Social Justice In A Time Of War
Suzanne F. Singer
Sept. 20, 2006
The Jewish Week
One may be tempted to excuse Israel, during this season of military conflict, from facing its seamy problem of sexual enslavement of trafficked women. But that cannot be. In fact, as the need has increased to prevent the long border between Egypt and Israel from being a conduit for arms and terrorists coming from Gaza, so too should the smuggling of women across the same border be halted. Moral weakness, like military weakness, saps the nation. The military doctrine of tohar haneshek (“Purity of Arms”) sets a moral standard for soldiers that is painfully evident in Israel’s restraint in Gaza and Lebanon today. No less, should a doctrine of respect for women be one of the standards of Israel’s civil society.
Israel is a leading destination and consumer of sex slaves. As many as 3,000 people are trapped in brothels and apartments around the country. A network of outraged Israelis is mobilizing citizen protest: encouraging more stringent laws, more vigorous police action, longer sentences for traffickers and pimps, more effective border control by army and police to halt the smuggling of women and workers — and compassion for the victims.
On March 15, then Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, signed a manifesto declaring trafficking to be “at the top of the list of societal priorities” and charged his ministers to “advance the battle in the fields in which they have jurisdiction.”
The story of the women has been told. Desperate to find work and hoping they will be able to send home money, young women leave behind husbands, children and elderly parents. In Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Uzbekistan they hear of jobs as waitresses, nannies and dancers in Israel. While some know their fate is to be prostitutes, none suspect the degradation awaiting them. Each is given a plane ticket, most often to Cairo. Then, regardless of the excuse used to recruit them, they are transferred to Bedouin smugglers, stuffed into pickup trucks and driven across the Sinai desert to Israel’s Negev border. Other Bedouin, often from the same Azazmi tribe, pick up the women along the 150-mile border with Israel, following remote wadis — dry river beds — into the Negev.
Arriving in Israel, the terrified women discover that criminal traffickers have bought and sold them like animals to pimps from all parts of the country. From that moment they are helpless, their passports confiscated by their pimps. The women are slaves forced to service 20 to 30 clients a day in order to work off what they are told is their debt to the pimp. When the “debt” is finally paid, the pimps often sell the women to another brothel owner looking for “fresh meat.” The hopeless process begins again.
Exposure of this sordid industry is due in large part to the work of Israeli NGOs — most notably the Hotline for Migrant Workers and Isha L’Isha-The Haifa Feminist Center, which operates in the north of Israel. Their report, “Women as Commodities: Trafficking in Women 2003,” separated the myth from the reality of trade in women, scrutinized the effectiveness of law enforcement and set benchmarks for protection and rehabilitation of victims.
Uri Sadeh, Hotline’s field coordinator for counter trafficking in persons, spoke to me about progress and failures three years after the report. “A lot of money is put into the deportation machine. Five hundred police work on deporting trafficked women, but not one social worker investigates what happened to them.” Filling this gap, Hotline volunteers visit one of the three detention facilities for women about to be deported as illegal aliens in order to try to identify those who were trafficked. For those who don’t want immediate return home, Hotline arranges to move them to the only shelter in Israel, where they are protected from the anger of their pimps. In the guarded, unmarked shelter in Tel Aviv, some women agree to testify against pimps and traffickers; some receive temporary visas in order to have time for rehabilitation and to find a job that will allow them to save a little money.
Unfortunately, says Sadeh, 80 percent of the cases against traffickers and pimps end up as plea bargains for lesser offenses, resulting in light sentences. Those traffickers who are convicted can receive four to 16 years in prison. Monetary compensation for their victims hardly exists.
Art and film threw a harsh light on the plight of trafficked women this year. An exhibit by women living in the Tel Aviv shelter who expressed their unspeakable experiences in art, joined by artists depicting what they had learned from the women, opened at the Petach Tikva Museum. Its title, “High Heels in the Sand,” was taken from the words of a woman forced by Bedouin across the desert into Israel. Abstract and realistic images captured dependence, hopelessness and pain.
Students from two film schools prepared 30-second television spots on trafficking, in a competition sponsored by ATZUM, a Jerusalem NGO that has taken on trafficked women’s abuse as one of its critical issues. The three winning entries alternated for several weeks on two Israeli TV channels.
Teaching high school students, soldiers and police about the sex trade is a priority for both Hotline and Isha L’Isha. Painful as it is to acknowledge, Rita Chaikin, anti-trafficking coordinator for Isha L’Isha, reports that some fathers actually take their sons to a brothel as a bar mitzvah present.
Israel’s leading newspapers are complicit in the sex trade, regularly breaking the law against accepting ads for sex. Occasional large fines don’t dissuade them from accepting only slightly veiled ads for massage and strip-tease parlors whose business is really sex. Sadeh wants the police to go after the wealthy newspaper owners. It’s not enough, he says, to slap fines from time to time on their papers, because they find it worth their while to pay up and then resume until they’re fined again.
If every leadership mission and Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations member were to request that the NGOs arrange a briefing from the Justice Ministry or police on progress in halting trade in women and workers, the exposure could lead to action. All the dedicated people fighting trafficking want pressure on Israel.
Today, as we face threats to Israel’s survival from north and south by those with unambiguous intentions to destroy the Jewish people in their land, we must continue to build the moral structure of our land in all its parts. n
Suzanne F. Singer is a contributing editor at Moment magazine,
Special To The Jewish Week
