Legal Statutes of Arab Refugees

The recently developed particle filter offers a general numerical tool to approximate the state a posteriori density in nonlinear and non-Gaussian filtering problems with arbitrary accuracy. Because the particle filter is fairly easy to implement and tune, it has quickly become a popular tool in signal processing applications. Its main drawback is that it is quite computer intensive. For a given filtering accuracy, the computational complexity increases quickly with the state dimension. One remedy to this problem is what in statistics is called Rao-Blackwellization, where states appearing linearly in the dynamics are marginalized out. This leads to that a Kalman filter is attached to each particle. Our main contribution here is to sort out when marginalization is possible for state space models, and to point out the implications in some typical signal processing applications. The methodology and impact in practice is illustrated on terrain navigation for aircrafts. The marginalized particle filter for a state-space model with nine states is evaluated on real aircraft data, and the result is that very good accuracy is achieved with quite reasonable complexity

Israel's violation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination with regard to asylum seekers and refugees in Israel

This report is in response to the 14th, 15th and 16th periodic reports of the State of Israel to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).This report demonstrates that Israel continues to ignore its international obligations towards asylum seekers and refugees which are predominately from sub-Sahara Africa. Various Israeli laws, policies and practices are racially discriminatory at their basis against this vulnerable population. For instance, Israel maintains a harsh policy of detention, tolerates segregation in the education system in Eilat and allocates temporary group protection to over 90 percent of the asylum seekers who arrive to Israel. As a result, asylum seekers live in constant fear of being returned to their countries of origin to face further persecution.The root of this discrimination stems from the tension created by Israel's sensitive political demographic status as a Jewish state. Several of Israel's high-ranking politicians have demonstrated an apparent lack of commitment in protecting the human rights of asylum seekers and eliminating racial discrimination. Their racially discriminatory and inciteful language, wholly adopted by the media, is at least partially responsible for generating the community-wide backlash against the asylum seekers that is documented in this report.This report is supplemented by a video report which provides visual documentation of the rising tide of hatred, fueled not only by certain Members of the Knesset but also by the Israeli community, and additional material not included in the written report. Whilst copies of the video have been provided to CERD, it can be viewed by members of the public at http://www.ardc-israel.org/en/articles/83. In closing ARDC offers recommendations where Israel could make advances in meeting its obligations under CERD.The report has been prepared with significant contribution by David Sheen, a journalist who has reported from Israel since 1999. In his work as a journalist, Sheen has extensively documented racial discrimination against many sectors in the Israeli community and particularly against the non-Jewish African asylum seekers. Together ARDC and Sheen are able to cite an extensive body of evidence to demonstrate that the Government of Israel has failed to meet its obligations under CERD with respect to this community. Additionally, our response to Articles 5(d) and 5(e)(v) regarding detention of unaccompanied minors and the segregation in the education system in Eilat were written with contributions from our partner organization Assaf -- Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel

Belonging and ‘unbelonging’ : Jewish refugee and survivor women in 1950s Britain

This article analyses the life stories of female Jewish refugees and survivors in 1950s Britain in order to explore their relationship with the existing Jewish community and wider society. The paper is based on an analysis of twenty-one oral history testimonies from the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust collection held at the British library. Around 50,000 Jewish refugees from Central Europe came to Britain in the 1930s after fleeing from Hitler. In addition, a relatively small number of camp survivors and former hidden children settled in the country after the war; the Board of Deputies of British Jews Demographic Unit estimates the figure at 2000. This article considers how these refugee and survivor women tried to find a place for themselves within 1950s Britain. Looking at their experiences of arrival, work and home, it reflects upon the discrimination and hostility they faced, and they ways they tried to deal with this. Finally it discusses what this meant for their sense of belonging or ‘unbelonging’

You must all be Interned : Identity Among Internees in Great Britain during World War II

Between 1933 and 1940, the United States, Great Britain and most other developed nations saw an influx of German refugees entering their borders attempting to be free of the tyranny of Hitler’s National Socialism. Many of those fleeing from Germany were intellectuals: authors, teachers, artists, or thinkers who faced persecution in their homeland. For the men, women, and children who chose the British Isles as their new home, Great Britain symbolized hope for a life free from persecution. By 1941, however, many refugees from Germany found themselves arrested and put into camps, not by the Nazis, but by their protectors, the British

Palestine, Apartheid, and the Rights Discourse

Since the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the oft-made analogy between the South African and Israeli cases has been extended to suggest the applicability to the Palestinian quest for justice through the rights discourse, arguably the most effective mobilizing tool in the anti-apartheid struggle. This essay explores the suitability of the rights approach by examining the South Africa-Israel analogy itself and the relevance of the anti-apartheid model to the three main components of the Palestinian situation: the refugees, the Palestinians of the occupied territories, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It concludes that while the rights discourse has many advantages, it cannot by its very nature -- the focus on law at the expense of historical context -- address the complexity of the Palestinian problem