Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
22 June
MASS KIDNAPPING OF 'INFERIOR' ARAB JEWS
22 JUNE On this day in 2017, thousands gathered in Jerusalem to protest the state kidnapping of Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan babies to be given to European Ashkenazi Jews in the early years of the state. Ze’ev, who had travelled south to Jerusalem from near Hadera, said: “Two of my uncle’s children were kidnapped, and to this day we don’t know what happened to them. One disappeared two weeks after they got to Israel; a few months later, his daughter wasn’t feeling well and then disappeared.”
خطف جماعي ليهود عرب من الطبقة الفقيرة
22يونيو
The mass kidnapping of the children of Arab Jews
In the early years of the State of Israel, and especially in the fifties, thousands of babies and toddlers disappeared from their families - families of immigrants who came to Israel and were housed in transit and absorption camps. About two-thirds of the children were from families of Yemenite immigrants. According to low estimates, in those years every eighth child of a Yemenite family disappeared. The remaining third of the children were from other Mizrachi families - Tunisian, Moroccan, Libyan, Iraqi and others – and a small number were children of families who immigrated from the Balkans. Thousands of testimonies by parents indicate a similar method: parents were asked to give their children to nurseries or hospitals under the pretext that there “they will be given more appropriate care.” Sometimes children were violently taken by social workers or nurses, placed in ambulances and forcibly transferred to these institutions. Read more
Thousands of people gathered in Jerusalem on Wednesday evening in order to protest the kidnapping of Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan babies in the early years of the state. The demonstration was organized by Amram, an NGO dedicated to researching and exposing the affair, and called for recognition of the state’s crimes as well as justice for the affected families.
Israel was not unique - the horrific case of the UK - shipping the poor from the UK to keep Australia White
"When empty cradles are contributing woefully to empty spaces, it is necessary to look for external sources of supply. If we do not supply from our own stock, we are leaving ourselves all the more exposed to the menace of the teeming millions of our neighbouring Asiatic races."
Archbishop of Perth, welcoming British child migrants shipped to Australia, August 1938
"It is proposed that the Commonwealth seek out in Britain and Europe, in each of the first three post-war years, at least 17,000 children a year (i.e. about 50,000 in three years) suitable and available for migration to Australia..."
Statement by the acting Australian Prime Minister, December 1944
Britain removed children, some as young as three years old from their mothers and fathers to ship them thousands of miles away to institutions in Australia. Many of these children were removed without their parents' knowledge or consent.
