Vol. 81/No. 47 December 18, 2017
Tel Aviv pushes African refugees to leave
From 2006 to 2013 some 36,000 Eritreans and 15,000 Sudanese entered Israel by crossing Egypt’s Sinai desert, fleeing brutal regimes and harsh conditions in their home countries. They headed to Israel, which they viewed as the most democratic country in the region, with the best chance of jobs and advancement.
Tel Aviv responded by building a border wall, completed in 2013, stopping further entry. Because of the political cost the government would pay if it forcibly deported the refugees — and a Supreme Court ruling saying it would be illegal — Tel Aviv is pushing them to “self-deport.”
Unmarried male refugees have often been forced into the so-called open detention center at Holot in the Negev Desert for up to a year. They have to be present for roll call three times a day.
The combination of threats, detention and offers of $3,500 cash have convinced 15,000 refugees to leave, including 2,100 in the first six months this year. Several thousand obtained visas to go to Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden or the United States. A number had been going to Rwanda, but that has slowed to a trickle after reports that few who arrived there were granted legal status. Most fled the country.
On May 1 Tel Aviv began requiring employers to deduct 20 percent of refugees’ pay and put it into a special account that can only be accessed if they leave the country. Employers were also required to pay another 16 percent on top of wages into the fund.
Thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese refugees protested in Tel Aviv June 10, chanting, “We are refugees — not slaves!” They were joined by Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel.
“This is wage theft and that made it easy for us to object and join the protests,” Shay Cohen, a leader of the Koach L’Ovdim union federation, which backed the action, told the Militant by phone Dec. 3. “The government is openly trying to increase their economic difficulties.”
The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is now considering a bill that would allow the government to jail asylum-seekers indefinitely if they travel outside assigned regions in Israel or refuse to move to Rwanda or Uganda. The bill is backed by opposition Labor Party leader Avi Gabby.
But Zouheir Bahloul, the Labor Party’s only Arab member of the Knesset, protested. “We need to get rid of this bill and allow the 40,000 refugees to be integrated by spreading them around the country,” he said.
Eritrean refugee Thomas Yohannes, 29, who has been in Israel for seven years, “going to the office to renew my temporary visa every two months,” was told he had to go to Holot. “They gave no reason,” he said in a Dec. 2 interview from Holot.
He had been working in a supermarket in Ramla, Israel. “I had Jewish and Arab Christian coworkers,” Yohannes said. “They would ask me why I came to Israel. ”
“My coworkers told me, don’t go to Rwanda,” Yohannes said. “They will take your money and kill you.”
“If we had freedom to form political parties, to have demonstrations in Eritrea, why would we come here?” added fellow Holot detainee Tesfa-gi Afgodom.
Anti-refugee groups claim Africans cause high crime rates in South Tel Aviv, where thousands of refugees live. “We are here on a mission to give back south Tel Aviv to the Israeli residents,” Netanyahu said there Aug. 31. The Africans are not refugees, he said, but “illegal aliens.”
“I am not a criminal. I am a mother trying to protect her children and give them a good life,” Shukriyya, from Sudan, who has three Israeli-born children, told the Jerusalem Post. “I was told Israel was a country that had humanity and accepted people who are persecuted.”
The anti-refugee moves don’t have wide popularity. Moran Mekamel, founder of the Negev Refugee Center, has been organizing “high school, college students and any other groups that are willing to hear what the refugees have to say” to go to Holot to talk with detainees.
“We’ve brought hundreds of people,” she told the Militant. “They see the big gap between what the media and the politicians say and then the reality.”
Related articles:
Thousands protest in DC for ‘No deportations!’
NY protest hits slave auctions, abuse of migrants in Africa
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