Netanyahu: It is time to deport African migrants
It is time to increase the pace of deporting African migrants, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the cabinet on Sunday.
Netanyahu said that he has a three-pronged policy regarding getting migrants to leave the country, with the current focus being to encourage most of them to self-deport to a third country – which reports have identified as Rwanda.
In the years prior to 2012, a flood of African migrants crossed into Israel illegally, at one point reaching around 64,000 annually.
Netanyahu said that the state had already carried out the first two prongs of its strategy: stopping the flow of new migrants by building a wall and through legislation, as well as getting more than 20,000 migrants to leave.
The third stage of deporting migrants at an increased pace, he said, “can be carried out thanks to an international agreement which I obtained which allows us to deport the 40,000 remaining infiltrators against their will.”
“This is very important. This will allow us to empty the Holot Detention Center in the future and to redirect portions of the large resources we are using there,” from guarding the migrants, to other needs of the state.
Netanyahu was discussing an initiative announced last week by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and Interior Minister Arye Deri to close Holot, an “open” detention center where a few thousand migrants have been sent to try to convince them to self-deport.
Erdan and Deri’s idea would be to offer migrants the choice of “voluntarily” deporting to a third country or being put in regular prison indefinitely.
Several organizations, including The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Amnesty International Israel, Kav LaOved, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, and the African Refugee Development Center responded to Netanyahu, Erdan and Deri by slamming the initiative.
give and receive. This is how it works with all intelligence organizations.”
Of course, this still leaves open what the intelligence-sharing parameters will be. Even with its closest allies, a country usually does not share every piece of intelligence.
Ben-Barak said that the “system for setting parameters of sharing is very organized and exact about what can be shared and how it can be shared. It is not at the discretion of a lower-level agent. There are decisions about what is important and what is not. When information is shared it relates to something happening,” and to a goal that the state focuses on achieving.
In terms of how information is shared, he said that “sensitive information is usually given over orally,” as opposed to large amounts of less-sensitive intelligence that the US and Israel share on an automated, electronic basis. Still, Ben-Barak did not think that one could assume that the new level of publicly-endorsed intelligence cooperation meant that Israel would necessarily, for example, get the green light from the Saudis to fly through their airspace to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
He did not discount such a possibility if “relations get warmer over time,” but said that overflights were a “very advanced level” of cooperation.
Amidror echoed some similar messages, but also emphasized key points of his own.
He said, what was important about the event was not so much that Eisenkot said he was ready to share intelligence with the Saudis, but more importantly that Saudi Arabia had permitted or even sent one of its journalists to publicly travel to Tel Aviv to meet with the current IDF chief.
The former National Security Council chief said Saudis had met with other former top Israeli officials like Amos Yadlin, Dore Gold and himself (he met with former head of Saudi intelligence Turki bin-Faisal al-Saud in Washington, DC, last year), but not with current ones, at least in public. “Someone in Saudi Arabia understands that relations with Israel need to change... they have crossed the Rubicon,” he said.
He added that, “The IDF has never had a problem with giving intelligence to actors [ who] are fighting with Iran or ISIS. Any actor in the world who comes to fight Iran and says I need something to fight them,” Israel would be likely to cooperate “to fight such a common enemy.”
Amidror agreed that Israel giving intelligence to the Saudis does not mean it has gotten something back, like the right to fly through Saudi airspace toward Iran. But he went even further, saying that “there could be a condition of exchanging intelligence, but not necessarily.” Meaning, Israel helping another country fight Iran is its own reward for Israeli interests, possibly even without immediate reciprocity.
Neither Ben-Barak nor Amidror said that Eisenkot’s statement was directly connected to the current proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia over Lebanon, although the timing coincided closely with the conflict over former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri.
Iran and the Saudis are putting pressure on Hariri to either officially resign as prime minister (the Saudis) or remain in office to help legitimize Hezbollah (Iran).
Amidror said Hezbollah had used Hariri to make Lebanon “appear to be a normal state when really there is an organization there called Hezbollah without whom you can do nothing.”
He said Hariri’s move “had shown there is not really a state of Lebanon separate from Hezbollah... they have lost their camouflage.”
This was a view which Israel had long expressed and which, he said, the Saudis and Hariri’s move had now proven to be correct.
He added with some flare that if Hariri goes back to Lebanon, “he should have good life insurance.”
Likewise, Ben-Barak said he thought that Hariri faced “a serious threat” from Iran and Hezbollah and that the Saudis had not held him hostage, even if “there was Saudi pressure on him to do what he did.”
He said, “Hezbollah wants to be a legitimate part of the political process in Lebanon. In fact, Hariri’s father [Rafik Hariri, one of Lebanon’s previous prime ministers] disturbed them, and now the son has revealed their true selves – that they are not part of Lebanon. It is very embarrassing” for Hezbollah.
Ben-Barak was also unsure whether Hariri would really come back to Lebanon.
He said that the Saudis’ actions in the affair show “they are ready for conflict and not [for] compromise” with Iran. •