Israel deceitfully gave Ethiopian Jews birth control injections

[LilOlLady]

How true is it that Israel deceitfully gave Ethiopian Jews birth control injections

When it was reported earlier this week that Israeli officials had been giving birth control to arriving Ethiopian Jews "without their consent", the international media had a field day. Twitter lapped it up, too. Here was hard evidence, observers said, of Israeli racism. Some even used the word "sterilisation" and haughtily reminded Israelis that the Holocaust, that thing they go on about all the time, also started with the sterilisation of "undesirables". Echoing Lib Dem MP David Ward's recent chastisement of "the Jews" for failing to learn anything from their experiences during the Holocaust, bloggers and observers accused Israel's sterilisers of repeating the very history that Israel's founders sought to escape from.

How true is it that Israel deceitfully gave Ethiopian Jews birth control injections? ? Telegraph Blogs

 

[PoliticalChic]

Trust me they learned from their past history and have rationalized that this evil deed is acceptable. Just how months ago they were rounding up and deporting Africans that they once accepted into the Country.

Are you aware of how and why Ethiopians became Israelis?

 

[Katzndogz]

Israel has a terrible problem with illegal immigrants from Africa.

Israeli Anger Over 'African' Crime Wave ? Forward.com

They not only need to provide them with birth control, but round them up and send them back.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Trust me they learned from their past history and have rationalized that this evil deed is acceptable. Just how months ago they were rounding up and deporting Africans that they once accepted into the Country.

Are you aware of how and why Ethiopians became Israelis?

That's an interesting rhetorical question.

Translation:

It's okay if the Israelis are practicing eugenics and race purifying at the expense of those they consider undesirable because......

btw, the depth of irony in this story makes it sound like an extremely tasteless satire.

 

[NYcarbineer]

I guess once you've been in the Middle East long enough, even Israelis can turn anti-Zionist.

 

[MHunterB]

But how true is it that Israel "forced" or "coerced" Ethiopian Jews into taking birth control, without even telling them it was birth control? An interesting piece in Haaretz says it isn't very true, and "the more [this] story is repeated, the more warped and distorted it becomes". Haaretz says it is certainly the case, as revealed in an Israeli TV documentary in December, that Israel's immigration authorities are guilty of "insensitivity" and "cultural condescension" towards Ethiopian Jews, and perhaps a "certain level of racism". The article says these African Jews were indeed given Depo-Provera, a birth-control injection that lasts for three months, both in Addis Ababa, as they waited to go to Israel, and also in the absorption centres they first stayed in upon arrival in Israel. But it is not the case – or it certainly has not been proven by anyone – that they were given these injections deceitfully, without their consent, being misled into believing they were just inoculations.

Haaretz says the Ethiopian women were "coaxed" or "strongly convinced" to have the Depo-Provera shot, not forced. The idea that they were given it without their knowledge springs from the testimony of a few women who simply said "they weren't aware the shots were birth control"; that could be down to these individual women's lack of understanding or confusion, says Haaretz, since "the vast majority of the Ethiopian women who received Depo-Provera were aware it was birth control and received it willingly".

As for the claims that Israel is "sterilising" immigrants it doesn't like very much, Haaretz points out that, by definition, an injection whose birth-controlling power lasts only three months is not sterilisation. It also points out that some Ethiopian women continued voluntarily to receive Depo-Provera even once they were settled in Israel, because they "preferred being injected at a clinic rather than having to take pills daily in the presence of other family members who might disapprove of that decision". That is, the injections became culturally convenient for some Ethiopian women in Israel. Haaretz says it is "insulting to these women's intelligence" to suggest they would continue travelling to a clinic in Israel in order to stand in line to be "sterilised", and in truth the drop in the Ethiopian birth rate in Israel that observers fretted over this week is far more likely "attributable to access to birth control that these women wanted".

 

[MHunterB]

Just in case anyone else hadn't actually read more of the story. Now maybe people can discuss the facts of the situation and not the rather incendiary allegations in the first paragraph.