Not Everyone is as Lucky as Kultida Lev
By: Adv. Noa Diamond, LACO Attorney
Published in “Haaretz” on December 15, 2021
Over the past month we have witnessed the struggle waged on behalf of Danielle Lev, a 7-year-old Israeli girl whose mother was threatened with deportation by the Population and Immigration Authority. Had they succeeded, Danielle would have been deported to Thailand alongside her mother. I do not know Danielle or the details of Kultida’s legal proceedings, but her story is only too familiar to me and is the same story of hundreds of Israeli children.
The Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC)’s Legal Aid Center for Olim (LACO) provides legal representation, from a broad understanding of the biblical commandment “and you shall love the stranger”. LACO represents people who have tied their fates to the State of Israel, created families here, and who need assistance in acquiring legal status in Israel for humanitarian considerations. Over the past two decades, LACO has represented hundreds of cases, mostly of women, whose spouse is an Israeli citizen, but the relationship ended before our client was able to complete the naturalization process. The reasons behind the dissolution of the relationship vary – divorce, death of the Israeli spouse, and Intimate Partner Violence at the hands of the Israeli spouse.
Nearly all the women we represent are mothers. Because their children have an Israeli father, the children are also Israeli citizens. And here is the particularly painful and outrageous part: the vast majority of naturalization requests filed by these women, mothers of Israeli children who were here as part of a legal naturalization process, are denied. Again, and again the CEO of the Population and Immigration Authority, as the Chairman of the Inter-Departmental Committee for Humanitarian Matters, tells our clients that they must leave Israel and take their Israeli children with them. To Nepal, Liberia, Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Philippines, Colombia, Uzbekistan – each of which, according to the Immigration and Population Authority, is a legitimate destination to deport Israel children, whose only crime is that they were born to a parent with the wrong passport.
The State of Israel signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and thus is obligated to put the child’s best interests first in all decisions. In practice, the Population and Immigration Authority justifies its position that the best interests of these Israeli children will not be harmed by their mothers being sent to a foreign country with such infuriating rationale, it is hard to believe that they put them in writing. For example, a five-year-old boy is “a tiny thing” and thus there is nothing stopping him from being uprooted from the only place he knows; that a little boy can stay in touch with his Israeli father “via technology” or visits; that it is best that a little girl is far away from the father who beat her mother, as if she was not already punished enough by being exposed to violence, she is now further punished by being exiled from her country; that a boy suffering from severe ADHD and will not have access to the medical treatment in Russia that he receives in Israel can find “natural alternatives to Ritalin” there; or that a ten-year-old boy is not “assimilated” enough into Israeli society.
Based on these justifications, one may think that the Population and Immigration Authority cares about these children, but problems such as limited access to education, welfare and healthcare, danger of starvation and disease that are found in many of the destinations for deportation – do not bother the Population and Immigration Authority at all.
“An Israeli minor does not grant status to their parent”, representatives from the State repeat over and over during proceedings against the expulsion of mothers and their children, they add that foreigners lack “the granted right” of settling in Israel. When the goal is to remove foreigners from Israel, even when they are the parents of Israeli citizens, any explanation or excuse for the disgrace of deporting native Israeli children from their country is apparently legitimate. Danielle Lev was saved, but according to the Ministry of the Interior’s current policies it seems that the rest of the Israeli kids in the same situation will be meeting at border control while having their Israeli passports stamped as they are forced out of their country – one kid at a time to their separate flights to different remote corners of the world. All that remains is to wonder if when the time comes, the State of Israel will be able to locate their addresses in Nepal, Liberia or Colombia to send them their IDF conscription order.