Making history: After the raid

The Knesset delegation [Image Source]

Well, as you may already have read, the Bizchut surprise raid actually took place. (I foreshadowed this earlier - see "Institutionalization: Upping the activism ante".)

On December 18, 2018, fifteen Members of Knesset fanned out across Israel to visit twelve large closed institutions for people with disabilities. Each Knesset member was accompanied by an activist on behalf of equal rights for people with disabilities. 

And thus I believe I transitioned into a disability activist because, I'm sure you'll agree, blog and article writing just doesn't cut it. 

Nachman Shai (of the Labor Party) was the Knesset member with whom I was paired. Along with his aide, we were given a tour of Aleh Jerusalem, an institution housing 80 residents with disabilities ranging from moderate to severe. They live in rooms of 3-4 beds and spend all day every day in a five story building that is surrounded by auto garages and parking lots.

Our guide treated us to a relentless barrage of PR prattle, some of it identical to the material I have read on the Aleh website. For example:

"We encourage the parents to remain parents and they are free to visit their children at any time of the day or night. Even if the child is asleep - needless to say, I'd discourage a mother from waking her child...." 

But interspersed with the interminable prattle were some telling points.

• "Of the 80 residents, three are wards of the State." Only three!
• "Some of the parents gave up their children because of lack of sufficient surrounding support"!!
• "Some out of difficulty in organization."
• "Not all families are 'built' for it." 
• "We have a couple of staff members who are raising at home children with disabilities as severe as the residents. They fully understand the parents who place their children in Aleh."
• "We encourage parents to maintain ties with their children and to have 'family events'". 
• "We champion integration of the residents in the community. But since it's too difficult to take them out, we 'integrate by bringing the community into the institution.'"

I haven't had the time to transcribe all of the guide's hour long spiel.

Aleh Jerusalem [From the Aleh website]

In the meantime below are the comments that Yotam Tolub, Bizchut's Chief Executive. posted on our Whatsapp site on Tuesday after the raids:

"Today you tackled a super difficult task. To succeed in opening the eyes of a Knesset member encountering the issue for the first time and who came with unconscious stigmas of his own and to deal with not simple institutions some of them very misleading. And I believe that this entire group made history. There is no precedent in the State of Israel for activists to being Knesset members to see these closed places.There is no precedent for so much information about institutions to be revealed in one day. A mass of harsh testimonies and our job at Bizchut will be to share this with the world and little by little to create a crack in the wall."

And here is what Na'ama Lerner, Bizchut's Director of Community Outreach, posted:

"I sign off on every word that Yotam wrote. You see your success or lack of success in convincing or showing the specific Knesset member something specific. But let's look for a moment at the macro, the larger picture. What did we have today? 15 Knesset members, a truly large group by any criterion, which stopped its day for several hours to see how people with disabilities, on the periphery of Israeli society, live. To visit the most transparent, invisible people in the State of Israel. Fifteen Knesset members answered this call. This has never happened before!"

Here's the press coverage from Ynet's print edition and Ynet Television.