A 25-year-old British Jewish man who recently moved to Israel to make aliyah was deported from the country for what he claims is a punishment for anti-government activism.
Leo Franks, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, entered the country on a tourist visa in April and moved in with his Israeli girlfriend, beginning the process of applying for citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return which guarantees citizenship to Jews from around the world, as long as they have at least one Jewish grandparent.
As Franks told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the problems began shortly after he attended a demonstration in the West Bank and an anti-government rally in Jerusalem, where he was arrested by Israeli police. He sees his expulsion from Israel – and the revocation of his right to make aliyah – as punishment for his left-wing activism by Israel’s Ministry of Interior, the government department in charge of citizenship and immigration.
“The story here is that the courts have given the Ministry of Interior free rein to make decisions about who can be a Jew in Israel on the basis of his politics,” Franks said in an interview with JTA.
After his arrest, Frank’s citizenship application was closed without comment and Franks was given orders to leave the country by Sunday. And while the Ministry of Interior has not responded to queries about the reason for Franks’ sudden expulsion, he and his attorney Ira Rozina believe it is likely to be correlated to his political activism.
“It’s clear the police want these activists to leave the country, and that was the end result of the ministry’s actions,” Rozina told JTA.
“This is a person with a right to make aliyah. To prevent someone from exercising that basic right should require a very significant justification.”
Rozina added that she had never heard of a case like this and called the outcome “surprising and alarming.”
Israel’s Law of Return only denies citizenship to Jews under several specific conditions, such as if an applicant is deemed a direct threat to Israel’s security or has a past criminal record.
London-born Franks, who briefly lived in Israel with his family as a child, said he is not affiliated with any activist group, though he participated in an anti-settlement movement in the West Bank. Even so, there are no known instances of Jews being denied aliyah on the basis of their political views.
But far-right lawmakers in Israel have been keen to clamp down on anti-settlement activism in recent months, deeming it an attempt to delegitimise Israeli sovereignty.
Omri Metzer, the executive director of Human Rights Defenders Fund, which provides legal aid to Israeli and international activists who support Palestinians in the West Bank, told JTA: “The desire to throw out activists is well known.”
“It’s not completely clear what measures are being taken to get them out, but it doesn’t matter because the reality is that the activists who defend human rights are operating under the threat of deportation,” he said.
According to JTA, Franks was arrested in May as he was leaving a protest led by the families of the Israeli hostages against Israel’s decision to invade Rafah. The charge – that Franks had assaulted a police officer – was reportedly quickly dropped, and Franks claims to have instead been the victim of police brutality.
In June, Franks said he was briefly detained by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank for refusing to show his passport while volunteering to escort Palestinian shepherds to deter Israeli settlers from attacking them. While he was not charged, his passport was confiscated and, when he needed it for his scheduled appointment with the Interior Ministry on 10 July as part of his immigration process, the police refused to release it until the following day.
When Franks returned to the immigration office several days later, he was taken in for a brief questioning. The document Franks received afterwards declared him as “uncooperative” and found that “his passport had been confiscated by police because of crimes committed against the security forces” of Israel.
Despite such allegations Franks does not face any criminal charges and has not been convicted of any crime.
The document concluded that “The applicant must leave the country within seven days of this letter or face action by law enforcement.”
“I froze and kind of teetered on my heels,” Franks told JTA. “It just felt like the room was spinning and like I had been winded, like the breath had been vacuumed out of me. What really just smacked the breath out of me was the demand that I leave the country within a week. It felt like my entire world had crumbled.”
Despite his hope that his lawyer would be able to help him fight the judgement, the Interior Ministry ultimately defended its actions, arguing that it had never received Franks’ application for aliyah.
While the ministry responded to an enquiry from JTA saying Franks is welcome to apply again from his home country, he said he is too disheartened to do so now.
“I am just heartbroken,” he said. “The partner whom I had moved in with and intended to spend the rest of my life with, whom I had to break up with because of the denial of aliyah and order to leave, gave me back my tefillin, which I had left at her house, yesterday. Very bitter and tragic symbolism.”
Franks declined to comment for the JC.
