Abstract
In this chapter Havkin analyses the symbolic reception of 365 displaced Vietnamese in Israel, an unprecedented event in a country established as a ‘refuge state’ solely for Jews. Emphasising Israel’s special relationship with refugee issues, the reception did not challenge the national resistance to integrating non-Jewish migrants. On the contrary, granting refuge to a few while avoiding the formalisation of a more general refugee policy revealed tensions surrounding asylum in Israel. This chapter unpicks the mechanisms underpinning Israel’s ‘humanitarian gesture’. In the absence of an asylum policy, Vietnamese were considered through existing policies and institutions designed for integration of Jewish migrants (olim). While the newcomers were embraced as ‘foreign-olim’, the warm welcome was often dissolved through micro-decisions of street-level and intermediary agents. This chapter reveals how asylum granted as an exceptional ‘humanitarian gesture’ may consolidate the exclusionary national order.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations from Hebrew are the author’s own.
Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977 (all Knesset protocols used in this chapter are in Hebrew. Their translation is my own).
- 2.
Shira Havkin, “Une terre d’asile sans réfugiés: une sociohistoire du dispositif d’asile israélien” [A Refuge-state without Refugees: A Social History of the Israeli Asylum System], PhD dissertation, Sciences-Po Paris, 2017 [Karthala forthcoming].
- 3.
Miriam Ticktin Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Mariella Pandolfi, “Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Postcommunist Balkan Territories,” in Postcolonial Disorders, ed. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 157–186.
- 4.
Miriam Ticktin, “Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 1 (2006): 33–49.
- 5.
Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries”; Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Ticktin, Casualties of Care; Pandolfi, “Laboratory of Intervention”.
- 6.
Sarah S. Willen, “Darfur through a Shoah Lens: Sudanese Asylum Seekers, Unruly Biopolitical Dramas, and the Politics of Humanitarian Compassion in Israel”, in A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities, ed. Byron J. Good, Michael M. J. Fischer and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 505–521.
- 7.
After 2001, a regulation promulgated by the Ministry of Interior Affairs governed the asylum procedure, yet, less than 0.01% of asylum seekers were granted asylum and even these few did not receive the status of ‘refugee’ as such since no such status exists in Israel’s public administration.
- 8.
UN General Assembly, Resolution 181 (Partition Plan), November 29, 1947.
- 9.
Israeli Declaration of Independence, The Official Journal, May 14, 1948, Art. 6.
- 10.
See Gilad Ben-Nun, “The Israeli Roots of Article 3 and Article 6 of the 1951 Refugee Convention,” Journal of Refugee Studies 27, no. 1 (2012): 101–125, and Gilad Ben-Nun, “The British–Jewish Roots of Non-Refoulement and its True Meaning for the Drafters of the 1951 Refugee Convention,” Journal of Refugee Studies 28, no. 1 (2015): 93–117. Ben-Nun quotes the Israeli Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Refugee Convention in a letter to the foreign minister, saying that the president of the Commission ‘expressed his regret that I would not be among the first signers [because of Shabbat], particularly because I represented, in his view, not only a government, but also morally the refugee as such’ (Robinson Final Plenipotentiary Report, quoted by Ben-Nun, “The Israeli Roots,” 113).
- 11.
Rotem Giladi, “A ‘Historical Commitment’? Identity and Ideology in Israel’s Attitude to the Refugee Convention 1951/4”, The International History Review 37, no. 4 (2015): 754. Emphasis added.
- 12.
Nahla Abdo et Nira Yuval-davis, “Palestine, Israel, and the Sionist Settler Project”, in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, ed. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Sage, 1995), 291–392; Elia Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (London: Routledge, 2016); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History (New York: Verso, 2016).
- 13.
Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 4.
- 14.
Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People: 2018; Sammy Smooha, ‘Minority Status in an Ethnic Democracy: The Status of the Arab Minority in Israel’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 13, no. 3 (1990), 389–413; As’ad Ghanem, Nadim N. Rouhana and Oren Yiftachel, “Questioning Ethnic Democracy: A Response to Sammy Smooha”, Israel Studies 3, no. 2 (1998): 253–267; Lana Tatour, “Managing Surplus Population”, Conference The Military Regime, 50 Years Later, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, January 18, 2017; Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
- 15.
Giladi, “A ‘Historical Commitment’”.
- 16.
Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine studies, 1992); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
- 17.
Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
- 18.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Alina Korn, “From Refugees to Infiltrators: Constructing Political Crime in Israel in the 1950s,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31, no. 1 (2003): 1–22; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Criminalizing Pain and the Political Work of Suffering: The Case of Palestinian ‘Infiltrators,’” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (2015): 1–28.
- 19.
Yehuda Levinger, “Hakabarnit sheneesa lo avel: lo heeleti bedimioni sheashalem ko rabot” [The wronged captain: ‘I never imagined I would pay such a price’], Srugim, May 10, 2018. The Ofer Brothers is one of the most powerful family conglomerates in Israel, owning not only a shipping company, but also real estate, Israel Chemicals, the Haifa oil refinery, the Mizrachi Tefachot bank and the franchise on one of the main television channels.
- 20.
Shimon Rappaport, “66 Plitey vietnam shenizlou metvia al yedei onia israelit mechapsim moledet” [66 Vietnamese refugees saved by an Israeli ship seeking a homeland], Maariv, June 12, 1977, 6.
- 21.
Shimon Rappaport, “Shum medina lo rotza liklot haplitim shehetzila yuvali” [No country is willing to receive the refugees saved by the Yuvali], Maariv, June 17, 1977, 4.
- 22.
Rappaport, “No country”.
- 23.
Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977.
- 24.
Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism Brooklyn: Autonomedia (1991); Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
- 25.
With the Paris Declaration on Maritime Law in 1856, SOLAS—the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea first signed in 1912, and the establishment of the International Maritime Organisation by the United Nations in 1948.
- 26.
Vessels must display the national flag of the state where they are registered and are subject to the Maritime Code through their affiliation to the authority of the state. On this extension of international law to the high seas, see Samuel Hayat and Camille Paloque-Berges, “Transgressions pirates,” Tracés no. 26 (2014): 7–19; Sévane Garibian, “Hostes humani generis : les pirates vus par le droit,” Critique no. 733–734 (2011): 470–479; Itamar Mann, Humanity at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 42–43.
- 27.
However, this obligation has not always been respected by Israeli ships: in 1982, the case of an illegal traveller found on board the cargo ship Moran and abandoned on a boat near the coast of Mozambique was discovered and reported by a journalist as the ‘illegal traveller case’. The captain and two of the sailors were brought to trial and charged with wounding the traveller and abandoning him in a dangerous boat. Yet, the court declared that “it is not possible to determine that the captain’s actions were deliberately offensive to the nigger”. Lital Levin, “Hayom lifney 26 shana: ktav ishoum neged rav-chovel shehifkir afrikayi bayam” [On this day, 26 years ago: A captain is accused of abandoning an African at sea], Haaretz, June 26, 2011.
- 28.
Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977.
- 29.
Dov Shilanski, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, November 15, 1978.
- 30.
Daniel Bloch, “Hamemshala hechlita lehatir knisatam shel 100 plitim mivietnam” [The government has accepted 100 refugees from Vietnam], Davar, January 8, 1979, p. 1; Dan Arkin, “‘Yesh lanou bait hadash’—amar beatouna dover haplitim lifneyi hamra’atam la’aretz” [“We have a new home”—says the refugees spokesperson while in Athens before attending their flight to Israel], Maariv, January 24, 1979, p. 1.
- 31.
Gideon Hausner, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1979.
- 32.
Davar Foreign affairs correspondent, “Israel maskima liklot od 200 vietnamim” [Israel agrees to accept another 200 Vietnamese], Davar, July 2, 1979, p. 2.
- 33.
Davar editorial, “200 Plitim mivietnam yavo’ou bashavoua haba” [200 refugees from Vietnam will be arriving next week], Davar, 16 October 1979, p. 3.
- 34.
Mann, Humanity at Sea, 21; Paul Weis, “The International Protection of Refugees,” American Journal of International Law 48, no. 2 (1954): 193–221.
- 35.
In this letter Begin wrote: ‘We never have forgotten the boat with 900 Jews, which left Germany in the last weeks before the Second World War […] travelling from harbor to harbor, from country to country, crying out for refuge. They were refused […] Therefore it was natural […] to give those people a haven in the land of Israel.’
- 36.
Arie L. Eliav, The Voyage of the Ulua (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969).
- 37.
Ruth Gruber, Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (New York: Union Square Press, 2007).
- 38.
Mann, Humanity at Sea.
- 39.
Willen, “Darfur through”.
- 40.
Ben Herzog, “Between Nationalism and Humanitarianism: the Glocal Discourse on Refugees”, Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 2 (2009): 185–205. Herzog analyses Israel’s reception of refugees as based on a ‘glocal humanitarian discourse’, adapting and translating global conceptions into national and local themes. He uses the concept ‘Zionist humanitarianism’ to show how the humanitarian logic appears as already intertwined with a heterogeneous set of national ‘symbolic frameworks’, yet he does not consider the role of Zionism in shaping the reception.
- 41.
Tamar Eshel, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1979.
- 42.
Akiva Nof, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, November 15, 1978.
- 43.
This appears clearly in the description of Begin’s first day in the prime minister office: Yehusha Bitzur, “Bemisrad rosh hamemshala houavar hashilton beseder mofti: kefi shehevtiach lakneset hetchil menachem begin et kehounato betipul beflitey Vietnam” [The transmission of mandate to the new prime minister went particularly well: as he declared, the first action of Menachem Begin as prime minister will be to accept the Vietnamese refugees], Maariv, June 22, 1977, 17.
- 44.
Nahum Barnea, “Al harega haze chalam begin” [The moment Begin was dreaming of], Davar, July 20, 1977, 3.
- 45.
Menachem Begin, White Nights: A Story of a Prisoner in Russia (New York: Harper & Row, 1979 [1957]).
- 46.
Many parliamentarians emphasise how Begin’s positions are related to his personal trajectory, a fact that shows his integrity and gives him more legitimacy. For example: Dov Shilanski, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1979.
- 47.
Literally, ‘light to the nations’, a biblical term originally from the Prophet Isaiah, evoking its role in offering spiritual and moral guidance for the entire world. Akiva Nof, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, November 15, 1978.
- 48.
Protocol of the Knesset Commission for Internal affairs, January 31, 1979.
- 49.
Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979.
- 50.
Tova Zimouki, “Begin kore lemedinot haolam liklot et plitey Vietnam” [Begin calls upon all countries of the world to receive Vietnamese refugees], Davar, June 19, 1979, 1.
- 51.
Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979.
- 52.
Davar Foreign affairs correspondent, “Israel maskima”; Yosef Waksman, “Shvaitz ueshvedia hodiou al haskamatan le‘tochnit begin’ veykletu plitim vietnamim” [Switzerland and Sweden declared they agree to the ‘Begin programme’ and will accept Vietnamese refugees], Maariv, June 22, 1979, 2.
- 53.
Tamar Eshel, Uri Avnery, Akiva Nof and Gideon Hausner all spoke in favour of receiving significant numbers of refugees. Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979.
- 54.
Dov Shilanski, Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979.
- 55.
Waksman, “Shvaitz ueshvedia”.
- 56.
Davar editorial, “Hamaarav yklot 250,000 vietnamim” [The West will receive 250,000 Vietnamese], Davar, July 20, 1979, p. 3.
- 57.
The Israeli position towards the UN is revealed in the expression ‘Um-Shmum’, coined by Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, where ‘um’ is the Hebrew acronymic pronunciation for ‘UN’ and the Shmum signifies ‘dismissal, contempt or irony’.
- 58.
Protocol of the ninth Knesset June 20, 1979.
- 59.
Rachel Primur, “Chiuchim, yad hama oukarka betoucha” [Smiles, a warm hand, and safe land], Maariv, January 25, 1979, 3.
- 60.
Associated Press archive images, UPITN Vietnamese boat people arrive in Israel, October 26, 1979; archive images used in: Duki Dror, The Journey of Van Nguyen, 2005.
- 61.
Yosef Waksman, “Haolim mivietnam hitpaalou mehagmalim” [The olim from Vietnam were excited to see camels], Maariv, March 2, 1979, 3; Meir Hareuveni, “‘Haalyia harishona’ shel nimlatey Vietnam mesayaat beklitat plitey ‘haalyia hashnyia’” [The ‘first alyia’ of Vietnamese refugees helps in the absorption of refugees from the ‘second alyia’, Maariv, January 25, 1979, 3; Meshulam Ed, “‘Haaolim’ mivietnam mitaklemim beofakim” [The ‘olim’ from Vietnam integrate in Ofakin town], Davar, July 1, 1977, 20.
- 62.
Shlomo Givon, “‘Atem retzouyim kan’, neemar laplitim bekabalat hapanim hachagigit baayara ofakim” [‘You are welcome here’, the refugees were told in a reception in Ofakin town], Maariv, June 27, 1977, 3.
- 63.
In some of the cases, this included some financial contributions from the UNHCR.
- 64.
Meshulam Ed, “Lekehiliyat plitey vietnam beofakim nosaf vietnami-zabar; metziym likro lo ofek” [A new Israeli-born member joins the Vietnamese refugees community in Ofakim; he will be named Ofek], Davar, September 5, 1977, 6; Yizhak Ben-Horin, “Pliteyi vietnam beisrael houzherou vehoukou ki ‘avdou maher midayi’” [The Vietnamese refugees in Israel were threatened and beaten because they were ‘working too fast’], Maariv, November 21, 1979, 16.
- 65.
Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, the former director of the Absorption Centre in Afula, October 30, 2019.
- 66.
Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yonah, Racism in Israel (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008).
- 67.
Yossi Klein, “Beayiat haplitim” [The refugee problem], Haaretz, October 9, 2005.
- 68.
Klein, “Beayiat haplitim”
- 69.
Michael Lipsky, Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage foundation, 1980); Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick le Galès, Sociologie de l’action publique (Paris: Armand Colin, 2007); Michael James Hill and Peter L. Hupe, Implementing Public Policy: An Introduction to the Study of Operational Governance (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014 [2002]).
- 70.
David Shalev, “Havietnamim bayim leafula” [The Vietnamese arrive to Afula], Davar, January 25, 1979, 3.
- 71.
Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, October 30, 2019.
- 72.
Primur, “Chiuchim, yad hama”.
- 73.
Gini Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina hanishkachim” [The forgotten boat people], Davar, August 5, 1983, 21.
- 74.
Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina”.
- 75.
Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina”.
- 76.
Routinisation is a translation of Veralltäglichung, meaning to ‘reduce charisma to an everyday matter’, a concept developed by Max Weber in order to describe the transformation of the genuinely extraordinary charismatic rule into everyday forms. Max Weber, Economy and society, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2019 [1921]).
- 77.
Levinger, Levinger, “Hakabarnit sheneesa”.
- 78.
Dan Arkin and Akiva Yinov, “‘Haplitim hachadashim’ mivietnam yilmedou ivrit baayara sderot likrat klitatam beisrael” [The ‘new refugees’ from Vietnam will learn Hebrew in Sderot so that they can be integrated in Israel, Maariv, October 24, 1979, 6.
- 79.
Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina”.
- 80.
Klein, “Beayiat haplitim”.
- 81.
Klein, “Beayiat haplitim”.
- 82.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For a theorisation of this type of situations in a very different context: Dotan Leshem, “Embedding Agamben’s Critique of Foucault: The Theological and Pastoral Origins of Governmentality”, Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 3 (2015): 93–113.
- 83.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism.
- 84.
Yizhak Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula hitkashu leechol orez bemazlegot” [The Vietnamese in Afula had difficulties eating rice with a fork”, Maariv, February 7, 1979, 17.
- 85.
Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”; Ed, “‘Haaolim’ mivietnam”; Ezra Yinov, “Anashim mikol hasderot helbishou pliteyi vietnam baayara hadromit” [The people in the southern town of Sderot offer clothes and welcome the Vietnamese refugees], Maariv, November 5, 1979, 6.
- 86.
Uri Avnery, Protocol of the ninth Knesset, June 20, 1977.
- 87.
Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”.
- 88.
Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, October 30, 2019.
- 89.
Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”.
- 90.
Yinov, “Anashim mikol hasderot”; Ed“‘Haaolim’ mivietnam”; Ben-Horin, “Havietnamim beafula”.
- 91.
Ed, “‘Haaolim’ mivietnam”; Givon, “Atem retzouyim kan”
- 92.
Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina hanishkachim”.
- 93.
Walsh, “Ansheyi hasfina hanishkachim”.
- 94.
Sabine Huynh, “The Vietnamese community in Israel: A profile”, non-published article written during a postdoctoral research in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007. She reached a total of 147 informants through a combination of interviews and questionnaires.
- 95.
Huynh, “The Vietnamese community”.
- 96.
Huynh, “The Vietnamese community”.
- 97.
Phone interview with Zvi Zeidner, October 30, 2019.
- 98.
These migrants, designated in Israel as ‘foreign workers’, were originally recruited to replace Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who commuted daily and who worked in the lower tiers of the Israeli labour market until the late 1990s. See Adriana Kemp, and Rebecca Raijman, Ovdim vezarim [Migrants and Workers: The Political Economy of Labour Migration in Israel], Tel Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2008).
- 99.
Eyal Levi, “Pliteyi vietnam dorshim: ‘im koltim az kmo shekaltou otanou’” [Vietnamese refugees claim: if the country is to integrate refugees, it should be done similarly to the way we were integrated], Maariv, September 8, 2015.
- 100.
Klein, “Beayiat haplitim”.
- 101.
Regional Labour Court of Tel Aviv—Jaffa, 18281-03-15, gebreiwot Iyob against Hadas Huan, November 19, 2017.
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Havkin, S. (2021). Israel: Asylum Without Refugee Status: Israel’s Reception of Vietnamese Exiles. In: Taylor, B., Akoka, K., Berlinghoff, M., Havkin, S. (eds) When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983. Palgrave Studies in Migration History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_6
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