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Feb. 2, 2007
Leaving the holy land
Thousands of Israelis claim refugee status.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
Israel's ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, registered his displeasure
with the Canadian government last week after it was revealed that
thousands of Israelis were seeking refugee status in this country.
Baker was quoted in news reports as saying that "spurious applications"
from asylum seekers were "harming Israel's image and representing
it as a country whose citizens are persecuted."
Last year, just over 500 Israelis filed refugee applications in
Canada, putting Israel among the top 10 refugee source countries
– a slot it has occupied only twice over the last decade; once
in 1996 and then again in 2004. Forty-five applications were accepted
by Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB).
Many more cases are rejected than accepted by the IRB which, according
to spokesperson Melissa Anderson, generally takes around a year
to process each claim. Some of the claims from Israel that were
not accepted cited fear of terrorism, spousal abuse and persecution
based on national background. Many of the claimants are from former
Soviet bloc countries.
Fear of suicide bombers, the IRB has consistently found, is "a
generalized risk to life which all Israeli citizens face."
Under Canadian immigration law, any perceived threat must be unique,
not common to all residents of the source country.
There are also a number of claims related to military service, including
one who "did not want to serve in the Israeli army and generally
feared for his life in Israel. He was not a conscientious objector,
and did not object to any particular activities of the Israeli military;
he was simply afraid of being killed."
Several IRB investigations into conditions for women alleging abuse
and newcomers to Israel claiming they were insulted and threatened
found adequate facilities and protection available for the former
and a generally welcoming tone among native Israelis towards the
latter.
Anderson said research for conditions in claimants' home countries
came from such sources as the home country's embassy in Canada,
news reports and information provided by Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch and the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees.
"Israel is a democracy that regards successful immigrants'
absorption as a prime value," said Ofir Gendelman, a representative
of the Israeli embassy in Ottawa, in a statement last week. "It
is unfortunate that some Israeli citizens who were seeking to immigrate
to Canada have opted for submitting bogus claims for asylum here,
thus deliberately misleading Canadian immigration authorities about
their past in Israel." Gendelman said the embassy "has
learned that, in more than a few cases, refugee claimants who have
stated that they were mistreated in Israel made this unsubstantiated
claim only when they were in the process of being deported from
Canada.
"Israel," he continued, "was established as a safe
haven for persecuted Jews from all over the world. It is saddening
to see that this fact is being blatantly ignored by people who would
do anything to cynically promote their own selfish interests by
smearing their homeland."
"Under Canadian law, any country can produce a refugee claimant,"
explained Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer who is also vice-chair
of Canadian Jewish Congress, Pacific Region. "I don't think
for a second that the government of Israel is suggesting that Canada
close the door to Israeli refugee claims.
"It would be wrong in policy and practice to declare that any
country cannot be a refugee-producing country. We haven't even done
that with the United States, so why are we going to do that with
Israel? It's the price of having an open, fully functioning, credible
refugee determination system. Just because you're going to get the
odd patient who abuses Medicare, doesn't mean you shut down Medicare."
What is unusual, Kurland conceded, "is seeing a refugee claim
find its way into the media. The vast majority of refugee claimants
fear persecution and do not go public. It's not in their interest."
That's a viewpoint shared by Adam Carroll, director of Canada Israel
Committee, Pacific Region.
Claimants go to the media, said Carroll, "often, in my opinion,
only because they're not getting what they're wanting out of the
system – they go public to try and generate public sympathy."
Carroll said such high-profile claims could fuel a negative perception
of Israel among Canadians. "When it does become public, they're
often using whatever arguments that they can in order to justify
their claim," he said. "Sometimes, when we're talking
about Israel and the kind of claims that people are using in order
to claim refugee status from Israel, for an uneducated person who
doesn't know anything about Israel to hear someone making statements
about Israel in order to justify their fradulent refugee claim can
potentially cause damage of the perception of Israel to those who
wouldn't know any better. So it's absolutely a concern."
He cited the case of the Portnoy family, Russian Jews from Israel
whose claim for entry into Canada on humanitarian and compassionate
grounds has been rejected, and who have been living in sanctuary
in a church in Marystown, Nfld., for several years. The family claims
to be living in fear of returning to"war-torn" conditions
and have also said that one of their children could not obtain proper
medical care in Israel.
"All of us who know and understand Israel can realize right
away that is a ridiculous claim," said Carroll, "because
if any country has an extremely advanced, technologically and capacity-wise,
medical arts system, it's Israel. There's really absolutely nothing
that you can get in Canada that you can't get in Israel.... There's
really no ever legitimate claim of refugee status from someone coming
from Israel, because it's suggesting that there's no institutions
and mechanisms to deal with and protect individual and human rights,
which is obviously not even remotely close to the facts."
Anderson said there is sometimes a spike in refugee applications
in the wake of turbulent conditions in a source country, such as
this past summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah, but often,
too, "people aren't claiming refugee status in Canada till
they're at the point of removal, so there could be quite a long
time gap between when they left that country and when they come
on our books as a refugee claimant. That's a tactic for certainly
some of the people who maybe don't have well-founded refugee claims,
and that's one of the things you actually look at – if there's
been any delay in making that claim, that's something you investigate."
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