The administration of the City of Bnei Brak, Israel demolished a building in the Pardes Katz neighborhood after it found out the building was being used as housing by African asylum seekers. The demolition was reportedly part of an ongoing plan to force Africans out of the haredi city.
Haredi City Demolishes Building Because African Asylum Seekers Were Living There
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
The administration of the City of Bnei Brak, Israel demolished a building in the Pardes Katz neighborhood after it found out the building was being used as housing by African asylum seekers. The demolition was reportedly part of an ongoing plan to force Africans out of the haredi city, Arutz Sheva reported.
Several years ago the city administration asked senior members of Israel’s internal security apparatus to remove the African asylum seekers – “infiltrators” in common Israeli parlance – but were told the African asylum seekers could be removed only after criminal complaints were filed against them, meaning an African asylum seeker would have to be formally accused of stealing or some other crime before he could be expelled.
Believing that African asylum seekers are largely criminals, the city chose not to wait for the crime wave it expected to be caused by the Africans – it never came anyway – and began a crackdown on illegally divided apartments in the city if those illegally divided apartments were occupied by Africans.
Bnei Brak’s spokesman Avraham Tenenbaum told Arutz Sheva that in the first stages of the crackdown against the Africans, dozens of legal files against the African renters were opened and the city also dramatically increased police patrols in the neighborhood.
"We discovered that in one building six housing units on the ground floor and four units on the first floor were divided into separate housing units for these [Africans]. In actions at the court, high monetary fines were imposed on those dividing up the apartments and for the building irregularities in these apartments, and likewise closure orders were issued against illegal cafes, noisy game rooms and pirate businesses lacking a license,” Tenenbaum said.
About 50,000 African asylum seekers managed to enter Israel over the past decade. Most have been treated horribly by successive Netanyahu governments, and even though under international law the bulk of these African asylum seekers qualify for refugee status, Israel has only approved a tiny handful of applications, sometimes taking well over one year to respond to an individual application – if any response is given at all.
The government has harassed these asylum seekers, prevented most from legally working, and has done little to nothing to help these desperate poor people with food or housing. The government has at various times also imprisoned thousands of the Africans without individual judicial review, not for committing crimes against Israeli, but for being “infiltrators.”
Periodic waves of racist violence by Israeli Jews against the African asylum seekers have seen Jews firebomb a daycare center run by and serving African asylum seekers, seen apartments housing African asylum seekers firebombed, and seen Africans beaten during anti-African-asylum-seeker-riots. But the mobs who beat African asylum seekers were not discriminating, and in at least one case they beat an Ethiopian Jew by mistake.
Only a handful of arrests of these violent Israeli Jews have been made, and even those who firebombed African asylum seekers homes or businesses – even that daycare center – and were convicted were sentenced to little to no time in prison.
Complaints of widespread crime – especially rapes – by African asylum seekers are primarily examples of selection and confirmation bias. A person expects African asylum seekers to be dangerous rapists and criminals. Then, when an African asylum seeker does commit a violent crime, that belief has been confirmed. But what is not immediately obvious is that the actual rate of this type of crime is not much different for African asylum seekers than it is for Israeli Jews of for the country as a whole.
Right-wing Israeli politicians, including members of Knesset, have called the African asylum seekers a "cancer" that has to be cut out of the country and some of the most vociferous opponents of helping the African asylum seekers have been Zionist Orthodox and haredi rabbis.