Six years ago this
week, my wife Marlen Ismalon took our six-year old son, Mathew
Ismalon-Nagy, to Israel for a two-month visit combining personal and
professional interests. Within two months it became apparent that she
had no intention of returning to the United States. In July 2007, I
filed a petition for my son’s return under the Hague Convention
Regarding Internationally Abducted Children.
At the Office of
Childrens Issues of the United States Department of State,
indifference and incompetent communication was followed by cover-up
and complicity with Israel in keeping children within the State of
Israel in defiance with the Hague Convention Treaty. Israeli
agencies, including its equivalent Office responsible for adhering to
Hague Convention Guidelines, openly violate The Hague Convention
Treaty. This has been my experience with both our State Department
Office and communications directly with State of Israel employees in
various offices.
In October 2010,
after three years of failed communications with both offices, I filed
two Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests. One was for a
complete copy of my own case file; the second was for statistics
regarding the number of similar cases of a child or children taken to
Israel whose left behind parent filed a Hague Convention petition for
return, with outcomes. Neither request was ever fulfilled, in spite
of federal regulations in United States Code defining a requirement
that each request is to be answered within thirty days, or “twenty
business days.” This lack of follow-through is consistent with all
that led up to filing those requests: a complete black-out of
information regarding communications between Washington’s Office of
Childrens issues and Israel’s equivalent office regarding my
petition. The blackout merely continued at a higher level involving
the entire Office of Childrens Issues, if not the highest levels of
the State Department.
At the very center
of this case is the fact that all communications with my son were
severed in 2007. Open communication, or “Access,” between a “left
behind” parent and an abducted child or children is a central
commitment to all parties to The Hague Convention Treaty. This same
commitment to access and communication is written into Israeli Penal
Code. Violation of this tenet is called “stealing a child” in
translations of the Israeli Penal Code, and is a felony. Many people
in positions of authority in Israel have been provided irrefutable
evidence that this continual violation of The Hague Convention Treaty
and Isreali penal Code is a constant; not one has taken a step
to correct this grievous circumstance. Instead, persons in both the
United States and Israel in positions of authority to take
appropriate action do the opposite: they actively perpetuate the
violation of laws.
This experience
teaches one that all parents who are “left behind” in the United
States ought to know as soon as it becomes necessary to file a
petition under The Hague Convention: the Office of Childrens issues
within the State Department is thoroughly corrupt. And, relevant to
cases involving children detained within Israel, that office serves
not the interests of left behind parents, but instead the
axiom spoken succinctly by Israel’s Deputy Consul to the United
States based in San Francisco, Ismail Khaldi: “We need soldiers.”
My personal
commitment is to peace, not war. It is to helping others, and finding
common ground by which to live in harmony with others who are
different in culture and beliefs. My beliefs and personal
commitments, then, conflict severely with a culture of war and
exclusive privilege that Israel represents in the Middle East and
elsewhere in the world. Hence, it is obvious why the State of Israel
endorses and actively participates in this continual condition that
precludes communication between Mathew and me, between a son and his
father. I do not want my son to become the soldier that the State of
Israel intends for him to become in six years, and is actively
indoctrinating him to become. I do not want Mathew to learn hate or
contempt for those who are different, or outside an exclusive group
to which the State of Israel is presently teaching him that he
belongs.
To be continued …
