Grocery Chain Told to Rehire 'Violent' Arab Workers - Why Arabs Love Israel

'Almost Free' Grocery Store

A grocery store that fired 21 Arab workers at once must hire them all again, Justice Ravit Tzaddik of the Tel Aviv District Labor Court ruled Sunday. The store was accused of racial discrimination in the firings.

'Workers were Violent, Made Threats'
Store managers at the Kimat Chinam branch in Modiin said the Arab workers in question created an atmosphere of violence and intimidation, threatened customers and fellow workers with physical violence, and were involved in sexual harassment in the workplace.

Some of the workers even bragged that they were involved in the murder of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar, and did so in the presence of Jewish workers and customers, management said.

They denied that the firings were motivated by the workers' ethnic background. Six Arab workers remain at the store in question, and almost 25% of workers at the Kimat Chinam network are Arab, they said, “So we cannot be considered a company that discriminates between its workers.”

Workers: Anti-Arab Discrimination
However, the workers told a different story. Workers said they were discriminated against by the manager, and had been fired with no warning, without a chance to tell their side of the story. All Arab workers at the Modiin branch were fired, they claimed, including some who had worked at the store prior to the appointment of the most recent manager, who had not had any complaints about them.

Notices of termination of employment were sent via one of the workers, who was given the letters on Friday and told to pass them on to his friends, the workers said. The letters told the workers they were fired and prohibited them to return to their former workplace.

Suit Filed by Former Director of NIF Group
The suit against the firings was brought by Attorney Ina David Sultanovich, on behalf of the Ministry of Trade and Labor's Equal Opportunities Commissioner. The Commissioner, Tziona Kenig-Yair, was formerly Director of the Women's Lobby, which is funded by the controversial New Israel Fund.



The NIF is a left-wing umbrella group that distributes funds – suspected to be primarily from foreign donors – to Arab and far-left Jewish organizations in Israel.

In representing the workers, Sultanovich responded to the claim that they had bragged about the murders in Itamar by saying that only a single worker, at most, had claimed to be involved in the slayings, and that managers had failed to provide first-hand testimony regarding the incident.

Some criticized Kenig-Yair's behavior in the case as hypocritical. The Women's Lobby usually trumpets cases of sexual harassment brought against Jewish leaders, and often calls for those accused of harassment to be fired. However, in this case, Kenig-Yair supported Arab men accused of harassment, and the Women's Lobby and political left have remained silent.

Court Rules: Workers Deserve a Hearing
In her finding in favor of the workers, Judge Tzaddik noted that the store had not brought proof that attempts had been made to deal with the workers' behavior or hold hearings in the matter. That fact alone made management's behavior problematic, even without the charges of racism, she said.

Minister of Trade and Labor Shalom Simchon praised the ruling. The ruling sends a clear message to employers that the government will not tolerate racism, he said.

“We see absorbing Arab employees in the workplace as being of utmost importance,” he said. “We will continue to work to prevent discrimination against them.”
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By Joseph Farah
© 2011 WorldNetDaily.com

Over the last quarter century, the Hispanic population of the United States has exploded. Immigration laws have been ignored. The huge border separating the U.S. and Mexico is virtually unpatrolled. And the illegal population of recent immigrants has been offered a series of amnesties forgiving past trespasses. Some within that community – and it is certainly a small minority of the population – are resentful about life in America. Some are even promoting the idea of creating a separate Spanish-speaking state of Aztlan in the southwestern United States.

All this raises an obvious question: If life in America is so bad for Spanish-speaking immigrants, why do they continue to flock to the United States?

Why do I ask this question today? Not because I am writing about immigration in America, but because I want to make a point about immigration in the Middle East.

Conventional wisdom suggests a huge Arab population was displaced by the creation of Israel in 1948. It suggests the remaining Arab population in Israel has been mistreated. And it further suggests the solution to this problem is the creation of an Arab Palestinian state on Israeli land.

There are several glaring misconceptions in this view:

• The Arab population displaced by the 1948 war has been greatly exaggerated. The actual figure is no more than 500,000. Even more important is the cause of that displacement. The 1948 war was declared against Israel by all of its Arab neighbors. The refugees left Israel at the urging of those Arab states. They were told to leave because their homeland was about to be liberated by Arab forces. Of course, we all know Israel survived. Who is morally and legally culpable for creating those refugees? I would suggest it is the Arab states, not Israel.
• 
  
• Far from being mistreated, the Arab population in Israel and in the territories administered by Israel has been freer than the population in any Arab state. Arabs in Israel vote. They elect leaders to the Knesset. They have their own political parties. They have their own newspapers. They have full rights to citizenship. They are free to speak their minds. As an Arab-American journalist who has spent a good deal of time covering the region, I can tell you there is more freedom for Arabs in Israel than in any Arab state.
• 
  
• Land cannot possibly be the contentious issue as the Arab and Muslim states in the region already have 800 times as much territory as Israel. The Arabs have 50 times the population of Israel. The Arabs have all of the oil reserves of the region. They have 21 states of their own – all varying shades of police states. It's difficult to imagine how one more will bring peace to a region that has known some of the most devastating and costly wars of the last century.

But, to top it all off, I seem to be the only observer asking pointed questions about the Arab-Israeli conflict: If conditions for Arabs are so bad in Israel, why is the Arab population exploding -- and I don't mean because of suicide bombers? Why do Arabs continue to flock to the tiny Jewish state from virtually every Arab and Muslim land in the world?

In 1949, the Arab population of Israel was about 160,000. Today, it is over 1.2 million.

This is hardly attributable to higher birth rates. Most of the growth in Arab population is due to migration. In other words, Arabs are picking up stakes in Arab lands and choosing to live in Israel.

This trend, of course, doesn't include Arab Jewish migration to Israel. No one talks about the staggering number of Arab Jewish refugees – as many as 1 million – who fled the Muslim world with little more than the clothes on their backs to reach the safety and security of the Jewish state in the last 50 years.

We're led to believe Arabs hate Israel – and, indeed, it's true there is an irrational, inexplicable form of virulent anti-Semitism growing in the Arab and Muslim world. But when they vote with their feet, Arabs seem to love Israel. They continue to choose it as a place to live over life in their native countries as they have for the last half-century.

I'dloveto hear one of the Arab nationalists explain this phenomenon.