This article comes from Chiesa. No doubt the Vatican wants to exploit this 50,000-member constituency to pressure the State of Israel.
----------------------------------------------------------
Israel's New Catholic Guests
By Sandro Magister
ROME, April 1, 2010 – In the homily for Palm Sunday, Benedict XVI recalled his pilgrimage one year ago to the Holy Land, and its threefold purpose: to see and touch the places connected to Jesus, to be a messenger of peace, to bring support to the Christians who live in Israel and in the surrounding regions.
Almost no one knows it, but for a few years there have been many more Christians in Israel. And many of them are new. Holy Friday, the day on which Catholics all around the world collect offerings in support of their brethren in the Holy Land, is also dedicated to them.
It is estimated that 50,000 of the new immigrants in Israel profess the Catholic faith. That's almost twice as many as the 27,000 Catholics of Arab ancestry already living there, belonging to the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem, plus the tiny community of 500 Catholics of Jewish ancestry.
The new arrivals include, for example, the Catholics who crowd into the church of Saint Joseph in Haifa on Saturday evenings. Beside the altar they raise the standard of El Shaddai, a charismatic movement that is very popular in the Philippines. It is from that faraway country, in fact, that they come. They work in homes and hotels in the area.
The same thing happens in Jerusalem, in Be'er Sheva, and in in Jaffa, a point of reference for the Catholics of the major metropolitan area of Tel Aviv. In Herzlya, there are big crowds for the Mass in a hall made available by the ambassador of Nigeria, another country of origin.
The new arrivals are foreign workers with residency permits valid for five years. In 2008, the Israeli government authorized 30,000 entries. The largest number, 5,800, came from Thailand; another 5,800 from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and other countries of the former Soviet Union; 5,500 from the Philippines; 2,700 from India; 2,300 from Nepal; another 2,300 from China; 1,400 from Romania; and so on from other countries.
But then there are the clandestine immigrants. Many of them, especially the Sudanese and Eritreans, enter via land routes, across the Sinai desert. They enter in such large numbers that the Israeli government has decided to build a wall on the border with Egypt.
The Thais, the most substantial group of legal immigrants, work mainly in agriculture. A little ray of light was cast on their presence last March 18, when one of them, while working in a field, was killed by a Qassam rocket launched from the Gaza Strip.
"Avvenire," the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, sent one of its journalists to the place where he was killed. The result was the story reproduced below.
The author is already familiar to the readers of www.chiesa from a report two years ago from Orissa, the Indian state in which Christians are in the greatest danger.
________________
Israel. New immigrants under the rocket fire
by Giorgio Bernardelli
His name was Manee Singueanphon, and he was 33 years old. He had left his family in Thailand three years ago, to go to work in the greenhouses of the moshav Netiv Ha'asara, an Israeli farming village just four hundred meters from the border with the Gaza Strip. While he was working at the farming operation on March 18, he was fatally wounded by the shrapnel from a Qassam rocket launched from Gaza by a group of Palestinian militants.
So he came from the other side of the world, the victim of the latest eruption of violence to shake the Holy Land. And this tragedy has brought into focus the least visible face of the conflict bloodying the Middle East. Because these workers in the moshavs on the border, although they are neither Israeli nor Palestinian, are living on the front line nonetheless, sharing the sufferings and dangers of this unending war.
It is no accident that the victim was from Thailand: it is from this country of the Far East that the overwhelming majority of workers come who have replaced the Palestinians as manual laborers in the Israeli greenhouses. A process that began in the middle of the 1990's, but accelerated sharply following the second Intifada.
Thais come to Israel through manpower companies, the placement agencies for the global labor market. The agricultural companies of the Negev that need employees at competitive costs for their flower, fruit, and vegetable export business work with the Tel Aviv branch of a Bangkok-based company. The company then recruits domestic farm workers. It can't miss, approaching the owners of fields that are too small to feed their own families. It offers them a chance to go work in the greenhouses in Israel, where they can set aside a little money. It says they can make 50,000 dollars in five years, which is the maximum duration of the work visa issued by the Israeli authorities. In the meantime, however, to pay for the trip and for the "commission," the farmer must mortgage his field to the owner of the company. And for the first year, the 800 dollars a month that the worker will send to his family in Thailand will only go toward covering his debt.
The fact that the story of Manee Singueanphon went more or less like this can be intuited from the statements of the ten employment companies interviewed by the "Jerusalem Post" after his death in Netiv Ha'asara. He was a good man, he loved his wife, the other Thais told the reporter, who immediately noted a cardboard box in which they were collecting a little money for his widow. They also told the reporter what they do when they hear the siren warning that a Qassam rocket is coming: they dive to the ground and hope that it falls somewhere else, and then get back to work.
How many Thais are in this situation in Israel today? It is said there are a few tens of thousands. According to the data of the central statistics office, in 2007 – the year in which Singueanphon arrived in the Middle East – 10,600 Thais came to Israel on work visas. Almost all of them were men, and three fourths were between the ages of 15 and 34. In 2008, however, the number of new immigrants from Thailand fell to 5,800. But the same source also says that over the same two years, 16,100 Thais left Israel to return to Bangkok. So arrivals and departures roughly balance each other. And this is a typical feature of the dynamics of foreign manual laborers in Israel. Foreigners, in fact, cannot remain in the country for more than five years. And if they lose their jobs, they cannot find another in a sector different from the one for which they were recruited. But all of this is true only on paper. Because in reality, a system of this kind – dictated by the thoroughly Israeli concern to avoid a demographic impact on the Jewish identity of the state – is not at all suited to the demands of the labor market. And in fact, clandestine immigration is rampant in the country.
The numbers about this are disputed. The latest official estimates – released by the Netanyahu government last December – say there is a total of 225,000 foreign workers, equal to 10.4 percent of the Israeli labor force, but 50 percent of them illegal. But many say that in reality there are many more clandestine immigrants: some claim there are as many as 370,000 foreign workers. The professions are subdivided fairly rigidly according to ethnicity: Thais and Nepalis in agriculture; Filipinos, Ukrainians, and Moldovans as maids and personal caregivers; Indians in the restaurants, while for a few years the Chinese have been overtaking the Romanians in the construction industry.
Then there is the question of the children of immigrants. According to Israeli law, they simply should not exist: the law says that infants must be taken back to their country of origin within three months after their birth, on pain of revocation of the mother's work visa. A particularly harsh system, designed to discourage even further the stable presence of foreigners in Israel. But many of the children have stayed. There are 1,200 of them who were born and raised here, speak Hebrew better than they do their parents' language, even go to school for the most part, but are clandestine. They were supposed to be deported, but then the decision was made to wait at least until the end of the school year. The Israeli supreme court is expected to rule on the matter.
All of this is behind the death of Manee Singueanphon, the Thai farmer whom Israel, at least for a day, looked on as one of its own.
