 |
 |
|
| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Letters From |
|
|
Israel |
Losing Faith
|
| African refugees in Israel face persecution and little solace |
|
Published : 1 February 2012 |
| |
|
|
OREN ZIV / ISRAEL OUT / AFP PHOTO |
|
| African refugees take to the streets in 2010 to demonstrate against plans to build a detention camp to house refugees who have flocked
to Israel. Israel refuses to process requests for asylum for the roughly 35,000 African refugees in the country.
|
|
|
|
| W |
HEN I PUT MY SILVER DIGITAL RECORDER on the table, Kidane Isaac, an Eritrean refugee, eyes it and shifts in his chair. He angles his broken straw fedora downwards, tipping the rim lower, as though to cover his face. |
The hat, which has a black band and a hole in the top—bits of straw unravelling, sticking this way and that—doesn’t suit the red, white and blue windbreaker Isaac wears. It’s also a poor choice for the weather. It’s a wintry day in Israel and the stylish summer hat is ineffective against the cold.
Not to mention that the fedora seems out of place here, at a coffee kiosk in South Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station. The surrounding neighbourhoods, the poorest in the city, are home to a large population of foreign workers and African refugees as well as a handful of Palestinian collaborators. While some migrant labourers make enough to send remittances home to their families, most African refugees are barely hanging on to the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Some have fallen off completely—homeless, they live in the parks near the Central Bus Station.
When he opens up to me later—sliding his fedora back on his head, leaning forward, putting his elbows on the table—I’ll learn that Isaac, 25, isn’t homeless. But he is unemployed. Too proud to use the word, he says, “I’m taking a break.”
Jobs are scarce for Israel’s roughly 35,000 African refugees. The state does not provide work visas for them so they are forced to enter the black market, where they face exploitation. Because of increasing racism, refugees sometimes have a hard time finding work. Even if they can scrape together the money to rent an apartment, some Jewish landlords refuse to rent to foreigners.
Nor does Israel process their requests for asylum—a “policy of non-policy” that has been sharply criticised by human rights organisations, including Amnesty International. But, because Israel does not deport Sudanese and Eritreans to their home countries—as it does undocumented migrant workers—it tacitly admits that they are refugees.
Isaac left Eritrea five years ago, he explains, because his mandatory military service consisted of construction work, a situation he likens to “forced labour”.
“They don’t pay you, you don’t get to see your family,” Isaac, one of nine children, says. “I felt like I wasn’t a citizen in my own country, you know what I mean?”
According to the United States Department of State, military duty in Eritrea is “effectively open-ended” and human rights violations run the gamut from abuse and torture of prisoners and army defectors to “arbitrary arrest and detention” to “unlawful killings by security forces”. Civil rights are severely restricted, as is freedom of movement.
So in 2007, Isaac left. He fled to Sudan, where he lived in a refugee camp close to the Eritrean border. Because the security cooperation between the two countries made Isaac feel unsafe, he moved on to Libya where he spent more than three years “living in the hands of the smugglers”.
While he tried several times to cross the Mediterranean and reach Italy, Isaac recalls, he was passed from smuggler to smuggler. It’s the typical experience of African refugees in Libya, he explains, nonchalantly. “Or you might get put in jail and then you pay a lot [to get out]. There’s a lot of bribery and corruption in Libya.”
In 2010, he abandoned any hope of reaching Europe and, because he understood Israel to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”, he set his sights on Tel Aviv.
He adds, however, that when he left Eritrea, he had “no intention or inclination to go to Israel. At all, at all”.
He’d heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “all the problems and the Israeli Army. After what I’ve been through in Eritrea,” he says, throwing up his hands, “Khallas,” Arabic for enough.
“I wanted a place I could go and live peacefully,” he adds. “That’s why I preferred to spend all those years in Libya, trying to reach Europe.”
Isaac says he has been shocked by the conditions African refugees face here. “It doesn’t have any proper policy for us. [Refugees] are not allowed to do anything. I would say it would be better for [us] in prison.”
Jail, he explains, would be more honest than the current situation, which he calls a “trick”.
“Because then [the Israeli government] can say, ‘Oh, you’re free and you’re working and you’re living and, okay, we have African migrant workers here.’”
I think of the detention facility the state is building in the south of Israel to house African refugees caught entering the country. I consider the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were dispossessed when Israel landed upon them. I think of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Checkpoints. Home demolitions. Political prisoners.
I think of what the Jews have themselves suffered and the biblical command to care for the strangers among us.
“Do you believe in God?” I ask Isaac.
Isaac angles his hat, which I have come to see as a small act of rebellion to circumstance. “Yes, I do,” he answers.
“Even after all this?”
“Religion, I don’t believe in religion. It’s just a drop, some sort of organisation ... But I believe in some superpower or whatever.”
Since the state of Israel was established in 1948, it has granted recognised status to fewer than 200 refugees.
Instead of reviewing the cases of African asylum seekers, the Israeli government calls them a faceless mass, “infiltrators”. It’s a word preferred by politicians, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also claims that Africans are a “threat” to the “character of the country”, our “Jewish and democratic” state.
On 9 January, just a week after I interviewed Isaac, the Israeli Knesset passed a parliamentary bill that modifies the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law. Initially created to keep Palestinians from returning to their homes in Israel after the 1948 war, the updated legislation will subject African refugees and their children to three years in jail, without trial. Those from “enemy countries”, including the Darfur region of Sudan, could be imprisoned indefinitely.
But, even before this legislative change, Africans caught entering Israel via its porous southern border with Egypt already faced jail time. Sunday Dieng, a 26-year-old refugee from what is now South Sudan, was held in an Israeli prison for 14 months in 2006 and 2007.
When I ask about the conditions and whether or not he received adequate food, Dieng looks down at the coffee I’ve bought him and gives a polite smile. The gesture matches his slightly formal dress. He wears a starched shirt with a stiff collar. His brown sweater is zipped up. A tiny Mercedes pendant hangs from the tab.
“Yeah, food was no problem,” he says, still looking at his cup. “But, you know, to live in jail for one year and two months for no reason, even though you have food and everything—it’s terrible. It’s very difficult.”
He looks up at me and flashes his teeth to make me, or himself, feel better, perhaps.
“It causes damage to the [mind], because you know you didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t do any crime.” Dieng, who was not charged with a crime, was held without trial.
He forces another smile before he goes back to the beginning, to 1993.
Dieng was 12 when his village was bombed and soldiers from northern Sudan killed his parents, before his eyes. He and his eldest brother fled, eventually making their way to Ethiopia. But Dieng had his heart set on studying. The refugee camps lacked “proper facilities”, he says, so he went on to Egypt alone.
Because he didn’t feel safe there, he eventually continued on to Israel, making his way through the Sinai on foot until he reached the border.
Speaking of Israel’s unwillingness to process requests for asylum and the refugees’ inability to support themselves financially, Dieng remarks, “How can you let someone into your house if you don’t want to give him food, if you don’t want to give him a place to sleep? This is like killing him in a political way.”
With contributions from Yohannes Lemma Bayu, founder and director of the African Refugee Development Center.
Mya Guarnieri is a Tel Aviv-based journalist and writer whose work has appeared in dozens of international outlets.
| | | |
| |
|
|
|
|
Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
|
|
si91
29 February 2012
02:41 AM
|
|
This article is disgustingly biased against Israel. Refugees that come to Israel do suffer racism, but the same could be said for the US, the UK, and even India itself, where immigrants from different parts of India are treated with xenophobic contempt. Israel is indeed the only democracy in the Middle East, unlike the countries that these refugees fled from, that regularly massacre and oppress their own citizens. No state in the Middle East gives its citizens anywhere near the number of rights and freedoms that Israel gives its people. The article acts as though Israel has some kind of an obligation to house these refugees. Their plight is dire, I admit, but why should Israel, which has nothing at all to do with the dysfunctional nature of the Arab and African regimes, be forced to clean up their mess? Is Israel some kind of trash can for dictatorships to dump citizens refuse to play along with their rulers' kleptocratic megalomania? It is hardly surprising, for instance, that Israel would declare Sudan an "enemy country." Sudan refuses to recognize Israel. Israel does, in fact, have excellent relations with South Sudan, which wisely recognized Israel following its own recent independence from Sudan.
Perhaps the biggest lie in this whole piece is that Israel has only granted recognized status to less than 200 refugees. In reality, Israel absorbed HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Jewish refugees from all over the Middle East, who were kicked out of their home countries when the genocidal war launched by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, against Israel in 1948 failed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries#Jewish_refugee_absorption
The Arab states refuse to absorb their Palestinian refugees, despite their condition having been created by an ARAB war of aggression; many Arabs fled Palestine because the leaders of the Arab states told them to, so they could destroy Israel unimpeded, and some fled simply to avoid being caught between to armies. But of course, the article doesn't mention this, and only talks about those Arabs who were forcefully expelled, not even mentioning that this would not have happened had the Arab aggressors let Israel live in peace. Indeed, mentioning this in an article that has nothing to do with Arabs at all, is merely a clumsy attempt to equate these African refugees with Palestinians, as though their refugee status is somehow ISRAEL'S fault. Though the article mentions that Israel is preventing Palestinian "refugees" (most of whom are descended from the original refugees, and therefore not refugees at all) from returning to their ancestor's homes, why doesn't it mention the Arab refugees that Israel DID allow to return, provided they gave up violence and swore to be peaceful, productive citizens? Why doesn't it point out that these Arabs have more rights and freedoms than Arabs have any ANY Arab state?
The Israeli blockade of Gaza is similarly irrelevant, though the author, as usual, ignores the fact that it was only instituted AFTER Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip and launched thousands of rockets into Israeli towns. There would be no blockade if Hamas allowed Israel to live in peace, but its Charter is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Israel "occupied" the West Bank and Golan in a war of self defence, the Six Day War, where it launched a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian Air Force, in response to President Nasser's massive troop buildup along the Egypt-Israel border, his blockade on the strategic port of Eilat, his violation of Israeli airspace, and his removal of UN peacekeeping forces from Egypt (to prevent them from being killed in the ensuing war) all of which were causus belli for a war. After winning, Israel offered to give these territories back in exchange for peace but the Arab states responded with the Khartoum Declaration, famous for its three no's: No recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. Israel holds them because a withdrawal would result in the Arabs having a free hand to attack Israel. That is exactly what Hamas did when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Israel needs checkpoints to make sure Arab suicide bombers, who have a nasty habit of blowing up pizza parlors, nightclubs, and buses, can't get in to Israel. It demolishes houses because terrorists use them to launch rockets at Israel. It keeps political prisoners because these individuals have been caught trying to commit terrorist attacks against Israel. The author shows a complete lack of concern for Israel's security needs.
Israel, in contrast to its Arab neighbors, fully integrated its Jewish refugees into its society and now more than half of Israel's population is descended from them. And that was only the refugees absorbed in the 1940s and 50s. To this day, Israel absorbs persecuted Jews and Christians from all over the world. The Bahai global headquarters is in Haifa, Israel because adherents of the Bahai religion are considered heretics in Iran, where the religion was born, and are persecuted there and everywhere else in the Middle East. Israeli Druze citizens, despite being non-Jewish, are proud citizens of Israel; they are the only non Jewish people drafted into the Israeli Defence Force, and have attained high social and political standing. Rather than complain about Israel, the author really ought to focus on the Arab and African states that brutalize their own citizens and make them refugees in the first place.
|
|
|
|
Doug
22 February 2012
04:54 AM
|
|
Dispiriting reading, and I have no special brief for Israel, but doesn't it rather beg the question of what reasonably should and could be done with refugees, especially given the enormity of the problem, and especially when a very small country is the place of refuge?
|
|
|
|
TheLastStraw
20 February 2012
01:14 PM
|
|
Why is it that the media always covers immigration and refugee stories from the immigrant/refugee's point of view and never from the government's point of view?
It makes it look as if the government and the local people are evil and whatnot, conveniently ignoring the problems that unchecked immigration brings to the parent country. Please cover both sides of the story.
|
|
|
|
| 1 |
|