Public security minister warns MKs’ statements against migrants may lead to violence
Yitzhak Aharonovitch says ministers are covering up own failures by joining populist anti-migrant wave
Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch warned Monday that statements made by public officials against African migrants may lead to “severe violence.”
During a ceremony commemorating Police fallen at the Kiryat Ono Police Academy, Aharonovitch said “those who do so are covering up for years of inaction by joining the populist anti-migrant wave.”
Aharonovich made the statement on the same day that an apartment housing African migrants in Jerusalem went up in flames, injuring four Eritrean citizens, in a fire police suspect was started intentionally.
Graffiti was also found spray-painted above a door of the apartment saying, “Get out of the neighborhood.”
Anti-African immigrant violence has peaked in Israel in recent weeks as scores of people have rallied in Tel Aviv for the deportation of the estimated 60,000-70,000 African migrants living in the country without legal status.
The violence is accompanied by a rise in anti-migrant rhetoric, some of it expressed by politicians.
One of the MKs who has been most vocal about the migrants is Interior Minister and Shas chairman Eli Yishai. Yishai, whose ministry is in charge of the Immigration, Populations and Borders Authority, the government agency that oversees migrant affairs, has come under severe criticism in the past for some of his statements about migrants. Left wing politicians and human rights activists constantly charge him with xenophobia for claiming that the migrants carry diseases, claiming that they are all criminals and accusing them of wanting to “invade” the country.
Last month Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the physical violence and the racial overtones of the anti-migrant protests, emphasizing that his comments were directed not only at the residents of Tel Aviv, but also at the public officials, including Knesset members, who participated in the rally.
In a speech to protesters in south Tel Aviv’s Hatikva neighborhood last month, MK Miri Regev (Likud) declared, “The Sudanese are a cancer in our body” and said, “they should be sent back” to where they came from.”