Alright, Wilson, as we come toward wrapping up this story, I have a couple of posts about matters of law in mind. That’s what this post is going to be about. I am going to describe some issues pertaining to the appeal of my deportation to Israel. I know, I am going a bit out of sequence, jumping back to earlier in this year after writing you a post about an encounter with Chaz just a few days ago.
There are various threads coming together here. On the one hand I am trying to introduce you to a kind of shadow war of the forces of God vs. the forces of evil, which I actually maintain involves invisible personal spiritual beings, demons, and those who serve them. On the other hand, I am following up with my personal narrative, with the first part, the Electrochemical Girl, being a tale of how a divine calling happens, and the second part, these posts to you, being a description of how the world comes after people who get divine callings. But finally, this tale has in mind to say some interesting things about Israel. And with this post, I want to relate my own personal experiences with Israeli law.
There are reasons for this, and I may end up forwarding this post and a couple of others, or some sections of them, to some journalists and politicians, because there are some problems with law in Israel, the country that via the Torah of Moses basically taught the world what just law is. With that in mind, I want to begin the tale with no references to demonic forces and their sock puppets or any of the other dramatic, spiritual, or prose elements that I have been telling you about thus far.
So with the above said, this incident begins with an article about a woman, a widow of an Israeli husband, who is getting kicked out of Israel because the ministry of the interior simply didn’t believe anything she told them or showed them. Have a read. Apparently only a newspaper article and the intervention of a high-ranking politician will save this lady and her daughter who grew up in Israel from the ravenous maw of the immigration bureacracy. You don’t need to make reference to demons to see something is wrong here.
Before going digging into the event of the aftermath of the deportation, I’ll jump back to a conversation with an Israeli friend I had in early 2019. She was a Hebrew/English translator and had contracted me to help her with some translation. I didn’t do a very good job, apparently. The client wasn’t happy with my translation. I didn’t do any further work for her. But I’ve kept her as a Facebook friend to this day.
Anyway, when we were discussing the client’s dissatisfaction, she commented that in many ways Israel is a kind of Mediterranean mercantile culture of old boy networks and Jimmy the Greek style business dealings where clients will often just say they don’t like the work to avoid paying, and there is no Better Business Bureau nor credit agencies in Israel, with only the courts to go to in order to remedy problems. It’s too costly to fight for a just result, and you often don’t get that result anyway.
The article above and the characterization of my Israeli friend don’t exactly paint a picture of a Holy Land, Wilson. Especially when you compare it to my experience with my appeal of my deportation from Israel. Remember that I was deported from the Ben Gurion Airport in November of 2021 under the auspices that I was an illegal immigration risk. The letter linked doesn’t say why I was determined to be an illegal immigration risk. I assumed at the time that he deported me because after asking me fifty thousand questions about why I was entering the country, who I would be talking with, and what I would be talking about, the subject that I would be visiting a rabbi friend came up, and it came up during the interrogation that one of the things I would be talking about with him would be the possibility that I would convert to Judaism, and when and where and how I might possibly do that. That’s how it sounded to me at the time.
As I’ve told you previously, Wilson, I appealed that decision. I hired an Israeli lawyer (I’ve already mentioned that as well) to handle it for me. I’m going to relate in some detail how that went, but I am also going to give you some analysis of the final result. It’s going to be depressing.
So I started the appeal from Belgrade, but the process continued for a number of months after I’d returned to the USA. In the interim I’d made a decision to convert to Judaism in the USA. Things took a long time with the appeal. A number of times I would have contact with my lawyer in which he would explain his efforts to me, almost seeming to be an attempt to avoid any customer dissatisfaction that I may have had due to delays. The proverbial, “I promise I’m working it…this is everything I’ve been doing” kind of situation, if you know what I mean.
Initially he had been given the runaround about where to even appeal the decision. There had been a change, apparently, and the required avenue for appeal would need quite a bit of work from him, but he graciously agreed to grandfather me into the initial fee. Ultimately he ended up doing a fair bit of work on the case without pay, it would seem. But keep this in mind, Wilson. Exactly where to appeal was a significant issue that was decided during the process.
Finally a decision was produced. I’ll link it again, Wilson. Yeah, it’s in Hebrew. Above my level as well. But I was able to get a crude translation. There are some interesting points that I will highlight for you.
- Paragraph 3: “The respondent sought to dismiss the appeal outright, since the appeal was filed after the appellant returned to his country, with the appellant having the right to submit a request to the respondent insofar as he wishes to revisit Israel.”
- Paragraph 9: “The appellant stayed in Israel for an extended period of time in 2018-2019 as a tourist and as a student. On 10.11.2021, the appellant landed at Ben Gurion Airport, and during questioning he stated that the purpose of his visit was to begin a conversion process, he intended to stay in Israel for at least ten months.”
- Paragraph 10(a): “In addition, when the appellant has the right to submit an application to the respondent insofar as he believes that there are circumstances that justify granting a permit to enter Israel,”
- Paragraph 10(b): “In these circumstances, and since it is not a matter of coming to Israel for tourism purposes, and since no preliminary request has been submitted to the respondent for entry into Israel, the respondent’s fear of the appellant settling in Israel is not absorbed from the air, and on the face of it, there was no defect in the decision made by the Border Control Officer on a site to return the appellant to his country.”
- Paragraph 12: “Insofar as a future request is submitted to the respondent and rejected (or a decision is not reached within a reasonable period of time), the appellant has the right to apply to the competent court.”
So above are the relevant statements of the decision that I would like to discuss.
To begin with, paragraphs 3, 10(a), and 12 state that the remedy to my problem was to file an appeal with the respondent rather than the court to which I filed an appeal. However, as I stated above, my lawyer worked tirelessly to discern the proper jurisdiction for the appeal, and ultimately worked at his own expense in order to comply with jurisdictional requirements given to him.
Second, the decision contains factual errors. In 2018 and 2019 I was never in Israel as a tourist, for example. Also, I never stated an intention to remain in Israel ten months. During his interrogation of me at the airport, the respondent demanded to know how long conversions to Judaism took. I didn’t even know, and offered that I had heard that some authorities had a ten-month minimum. Both my rabbi friend and I were very, very clear with the border officer that we were only intending to generally discuss the issue of conversion. So the respondent lied to the court, or the court failed to understand the data supplied.
But the most shocking thing here, Wilson, is in paragraph 10(b). That the border guard had a fear that I might stay in Israel is seen as grounds for deportation from Israel. This is what I really want to dig into. This is what people need to know about. See, the border authority said they deported me because they thought I was an illegal immigration risk. However, this decision says that my being even a legal immigration risk is grounds for deportation.
Let me explain. There is no law against converting to Judaism in Israel. The government of Israel actually gives a variety of benefits to Jews who immigrate. The government of Israel desperately needs more Jews in Israel because current democratic proccesses within Israel allow for Jews in Israel to be in danger if they are ever a minority within the country with a hostile Arab muslim majority. This affects Israeli politics in a big way because currently, if Israel were to ever give Israeli citizenship and voting rights to all of the Palestinians in the contested territories, Jews would be a minority in a democratic country, and the concept of a Jewish State would be in jeopardy. In short, Israel desperately needs more Jews, and the lack of Jews in Israel jeopardizes any possibility for a one-state solution to the Arab-Israel conflict.
So we have a situation where Israel needs more Jews in the population. Current Israeli law gives a number of benefits to Jews to come to Israel and become Israeli citizens. For example, they give free language instruction, considerable tax breaks, a small stiped for a short time, and some other benefits that I am not specifically aware of. They try to make it pretty lucrative for Jews to come to Israel.
Yet this guy at the airport considered the concept that I might come to Israel, like it, convert to judaism, and become a zionist Jewish citizen of Israel as grounds for deportation, and this appellate court upheld his reasoning! Keep in mind, the guy at the airport is not an elected legislator authorized to enact laws for Israel. He is not a judicial official authorized to interpret those laws.
Now any rational being is sure to be able to understand that anyone going to a country may encounter events that would cause him to stay in the country. He could meet a girl and get married, he could discover business opportunities, etc. This being the case, according to the reckoning of this border guard, which was upheld by the court, every single tourist who ever attempts to set foot in the country should be deported at the airport!
The key here is that there was an assertion of a risk of illegal immigration. An individual who comes to Israel, likes it, legally and lawfully enters a conversion program in Israel to become a Jew, legally and lawfully obtains a visa in order to stay in Israel in order to complete that program, and then upon completion of that program legally and lawfully applies for Israeli citizenship has then successfully legally and lawfully settled in Israel. Notice no illegal immigration will have taken place.
Yet this airport guy takes it upon himself to interfere with that process without any law supporting his decision, in what looks to me to be very obvious contravention of the spirit of Israeli laws that encourage the increase of the Israeli Jewish population. And the appellate court said he was correct!
“The respondent’s fear of the appellant settling in Israel is not absorbed from the air” the court said. Correct! But he needs to suck on that because there is no law against the appellant settling legally in Israel! If the entry authorities want to deport people because they look like they might want to settle in Israel, there needs to be some kind of a law authorizing them to do that.
Now I could comment at incredible length about the significance of this situation in terms of what it means to our story about angels and demons and prophets and the illuminati and all that, Wilson, but as mentioned above, I want to keep this post more real and a little less literary because there’s a chance I’ll be showing this to some journalists and/or politicians who have no interest in any of that, but may be very interested in this program of illegal deportations of zionists taking place at the Ben Gurion airport.
So I will just close that this situation that happened to me is not entirely unlike the situatioin of the widow and her daughter who are being forced to leave the country for no other reason than that some bureaucrat in the government of Israel was suspicious of the validity of the widow’s marriage. We seem to have a country of bureacrats operating outisde of the confines of the laws that they were hired to enact.
And that’s where I will leave off for today, Wilson.