This is just another piece of evidence that shows that the isrealis as a people seem to view themselves as superior than everybody else. While other countries tend to encourage assimiliation of the population to prevent violence/discrimination, the isrealis seem to discourage it. This attitude towards other cultures and races could be traced to one of the reasons of the mideast crises.

The only reason for this is because of the drop in the population of Jews around the world.
Women who would decide to leave with one of these workers and might decide to convert religion and so on.... will truly deminish the current population to nothing.

Mach: Have you ever...you know, actually been anywhere?

Ask a Palestinian how they are treated in Kuwaitt. Ask a Korean how they are treated in Japan. Ask a Turk how they are treated pretty much anywhere in western Europe.  Ask an Albanian how they are treated in Greece. Ask a jew how they're treated in France.

Tell me Mach, do you still think you're not anti-semetic or are you merely biased against Israel for other reasons?

Racism is a worldwide phenonomenon. Saying that other countries tend to encourage assimilation is ignorance of the highest degree.  Outside a handful of western European countries (and then selective) and a decent chunk of the western hemisphere, tolerance for other races is not very high.

Thanks for all your comments. It is true what M. Wardell states. In Japan, they are so oblivious to their racism, I listened to a Japanese official state that Japan was multi-cultural, almost 1% of all Japanese are foreign-born.
Yet, racism is proof of lack of wisdom. I had a friend who based all of his research on the 'Jewish Conspiracy' and had some insightful (qua, in-cite-full) points in his work. He argued that the 'white' race had to adopt the Zionist tactics to 'win' the race war he insisited we were all engaged in.
This was a man whose mind was a powerful weapon, clearly exceeding any bounds of the term genius. He missed one verbal on his SAT's applied to the Air Force Academy, and sat down and taught himself rudimentary Hebrew in three weeks time. His love was clasical piano, yet his forte was claculus. I marvelled at his ability to subsume a quantum of information exceeding one's own just by hearing the axiom and premise of theresearch. I mean he could get doen to the nitty-gritty details and rock you. A rare left-right brain thinker, I mean he was firing equally in all cylinders.
I listened to his protracted exegesis on racial theory and then sat him doen and explained some very simple facts his work neglected in order to reach his conclusions.
First, there is no such thing as a 'white race'. If one asks a French person what they are, they'll tell you "I'm a Frank". A Londoner is "a Brit, or Anglo-Saxon", etc. With the exception of the 'Isle of Wyte"[sic], there is no such nation or people. Second, there is no superiority of conglomerate government to a tribal or clan people's Govt., as his work implied, because his own Ancestors utilized this same form of government until the Romans invaded and altered it. His people too were a peaceful tribal people until the conquest by his own supposed 'white' creators, the Romans who were themselves a mix of African, as they had once been invaded by them. Finally, America is not a white or Europeans Country, and never was. It is and was occupied by a diverse people having a various mitochondriatic mix (unique to the world in DNA study of races, each other continent having one but they show at least 23 and the study continues)and so long as one exists, this is a land of occupation, governed by a people whose own ancestors came in the hold of prison ships or escaped from the oppression of European Monarchs. I told him to get himself a gun and a boat, and if he wanted to liberate or lead his people, row back to his homeland and fight, but don't sit on my land and tell a people who NEVER run from a good fight that you're not what everyone else sees you as.
He lived in denial of his own Nations history, equating the conquest of Greece and Rome as somehow HIS when it clearly and factually was not. I told him he lived in a State of mind termed the genocide, which is the systematic destruction and coruption of a race or people, and his mind was infected.
So here was this incredibly intelligent mind, able to integrate computer programming instructions of highly complex nature in but one showing - I've seen him repeat 17 steps on first try, then suggest improvement for efficiency sake - yet he was a fool, if you'll excuse the term, when it came to his Social philosophy. It goes to show that knowledge is not wisdom, and often our problems originate from lack of the wisdom; witness our advanced technological society of today.
I just want people to begin to open their eyes and see Israel for what it is under these 'Zionists' who control their policies of today. They are foolish racists, deluding themselves that God authorized them to kill the infidel, and this is a vain and false belief which is causing humans in many Nations to suffer. We don't have to oppose Israel any more than Iraq, just stop supporting such an agenda as the 'Zionists' - not the Jews or Israeli people - are putting forth. The article points out the racism of the present Government of Israel and should be known, so we can consciously understand what our hard-earned tax money is supporting in the Middle-East as a solution to the likes of Saddam.

In return to Brad for his seemingly arrogant comments on my experiences. I was born in china, traveled europe, Japan for a year (hated it), Canada for three and obtained citizenship. Now im in the US. Now to ur comments. I agree with ur Wahkonta on the japanese views on racism. And not all of brad's examples r correct, Turks r treated much better in Europe than in America. While it is true that only selected countries encourage assimilation by actively bringin in foriegn born ppl. Countries in Europe, Asia... etc, would much rather assimilate the population rather than alienate them.


"Outside a handful of western European countries (and then selective) and a decent chunk of the western hemisphere"
umm....So in other words more than half of the industrialized world?

Several points need to be made here.

Israel is a multi-racial society. Jews and Israeli are not necessarily "white" however you care to define that. Most American Jews are Ashkenazi, meaning of Eastern European descent. So that is the picture that most Americans and Europeans have. But Judaism is a religion and culture, not a race. According to the Bible, the Jewish people are descended from Abraham through Isaac, as the Arab race is descended from Abraham through Ishmael, both peoples being referred to as Semitic. You can clearly see that if you meet any Israeli whose people stayed in the Middle East. But after two Diasporas, when the Jewish people were scattered around the world, the gene pool is pretty diverse. Any Jew can come to Israel under the law of the return. So, in Israel, you have people of Eastern European stock mixing with Jews who appear more Arabic in color and features, mixing with Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugul, etc. Then you add in the Ethiopian Jewry, rescued by the Israelis and Americans, and Jews from Asia. So lets not classify Israel or Jewry in general as a race.

Here is a breakdown of Israelui population by ethnic group:
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/demographics.html

16% are Moslem, 2% each Christian and Druze. 12.5% of the Jewish population was born in Asia or Africa.

It is not unusual for any religious group to have prohibitions against members marrying outside that religion. In fact I would go so far as to say that all religions have this to one degree or another. I was going to ask, tongue very much in cheek, if the workers were prohibited from trying to convert Israeli women to Christianity or to being Chinese.

There is no question to me that Israel is struggling to assimiliate all the people that have arrived there. Bear in mind that many members of the conservative Likkud party are relatively recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They bring with the them the zeal of people prevented from worship for decades and an intolerance of things foreign to them. They have had problems with many aspects of diversity of Israeli culture.

But that is true of a lot of places. A recent comment made by a Turkish citizen that was carried in the Christian Science Monitor goes as follows: ""It's the same message the Europeans have been giving us for 10 years - you are not part of Europe."

A last note on the story itself. I did a Google news search on this. The Toronto Star carried the original story, which was then repeated verbatim in a number of places in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. No Israeli paper carried the story (I was curious what there point of view was) but Haaretz did cover a story about the round up of illegal workers.

Personally, I feel that Israel has every right to demand foreign workers in THEIR country to follow such strict policies. It's not as if foreigners have nowhere else to go if they desire a haven from their homelands, especially if there are countries out there that welcome immigrants. I look at it as I look at housing. To live in some places, I must abide by certain rules, such as being of a certain age or not having pets, but if I refuse to accept such rules, I can always find somewhere else to live.

This desire of people of different peoples to socialize is being termed a, 'social time bomb'. Come on now. You are holding that you actually support that a foreigner in Israel has no right of religious expression, political affiliation, or even to have 'contact' with females. [I'm American and find such a holding anti-thetical to my concept of the terms, 'rights' and 'freedom']
No where is the hypocrisy of this policy more glaring than in the FACT it only applies to the women, not the men. Think about it. This is no desire to preserve the 'jewish' culture, this is genocide and chauvanism pure and simple. To hold the jewish men can socialize with the foreign women, but not the women is a refutation of your 'denial' of the facts of zionism and what it is doing to the Middle East. Go to the article on the state of Bethlehem and it is an insult to all Christians to see what our kow-towing to such immorality is doing to us.
Whether or not a people have a 'right' - as you term it - to do wrong, is not the point the article makes. It is the racism and chauvanism being carried out by a Government which is first to put a Liberal U.N agenda such as the "rights of women' forth for the rest of the world to have to abide. Denial is thy name and shame on the Hypocrites, hypocrites, the hypocrites!

They probably only applied it to women and not the men because unless I'm mistaken, the foreign workers are all men. If there's a significant amount of women though, then it is sexist, but otherwise, it's just Israel's way of protecting its own interests. It's not as if foreigners have nowhere else to go for work.

I don't know, you tell me, there are 260,000 foreign workers. Now, do you think that they are all male? If you read the article it states,"Those who violate the agreement will be sent back to China at their own expense."; Not,"given train fare to next country of their choice". Someone say somthun bout, 'Denial'?

I'm not sure. It's possible that they're all male or that only an insignificant minority of them are female. I read that, and I have no problem with making them pay their own fare. After all, they weren't able to follow the rules, so they should pay for it.

Wahkonta Anathema, with all due respect, its not genocide. If you said "racial purity" laws, I would agree. Racial purity laws are equaly repugnant to me, but not the same as genocide. No race is being murdered. Using the term "genocide" in anything but a literal sense, to me it denigrates what happened in Rwanda, what happened to Jews and the Roma during World War II and other places. Just a point of sensitivity on my part.

Please also note that in my earlier post, I questioned the validity of the story itself. I am not sure that all the facts are in. The story is inflammatory, but don't take everything that you read in the papers as gospel.

You should also know that in the Jewish religion, religous inheritance is passed on through the mother. It is the mother's religion that determines if a child is Jewish or not. So any child by a Jewish woman is Jewish at birth under orthodox law. I am not sure of the bearing of this on the issue and I remain doubtful that we know the full story here.

A last point here. I don't view my Jewish heritage as a racial identity, any more than I view my American heritage as a racial identifier. Jewish communities have flourished around the world, including China. Please see http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/vjw/chinajews.html#1 for a brief history. The modern state of Israel recognizes all Jews as potential Israelis, welcome under the Law of the Return. Another reason why I feel that we are missing something here.