By Marianne Azizi

As Europeans grow steadily more furious with “Nazi social worker” practices, Israel’s crimes against its own children continue unabated.

Make no mistake about it: Israel is a police state – a vicious one. Every dispute seems to result in a call to the police. The amount of public money spent on this must run into millions. But there is one group of people that is supreme, and controls the police: the social workers of Israel. One call from them to the police and abused children are forced to see their abusive parent with no argument. Another call and an abused child continues to live in unprotected fear with no process for parents to appeal. Other children are snatched from fit parents at the nod of a social worker and the police whisk them away to private institutions with no way back. The norm seems to be to kidnap children for the most absurd reasons.

Kidnap the child, break the father

Israel recently submitted a report to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), describing its practices towards child trafficking and sexual abuse. It reads well. It makes it appear as if the children live in the Garden of Eden. Yet, across the country the cry from Israelis is “holocaust of the children”. For a Jewish person to use these words is an indication of the horrors that are happening in Israel.

The kidnap of children by social services runs deep in Israel and hides grave abuse. Family breakdown programmes are systematic. Gender discrimination initially begins against men, which means that women can literally make any false claim they like with impunity. Child support demands on the father are the highest in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Wages are lower than most developed countries, and the No Exit Order is flagrantly used to hold citizens inside the country with no way out. Children in divorce are regularly issued with a prevention of travel order until the age of 21. “Break the father” is the first step and the state does a good job of doing it, with 1 in 72 divorcing men taking their lives every year.

As the system takes hold, social workers start to hunt down vulnerable families – single parents or even happily married couples. A call from a school about a child struggling brings in a social worker. They start to suggest assessments and put the family on notice. They will be watched and checked constantly and become afraid of making any mistakes. Parents speak of seeing social workers sitting outside schools to spot any children who could be targeted.

Some parents are cajoled into signing a needy warrant, and many don’t understand that what it means is that they would soon lose their children to social workers. The small print isn’t noticed. The children are put into emergency centres, often prevented from seeing a relative while assessments are done by the very people who work for the centre. Then they get shipped through to foster care, which is profitable for the foster parents, or to institutions for which this is even more profitable, or they are put up for adoption, with many parents being unaware their children have been adopted. Mothers talk of coercion and pressure as social workers take children without due process.

Drugs and sexual abuse

These decisions are rubber stamped by a judge. There are no rights for the child to speak up. There are no interventions of training, rehabilitation or financial support as stated in Israel’s report to the UNCRC. The children are just taken. Some children have tried to escape emergency centres to get home, and are then subjected to psychological assessment and, more often than, not put on the drug Ritalin. If a child wants to go home to his or her family it would seem insane to most normal people to declare them in need of drugs, yet the social workers recommend this as a matter of course.

Sexual abuse is classed as a crime in Israel, especially abuse which occurs in a family setting. If this is so, it is inexplicable that abused children remain at risk, and lawyers fighting for their protection are actually fined in the district and supreme courts for appealing against a social worker’s decision. No medical reports, videos, recordings or photographs count in a child abuse case if the social worker chooses to ignore the evidence.

To speak out in public against a social worker can result in police intervention, and a prison sentence for the complainant. Most people dare not to speak out as they are fully aware they will lose their children if they do so – it happens a lot.

No free speech, no protest

Freedom of speech regarding this is almost non-existent. The laws here do allow for protest and demonstration. The laws even go as far as to allow protesting at the address of a public official. But when it involves a social worker, they are above the law. They control the police, who in turn control society. The world is waking up to the sense that something is happening to all our children. The power of social workers worldwide is frightening. Parents are afraid to make a single mistake for fear of losing their kids. The Revaha (Hebrew for social services) is one of the most feared words. The state controls the media to an extent that nothing can be said that contradicts the propaganda. Journalists who speak out against the kidnapping of children are not treated with the democratic respect they enjoy in Europe: they are hounded, harassed and punished to set an example to others.

There is no rhyme nor reason as to which children will be stolen and which children will be left abused. There is no reason why children are cherrypicked and split from their siblings. There is no reason why contact centre visits are the highest in the developed world.

Because children are started on the drug Ritalin when they are as young as two or three years old, in institutions they can spend their entire childhood on medication. American fundraisers such as Orr Shalom make claims at foster parent recruitment sessions that no children are taken without the full authority of a judge and full evaluations. It simply isn’t true.

No accountability

In Israel, there is a “Duty to report” law, which means it is an absolute duty to report child abuse to a social worker or police. The law goes further to say that the duty is also to report on an official, such as a social worker, police officer, director of institution, doctor, etc. What is key is the difference between reporting to and reporting on. The problem is that there is no independent ombudsman to report to. If a social worker fails to act on a report, there is no consequence to them.

There are countless witnesses to the fact social workers are forcing good, protective parents to make their children visit abusive former spouses.

Israel claims in its report to the UNCRC that there are special children’s investigators who have up to 420 hours of specialist training in child behaviour and who are the only people allowed to get involved in children’s cases. Yet social workers have removed children from parents in a matter of hours with no such specialists present. Israel further claims that children are removed from a parent only in cases where the parent’s behaviour is “unlikely” to change, despite training, rehabilitation and financial assistance. Yet, a couple who couldn’t pay a 500 shekels (USD 131) electricity bill had their child removed from them – a baby who was only four months old. There is no extensive evidence that any education, financial assistance or rehabilitation is provided to a parent either before or after a child is removed from the family home.

So, it appears that Israel is misrepresenting the story of children’s rights to the UNCRC. Unless the world becomes aware of these untruths, every day another child will be subjected to abuse, parental alienation or medication and possibly lose its family forever.

The logic of money

On the face of it, there is no logic to all this. But look deeper and you will find that profit is the motive.

Each institution receives 17,000 shekels (USD 4,453) per month for each child who occupies a bed. Legal guardianship is given to a lawyer who benefits to the tune of at least 5,000 shekels (USD 1,310) per month. Parents and/or children get sent for psychiatric evaluation, and the psychiatrists receive up to 20,000 shekels (USD 5,234) for each report carried out. More profit is made in the case of children who are put on medication – most unnecessarily at a great profit to the drug companies.

Once inside an institution, if the kids are declared as psychiatrically damaged, the remuneration is 3,000 shekels (USD 785) for the institution per child per month.

If a parent is suffering financially, foster parents get from 3,000 shekels (USD 785) per month to take a child, plus the cost of all the needs of the child, such as kindergarten fees, medical requirements – benefits that are not given to the biological parent.

Social workers’ incomes are not declared on records, despite the fact that they are public officials. It must be sheer coincidence that such a large majority of them must have married wealthy people, as the homes they live in are way beyond the assumed salary levels. Yet, they go on strike regularly to request more money.

Before all this profit is made, the local authority – another public service paid for by the taxpayer, operates the contact centres. Each parental visit of one hour creates an income of 640 shekels (USD 166) paid by the Ministry of Welfare. Based on a 10-hour day, 300 days a year, each room generates almost 2 million shekels (USD 523,903) per annum. It is reported that there are 64 contact centres in Israel. The idea that 250 million shekels (USD 65.5 million) is given by the Welfare Ministry to the local authority (a conservative estimate) might suggest the department should answer to the treasury why it is squandering taxpayers’ money on taking children from their hard working parents.

The regimented way in which children are stolen is reminiscent of the Yemenite Children Affair, which remains unresolved. It appears the success of stealing children for adoption in that case has served as a blueprint for today’s continuation of child kidnapping.

It is clear that if Israel does not care for its own children, it is unlikely to care for any other people’s children. The supporters and donors to Israel need to know the suffering of the children, and those who stand against Israel should understand that the chance of peace is limited until the Israeli state’s war against their own people ends.