Israel’s dirty little secret

Zehava Galon is a member of the opposition Yahad Party in Israel. In 2005 she headed a Committee Against Trafficking in Women that undertook a four-year investigation into the problem of sexual exploitation. In Galon’s words, the investigation revealed how women are smuggled into Israel and “along the way, raped, beaten and then sold at public auctions.”

Up to 20,000 women have been smuggled into Israel from Eastern Europe. These women, many of them teenagers, are held as virtual sex slaves and brutally exploited in a country whose centerpiece is a memorial to Holocaust survivors.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has named Israel one of the world’s worst offenders when it comes to the crime of trafficking in persons for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor.

This trade of the weakest and most vulnerable has been routinely covered up and soft-sold by the Israeli authorities. Fortunately, there are also Israeli activists who are facing the problem head on. The Haifa-based human rights organization Isha L’Isha is one such group. However, despite the good work done by groups like this, until the government takes this issue seriously, trade will continue to flourish.

The captive women are often teenagers, some as young as thirteen, who have been lured in with false promises and bogus contracts. They are smuggled into Israel via Egypt in most cases. Along the way they are raped and abused, before being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Depending on the girl and the “her attributes” of her, she can be sold to an Israeli pimp for up to $10,000. These girls are then held in private clubs or private establishments and forced to serve customers day and night.

Here is a description of one such auction via the Israel News Agency…

“Yosef took Anna to a hotel and ordered her to strip naked in front of a room full of men. The ordeal is known as an ‘auction’. Like dealers at a cattle market, dealers inspect the ‘goods’ and bid on the women they want to buy. Dealers aren’t necessarily picky about an auction location. In one case, a woman was stripped, inspected, and sold for $6,000 in a McDonald’s men’s room.”

Considering that the former Soviet Union and countries like Romania have been struggling to get out of difficult economic situations, of course there is a large underclass that is trapped in poverty. Traffickers target the young and impressionable: adolescents who are already in a difficult situation and face many difficulties. They betray the trust of these women and, in many cases, destroy their very humanity by driving them from their homeland and subjecting them to criminal assaults and intimidation.

The sentences imposed on the few perpetrators who are actually convicted in Israeli courts are a joke. Some of these dealers get community service and the clubs they run are often only temporarily closed. Some mysteriously reopen and carry on with business as usual. There are an estimated 300 brothels in Tel Aviv alone, many of which hold women in conditions that could be compared to slavery.

The writer, Isaac Herzog, documented some of the dire conditions these women on the move face in a Jerusalem Post article titled “Time to Crack Down on White Slavery.” Herzog says police have surveillance footage of this “herd” of women across the desert, and claims people just wouldn’t believe what’s really going on. Hundreds of captive women have been driven through the Egyptian desert to Israel. Anyone who collapses along the way, or who runs out, is simply abandoned, in Herzog’s words, like “a dying pack animal.”

Some women who have been abandoned or who try to flee have been targeted by the Bedouins. The article “Israel Sex Slavery Thrives” courtesy of the Israel News Agency contains the following statement from a victim named “Anna”:

“Already in Egypt I found out that I was going to work as a prostitute in Eilat… I tried to run away, but a Bedouin grabbed me and beat me. At night, four Bedouins raped me, one after the other… I was bleeding and I couldn’t walk, my legs hurt so much… I wanted to die.”

Amnesty International maintains that the Israeli government and police have largely turned a blind eye to this trade taking place under their noses. Exactly how a nation that emerged on a history of victimization can be so slow to act decisively to eradicate the systemic exploitation and abuse of trafficked women within its own society is a difficult mystery to fathom.

Many Jewish writers and commentators in the US and Canada have been shocked by the impunity of Israeli pimps and gangsters. Many are appalled by the apparent unwillingness of the Israeli government to crack down on a trade that the authorities are well aware of. Here in Canada, respected investigative journalist Victor Malarek has done an excellent job exposing the trade.

There is a strong racist element in business in Israel. Leah Gruenpeter-Gold, co-director of the Awareness Center in Tel Aviv, claims that these young Eastern European women are being sacrificed for the sexual needs of men, in a culture that protects the virtue of the Jewish woman. She and her partner spoke of her disgust at the way some Orthodox Jews take advantage of these women.

Haredin, Orthodox Jews, flock to Tel Aviv’s brothels on Friday mornings and evenings for fun and games before Shabbat. In the area of ​​the Stock Market and the Diamond Market, this activity is particularly evident. Since the Orthodox are not allowed to masturbate according to religious law, they must have sexual relations with a woman. Their law prohibits them from using condoms, so they have to pay pimps more to have “the privilege.”

Grunpeter-Gold affirms that the victims are being sacrificed… “because these women are not human beings… they are foreign women. The religious prefer that it be with foreign women because that way they do not harm Jewish women.”

Why isn’t more done to stop the continued sexual victimization of women in Israel? According to the girls who work in the shop, the police and other prominent members of Israeli society are allegedly involved, sometimes in stealing leftovers or other “businesses”, or simply as customers. A percentage of orthodox like those mentioned are also involved. Who knows how deep the collusion is: it is impossible to trace it. But certainly such connections would work against official attempts to crack down on trade.