لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
How Israel's policy toward African asylum-seekers transformed it from a land of refuge into a land of deportation.
Last month, Israel’s government initiated a sweeping new effort to expel tens of thousands of unwanted African asylum-seekers. Officials offered them a choice: indefinite detention in Israel or a one-way ticket to an unnamed third country — most likely Rwanda or Uganda.
The first seven men swept up as a result of the new policy chose prison. Now many of the roughly 34,000 asylum-seekers in Israel will face the same difficult choice as the government aims to force most of them out by the end of March.
“It’s a very worrying situation,” said Taj Haroun, who fled Sudan during the genocide in Darfur and has been living in Israel for a decade. “Almost every individual here is afraid. We live in this uncertainty. We’re not sure what will happen to us.”
For years, the Israeli government has conducted a shadowy program to rid itself of asylum-seekers from Eritrea and Sudan — a process guided by secret deals with African governments that agree to take in the asylum-seekers, only to discard them illegally in third countries, including war zones like South Sudan.
Now Israel appears to be ramping up that clandestine program. In the past, asylum-seekers were deported in small groups; now, the Israeli government is looking to kick out thousands in just a few months. And whereas the earlier program was at least ostensibly voluntary, Israel is now offering the asylum-seekers only one alternative to deportation: detention with no known end date or guarantee of asylum.
Human rights groups have long insisted that Israel’s policy violates international law. They say the latest iteration adds another breach, this time by ignoring a recommendation from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the use of detention as a last resort.
African asylum-seekers first began entering Israel in large numbers in the mid-2000s. The bulk of the arrivals were from Eritrea, a country with a policy of forced military conscription that U.N. observers have compared to slavery. Others came from Sudan, many of them, like Haroun, survivors of the genocide in Darfur. Most made their way into Israel by crossing the Sinai desert, where they ran the risk of being caught and tortured by human traffickers or shot by Egyptian border guards.
Israel officially sealed its border with Egypt in 2013, after almost 65,000 foreign nationals had entered the country, according to the Israeli Ministry of Interior. By then, the campaign to expel them was already well underway.
As the numbers increased, Israelis living near asylum-seekers and politicians courting votes in those areas began to make largely unfounded complaints that the asylum-seekers were committing crimes, robbing locals of jobs, and destabilizing the neighborhoods where they settled. The subtext of these allegations was a fear that their presence would transform Israel into a less Jewish state.
In a February speech, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said that without the fence on the Egyptian border, “We would be seeing here a kind of creeping conquest from Africa.” Shaked, a member of the Jewish Home party, has long pushed an unapologetically nationalist agenda which includes settlement expansion, annexation of the West Bank, and aggressive moves to ensure that Israel retains a Jewish majority.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has adopted some of Shaked’s positions and has made it virtually impossible for African asylum-seekers to actually receive asylum. Since 2009, Israel has granted refugee status to just one Sudanese and 10 Eritreans, recording an acceptance rate within those communities of less than 1 percent, according to UNHCR.
