicted on women immigrants of African origin.
From a sociological perspective, this incident shows the strain between Israel’s religious heritage and its modern political agenda. “Behold, the heritage of the Lord is sons, the reward is the fruit of the innards. Like arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the sons of one’s youth. Praiseworthy is the man who has filled his quiver with them,” the Torah proclaims. The involuntary sterilization of African immigrants suggests that the Jewish moral code (inextricably connected with Israel’s domestic legal codes) can be selectively applied to those with ‘desirable’ backgrounds. It is hard, indeed almost impossible to believe that an American Jewish woman immigrating to Israel would have been forced to take birth control.
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Flashback: David Cameron describes blockaded Gaza as a 'prison
UK Prime Minister David Cameron has condemned the blockade of the Gaza Strip, describing the territory as a "prison camp".
He also criticised Israel for launching an attack on a convoy transporting Turkish activists and aid to Gaza. Nine Turkish citizens died in the raid.
He was speaking to an audience of businessmen during a visit to Ankara.
The Israeli embassy in London said Gazans were prisoners of Palestinian militant Islamist group Hamas.
Israel and Egypt enforce a blockade on Gaza which restricts goods and people from coming in or out freely.
"Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp," Mr Cameron said.
"People in Gaza are living under constant attacks and pressure in an open-air prison," he said.
In May, Israeli commandoes stormed the Mavi Marmara and in fighting that followed, nine Turkish activists were killed and four soldiers wounded.
During a press conference held with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mr Erdogan called the Israeli raid an act of "piracy".
"Israel must apologise as soon as possible, pay compensation and lift the blockade," he said.
The British government's policy has been to call for an end to the blockade, but never before has a British prime minister been so blunt, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Ankara.
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, was responsible for the situation in Gaza.
"The people of Gaza are the prisoners of the terrorist organisation Hamas. The situation in Gaza is the direct result of Hamas' rule and priorities," the spokesman said.
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