Posted on 06/29/2002 11:43:51 AM PDT by LarryLied
TEL AVIV — A string of cars marks northern Tel Aviv's Tel Baruch Beach, renowned for its posh seafood restaurant, Blue, but also for the dozens of prostitutes who flock here looking for business.
Many of them are from the former Soviet Union. Some of them are slaves.
About 3,000 women are bought and sold in Israel each year. Amid calls from international organizations and pressure from the United States to curb the sale, trade and barter of women, Israel has begun to crack down on this billion-dollar-a-year industry. Both police and state prosecutors call ending the slave trade one of their top priorities.
Until the recent crackdown, Israel — along with Bahrain, Qatar and Sudan — was stuck on a State Department list of countries failing to meet America's minimum standards for the suppression of sex trafficking. In early June, however, the State Department bumped Israel up a category: from a state that does nothing to prevent slavery to one taking action against it.
This coming Monday, as a result of one of the biggest stings on slavery in Israel's history, 18 men involved in drug sales and the smuggling, trafficking and prostitution of women will face trial in the Netanya Magistrate's Court and in a Tel Aviv District Court. The maximum sentence they may receive for the trafficking of the three women allegedly caught in their grips is 15 years. The director of the Special Crimes Unit, Deputy Commissioner Menashe Arviv, thinks they will likely receive sentences of between 3 and 10 years.
The police apprehended the 18 men and completed the sting when one of the country's biggest slave traders agreed to turn state's witness, said Central District police spokesman Shaul Zionit. What they uncovered, according to Zionit, was horrifying.
The women, who were allegedly bought for about $7,500, were traded and bartered for all sorts of goods, including drugs, Zionit said. Their new "owners" most often used them as prostitutes after first sexually abusing the women, according to the spokesman.
The three women the police rescued from slavery in this case, Zionit said, were smuggled from Ukraine into Egypt and from there over the Israeli border by Bedouins. They were lured to the region by advertisements promising jobs in Israel as models or nannies. Most often the women were unaware of the life they would be thrust into once in Israel. After their arduous trek through the desert, where the Bedouins raped them, the women were handed over to their new "owners," according to the police spokesman.
"It's horrible," Zionit said. "The women we found had been used along the way. After all, their masters had to test their product. They are touched and measured and prodded in heinous ways to 'ensure the quality of the product.' Some also bring friends or family to use the women. Then the women have to work for a period of one or more months free of charge to 'pay for their passage.'"
The Israeli police say stopping the crime is one of their top priorities.
Yet one of the most worrisome aspects of this type of case, said prosecutor Arviv, is that demand for women from the former Soviet Union is still high. It is also easy to smuggle in the women, given the 70-mile Israel-Egypt border, which is mostly unmarked and unfenced. Bedouin "traders" easily drive over it using dune buggies and all-terrain vehicles.
No fence exists along the border. According to a reserve major in the Israeli army's engineer corps posted to the border area, who spoke on condition of anonymity, a physical barrier would be ineffective because shifting sands would bury it within a year or two. The smugglers keep coming and are seldom stopped by Israeli troops, who are more concerned with catching terrorist infiltrators, he said.
The demand for the women and the ease with which they can be smuggled into Israel make it one the of the world's hubs of women-trafficking, lamented Esther Hertzog, a social anthropologist at Tel Aviv University and head of the Movement for the Equal Representation of Women. While police crackdowns have nabbed some suspects, the trade largely remains unhindered, she said.
Chaim Nardi, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University, links the slave-trafficking to machismo attitudes in Israeli society, which he said "allow men to consider women their toy."
Nardi, who compiled a report on the sale of women and prostitution in June 2000 and has since updated it, said most prostitutes suffer from depression, and the overwhelming physical and emotional abuse to which they are subjected drives a huge percentage to abuse narcotics.
Even so, he sees hope. "There are certain encouraging signs," he said. "It appears things are getting better. The Israeli prosecutors are working hard against this phenomenon. But prosecutors have said their work will continue to be low-key as long as citizens are not bothered by the phenomenon en masse. This type of thinking legitimizes the trade in women, and I think this should no longer be tolerated."
Real slavery is only being practiced under islamist regimes like Sudan and a few African countries. White slavery is being perpetrated against western Europe and even in the US by criminals that prey upon weak and desperate girls, whether at the bus station or from the former eastern bloc countries.
In the present atmosphere defined daily by terrorism and fears of terrorism one is inclined to give Israeli society a pass. But there were years of "relative calm" between intifada I and II. Where was the Israeli conscience then?
Relative calm? Relative to what?
So that's the benchmark now?
It's time to ask all these ME countries the obvious question:
Whose bed o uin??
FMCDH
No, that's what Arafat and the rest of the terrorists would want you to do.
How DO YOU explain Israel's seeming complacency WRT this trading in human "service"?
You might want to read up on russian hookers in Dubai, Egypt, etc.
But, when 10 or 15 people a week are being murdered by psycopaths strapping bombs to children, the local gendarmes tend to focus their energies elsewhere. Quite understandably IMO.
Why don't you seem upset at the fact the the home countries of these 'bedouins' aren't stopping the smuggling?
L
Same place as the American conscience. This goes on in the US, too. We both work to stamp it out, though admittedly it's far from the highest priority in either case.
40 to 1?
Assuming that is the number, America has 120,000 women sold into sex slavery every year.
Seems high to me.
Because G_d did not choose those people and burden them with a covenant that requires of them better behavior. G_d chose Israel.
. . . in essence, for the same reason that most on this forum find those other populations more . . . uh . . . "disposable".
Your ratio is all kinds of wrong. Those women are not Jews. 3000 is just a number that's in Israel. If you really care like you pretending to be, why don't you give us a figure of all the women from ex USSR republics who are hooking around the world?
Here's a sad story out in Cali story for you:
Landlord's son pleads guilty 2-year sentence likely in Berkeley sex-smuggling case
I've also seen stories about South Americans and others keeping domestics as virtual slaves. For example, the Saudi Princess tale from Florida.
So far I see no inclination to condemn this. All I hear is the Clinton excuse: "Everybody does it!...what about Asia?...what about the USA?..."
If major Jewish groups in America spent less time trying to block those moralistic conservative Christians from being confirmed to the bench and turned their attention to sex slavery in Israel the problem would end almost immediately.
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