Wonderfully scripted propaganda

The entire saga of foreign worker children has been dominated by a carefully constructed tale that focuses the debate only on the kids.


Seth J. Frantzman
Terra Incognita/JPost
03 August '10

"If any of you know children who are candidates for deportation, take them into your homes, hide them…let the authorities tear them from your arms. Maybe you won’t succeed in averting the evil decree, but this is how human beings are supposed to act. A few years down the road, they become Righteous Gentiles.”

Sounds pretty bad doesn’t it? Like the shadow of Nazism threatens children and we must save them. Of course this is merely the hyperbole in Israel’s newspaper Haaretz issuing forth from former education minister Yossi Sarid. It’s typical Sarid. On June 4th he compared himself to Pastor Martin Niemoller, of “I was not a Jew so I did not speak up” fame.

Fantasies of the Holocaust notwithstanding, Sarid is part of the larger “foreign worker” story that has caught the Israel public and parts of the world in its talons. The latest twist on the story was announced August 2 with the claim that the Israeli cabinet has voted to expel 400 children of foreign workers. The newspapers and television shows are ablaze with perfectly scripted “foreign worker” children, their beautiful faces staring back, perfectly placed to look the most vulnerable and cute with signs in English reading “don’t deport us: we were born here, Hebrew is our language.”

Another photo shows the children gathered with signs in English that read “there are no illegal children” and “let us be together, kids, mom and dad.”

The story has been a long time coming. Since the 1990s foreign workers have been coming to Israel, initially legally, to work. The process accelerated during the second intifada when Palestinian labor was replaced by foreign workers.

(Read full article)

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