Dec. 1, 2022

 

The editorial in Haaretz (Israel’s New York Times) begins, “Ayelet Shaked is determined to use every moment she has left in the Interior Ministry to torment the most disadvantaged people living in Israel.

 

Two weeks ago, she rejected the advisory committee on refugee affairs’ recommendation that asylum be given to a woman from Sierra Leone who fears she will face genital mutilation if she is repatriated”

 

You read that right.  She opposes giving asylum to this one woman even though the advisory committee vote was unanimous and that the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that fear of this mutilation was in fact a reason to grant asylum. 

 

Who is Shaked?  She’s head of the Interior Ministry.  She’s part of the (now defeated) “alternative to Netanyahu”, the absurd cobbled together coalition that included settler leader Naftali Bennett, a Palestinian Arab who thought he could get money for his community by giving up Palestinian rights and a party that once stood for civil rights.

 

Shaked continued the Israeli policy of NOT giving asylum to virtually all non-Jews.  A week ago the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority rejected “a residency permit request on humanitarian grounds of a 16-year-old autistic Filipino girl who was abandoned by her family, and ordered her to leave the country within 30 days.”  She had been sent by her family(who likely abused her) to live with her father who was working in Israel.  Three years ago she was found wandering the streets of Tel Aviv.  She was evaluated and “diagnosed on the autistic spectrum.”  The father has been deported from Israel and he did not take his daughter.  But there is no mercy in Israel for this one child.  She must go.

 

About the woman from Sierra Leone, Interior Minister Shaked said, (believe it or not) that not all kids of female genital cutting is the same.  Some, she said are less extreme than male circumcision.  “Only a portion of them have the potential to inflict hard great enough.”  Shaked said one had to use “caution” when criticizing other cultures.  The Haaretz editorial said, “This breaks all records for cynicism.”

 

As Palestinians are shot to death daily by an Israeli government headed by this “reform” coalition, one can only tremble to think what will come next.