Jerusalem Post, September 5, 2005
The most recent “Trafficking in Persons Report,” issued in June 2005 by the US Department of State, places Israel in “tier two” in terms of its treatment of women who are bought and sold in the sex trade.
The rating is better than in past years, when Israel’s treatment of sex slaves almost brought on economic sanctions by the United States. But the rating is still a diplomatic embarrassment, since Israel is left in the dubious company of countries such as Kuwait, Lebanon, Albania, Azerbaijan and the Kyrgyz Republic.
“The Government of Israel,” states the report, “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so.”
MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz-Yahad), who heads the Knesset’s Parliamentary Subcommittee on the Trafficking of Women, soberly agrees with the assessment.
According to a recent report by Gal-On, between 3,000 and 5,000 women have been sold as sex slaves over the past four years, each for $8,000-$10,000. The women are forced to work up to 18 hours a day in nearly 400 brothels throughout Israel.
With approximately one million visits to prostitutes each month, the Israeli sex “industry” generates an estimated billion dollars a year, Gal-On reveals.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared last month that this “despicable phenomenon completely contradicts Jewish tradition and the values of dignity.”
Yet, despite repeated criticism by the State Department and human rights organizations, Israel has not established a central authority to cope with the problem. In December 2003, the government decided to establish a committee of ministerial directors-general to deal with trafficking in persons, but the decision was conditioned on a budgetary allocation, which was never forthcoming. Nearly two years later, this committee still doesn’t exist.
To Gal-On’s dismay, while the public seems to feel some sympathy for the sex slaves themselves, most Israelis simply do not view trafficking in women as a human rights violation.
To mark last week’s International Day Against Trafficking in Women, Gal-On – who has been campaigning against the sex trade in Israel for nearly four years – discusses the State Department’s report and its implications.
“We have made tremendous progress with regard to legislation, law enforcement and the treatment of the women victims,” she says, reviewing the achievements of the committee she heads. “But we still have a long way to go.”
Even after four years of intensive parliamentary effort, Gal-On “still doesn’t have the words to describe how abhorrent and cruel trafficking in women really is… These women are bought and sold as if they were merely commodities in the market. They are beaten, raped and abused; imprisoned in brothel-apartments; threatened and forced to work, without a break, for weeks and days on end. If their ‘value’ goes down, they are traded off again, sold for a lower price. What words are there to describe this modern slavery?”
Gal-On considers the increasing official recognition that “trafficking in women is a phenomenon that the government and the public must deal with” as her committee’s primary achievement.
“When we established the committee, most people didn’t recognize – even I wasn’t fully aware – that we were dealing with a phenomenon, not merely a collection of isolated cases,” she says.
Gal-On is also careful to give particular credit for this achievement to the women’s and feminist organizations that work with her committee.
“The organizations – who work with the women – brought us the data, and they were the ones to convince MKs from all political parties how serious a problem it really is,” she says.
The public often contends, she notes, that most of these women came to Israel of their own free will, knowing they would be prostitutes. This argument infuriates her.
According to her committee’s report, fully one third of the women traded in Israel did not know they would be working as prostitutes, and the two thirds who did believed they would be employed in comfortable conditions and would earn enormous sums of money.
“So the majority of them knew they would be prostitutes,” she says. “But they didn’t come of their own free will. They came out of despair. The public thinks about [the movie] Pretty Woman. Well these women aren’t Julia Roberts, and their clients aren’t Richard Gere.”
There is no free choice in this situation, she says.
“A woman who is sucked into the world of prostitution usually lives in deep poverty and social despair, especially in the former Soviet Union, where everything has fallen apart. The procurers promise them that they’ll work for a summer, earn vast sums of money, and be able to come back home. And they believe them, because they don’t know the truth and are too desperate to find out.”
Furthermore, she asks rhetorically, “What about the effect prostitution has on all women? Is that free choice?”
“A society that allows trade in women only because they’re women degrades the entire community of women. If some women can be bought, then all women can be bought.
“The sex trade entrenches women into their inferior social position. It finds its expression in the under-representation of women in politics, the fact that women earn one third less than men.”
GALON RECALLS a recent Knesset debate about child prostitution in Jerusalem.
“Everyone was so upset, but I thought, ‘Why are you so surprised?’ After all, this is a slippery slope. It’s another stage in our loss of our humanity as a society. If we are insensitive to foreign women who have been sold into slavery, sooner or later we will become insensitive to Israeli women, and then to children, too.”
Incensed, she describes a recent court case in which a judge ordered an insurance company to compensate a man who was wounded in a traffic accident by paying for his visits to a prostitute in order to meet his sexual needs until he reaches the age of 70.”
“The man also asked for cigarettes,” she continues, “but the judge refused, because cigarettes are dangerous to his health,” she says ironically.
“So a judge in the State of Israel is saying that it’s OK to buy sex, and the state should pay for it. On the one hand, the state wants to close down the brothels and fight the sex trade and on the other, a judge is mandating their use. A woman as compensation for a traffic accident? That’s perverted.”
Gal-On also rejects proposals to legalize prostitution, noting first of all that in Israel, prostitution isn’t illegal, although pimping and procuring are.
“People say that since prostitution has always been around, let’s legalize it and take care of the women. This infuriates me every time I hear it. First of all, whoever wants to legalize prostitution is lending a hand to trafficking. You can’t separate the two.
“So these criminals who are trading in human beings will now be considered legitimate businessmen? Upstanding citizens who are called up to the Torah on Shabbat? Pillars of the community? If the pimps become legitimate, tax-paying citizens, then the state becomes a mega-pimp.
“Third, by making prostitution legal and normative, we’d be removing the last inhibitions that people may have, so there will be a greater demand and actually increased criminality. After all, these are not people who want to pay taxes.”
She continues, “It has also always been said that slavery can’t be eradicated – so should we institutionalize it? We can’t eradicate domestic violence, so should we make it legal? And incest has been around forever, too – so should we make incest legal?”
The suggestion wouldn’t be made if prostitutes weren’t women, Gal-On believes.
“No one is suggesting that we allow drug dealers to legally launder their money. Or gun runners. It’s more acceptable to think of institutionalizing prostitution because it involves women and women’s bodies.”
While protecting the women and criminalizing the pimps, the committee has also devoted attention to the “Johns” (the clients).
“We like to delude ourselves and think that most of the Johns are foreign workers or Palestinians. But they’re not. They majority are Israeli Jews – secular and religious, from all ethnic backgrounds.”
The committee, Gal-On says, has had numerous discussions about this issue.
“There are a million visits to prostitutes every month. This means that men rape women every day. Some of them rape women several times a day. We’ve considered criminalizing them, but I think that before we make it a criminal offense to visit a prostitute, we have to work on public opinion, to get men to realize that they have to find other ways to fulfill their sexual needs. There are models of such campaigns in other cities, and we will be studying them in the fall.
“I believe that it will be possible to affect the way the public views the issue. We’ve already brought about changes in the way the authorities behave toward the women. At first, they treated them like criminals, because of their illegal status in the country. But now, through concerted efforts, the police and the courts recognize they are victims. If we were able to change official opinions on this issue, we should be able to create a shift in public opinion.”
Such a shift, she believes, is crucial, pointing to a recent survey conducted by the Information Center at the Knesset and the Dahaf Institute’s Mina Tzemah, which found that a majority of the public does not make a connection between trafficking in women and the violation of human rights.
“Israelis see this as an issue for foreigners – foreign workers, illegal residents, foreign prostitutes. And those who do object to trafficking mostly do so for moral or moralistic reasons.”
She is thus especially proud of a shelter the government has established to care for the victims of the sex trade.
“The moment the state established the shelter, it was making a statement that Israel views these women as victims. In the shelter, the women are protected from the men who abused them and could try to harm or even kill them because they have agreed to testify against them. They also receive all of the services they need, such as medical treatment, psychological aid and even professional training and education.”
Today, there are nearly 50 women in the shelter. Gal-On notes, however, that the shelter only accepts women who are waiting to testify; women who refuse or are unable to testify are held in a separate facility where they are protected, but not entitled to the same services. She is campaigning for all the women to be admitted to the full-service shelter.
DESPITE THE State Department’s critique, Gal-On does not believe that Israel is in any way “special” with regard to trafficking in women.
“Israel is part of a world-wide phenomenon,” she says. “But for many years, it was virtually risk-free to traffic here, because Israel didn’t have anti-trafficking legislation.”
The reason for this, she explains, is “because we never had to, since we didn’t have a history of slavery in this country.”
The massive aliya from Russia, she adds, facilitated the phenomenon, because the women trafficked from the FSU were able to blend in with the genuine immigrants.
Israel’s criminal code was amended to specifically address trafficking. Since then, Gal-On has brought some 17 legislative changes in the Knesset, and says that Israel now has some of the most progressive legislation in the world. And when judges were unwilling to impose stiff sentences on the pimps and procurers, she made sure that legislation mandating minimum sentencing was also passed.
Proposals currently in committee include empowering the state to repossess property obtained through the profits of trafficking and a comprehensive proposal that would apply to all forms of coercion – whether ill treatment of foreign workers, organ theft or any other type of behavior that denies a human being his or her freedom.
“Human rights are simply not divisible,” she says. “Trafficking is enslavement, and it is a violation of a woman’s human rights.”
Thanks to new legislation and heightened awareness, Gal-On claims, the police have increased their activity and are catching more of the pimps and procurers before they manage to force the women into slavery. In the past, women were smuggled in through the airport and seaports, but police have cut off most of the activity through these entrances. Today, most women are smuggled in through the Philadelphi corridor, under the nose – and tacit approval – of the Egyptians.
In its report, the State Department criticized Israel for not having established any specific task force or authority to deal with trafficking. Gal-On responds that she has proposed creating a central, statutory authority to coordinate among all relevant ministries and offices to initiate educational campaigns and promote human rights.
The proposal has yet to pass its first reading.
Summing up, Gal-On sighs. “People must realize that prostitution is first and foremost a form of violence against women,” she says emphatically. “It is a denial of a woman’s right to dignity and physical and mental well-being. How can Israel consider itself a democracy if people in our midst are treated this way?”
