In Israel, a flood of seemingly Biblical proportions has led to ugly race riots by infuriated citizens and to legislation that threatens lengthy prison terms to anyone who assists "infiltrators." Early Monday morning, unknown attackers set fire in Jerusalem to an apartment housing Eritrean migrants. No one was killed, but spray painted on the wall was "get out of the neighbourhood."
Historically, many countries, Canada included, have gone to considerable lengths to prevent vehicles carrying refugees from landing in the first place. Last year, Italy and France pushed for military action against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi as much to ward off flotillas of refugees as to protect the Libyan people from the violence of their dictator.
As a country whose raison d’etre is to establish a safe homeland for the Jewish people, Israel is painfully aware of how boatloads of Jews escaping Nazism in Europe were turned away by countries in the West.
So when tens of thousands of people fleeing violence and poverty in countries of Northeast Africa find their way to Israel, mostly by infiltrating across the desert frontier from Sinai, Israelis face a dilemma. Do they admit the asylum-seekers and consider each one’s case, even though they arrived illegally? Does it matter that many arrived by paying Bedouin smugglers hefty sums to transport them and that many have reportedly been abused and some even killed?
Or do they deport them, even though may suffer by being returned? Do they lock them up?
There are some 60,000 illegal African immigrants in Israel, officials say; most have arrived in the past few years. The majority, about 35,000, are from Eritrea and Sudan and have been given collective protection from expulsion by the Israeli government. In the case of Eritreans, the United Nations has declared they must not be returned to their native country as their lives will be endangered by the current dictatorial regime. In the case of Sudanese, Israel realized that if they were returned to Sudan, a declared enemy of Israel, the people could be considered traitors and be imprisoned or executed.
Most of these people have been given renewable permits to live in Israel but have not been given the right to work nor the benefit of any social services other than schooling for their children.
These are the people who crowd together in cheap housing in South Tel Aviv, Eilat and Beersheva, many of them working illegally, usually in restaurants and hotels. The Benjamin Netanyahu government made it clear it will not enforce the ban on working, knowing the people have no other way to survive.
Along with them are another 25,000 Africans from countries such as Ethiopia and South Sudan, countries with which Israel has diplomatic relations and whose lives would not likely be at risk if returned. These people too have sought asylum and Israel has, to date, assigned few case officers to consider their claims. Many, but far from a majority, have been placed in holding tanks in southern-most Israel. The rest also can be found in the tenements of South Tel Aviv and elsewhere.
And that’s where Israel’s cultural crisis is most acute. Israelis who encounter the visible minority spilling into local parks and crowding round the bus station have become restive, uncomfortable both with the migrants’ restlessness and their not being Jews. With few exceptions, Israel offers legal status only to Jews and to those, such as Arabs, who lived (or whose ancestors lived) in Israel when the state was born.
At a time of economic stress and with great demands being made on the country’s housing and health facilities, can Israel afford the addition of so many needy people, especially since they’re not Jews, people demand.
After months of unease this gathering tinder was set alight recently when a young Jewish woman was raped in Tel Aviv, allegedly by a group of African refugees. Riots erupted in the neighbourhood, which had seen a large increase in the African population, and Israelis demanded the asylum-seekers be removed.
What followed was the spread of demonstrations and violent protests against all African infiltrators, with participants often joined and egged on by right-wing politicians.
"The Sudanese are a cancer in our body," Likud member of parliament Miri Regev told a veritable mob of hundreds of Tel Aviv protesters recently. "We will do everything to send them back where they came from."
The outcry against such a damning statement, reminiscent of Nazi denunciation of Jews, provoked Ms. Regev to apologize, but not to the Africans whom she attacked but to cancer patients who might have taken umbrage and to Holocaust survivors who may have felt aggrieved at the comparison.
Ms. Regev’s and other politicians’ rhetoric that night had immediate effect. The crowd proceeded to smash windows and loot stores; they beat up Sudanese people they encountered, threw firecrackers at police horses and chased activists and journalists.
"The people want to expel the Sudanese," they shouted.
By way of trying to explain the public’s growing concerns over African migrants, some Israeli media quoted an unnamed police official saying "asylum-seekers are involved in some 40 per cent of the crimes committed in the Tel Aviv area." The notion went viral.
Days later, Gilad Natan of the Knesset's Research and Information Center had checked the statistics. Less than 1 per cent of criminal files opened by police in Tel Aviv in 2010 were against Africans. And, last year, nationwide, slightly more than half of 1 per cent of criminal court cases or extensions of remand were against foreigners of any description.
The damage was done, however, and the reverberations still are being felt. On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered that the deportation of the 25,000 asylum seekers from Ethiopia and South Sudan be expedited and that holding facilities for the 35,000 other African migrants currently in South Tel Aviv and elsewhere be built in the Negev desert as quickly as possible.
Also on Sunday, members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs committee toured the border with Egypt to see the progress made in constructing a massive barrier from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. It will not be sufficient commented Arieh Eldad, a member of the very right wing National Union party. "As long as the IDF [Israel Defence Force] does not receive new instructions to shoot whoever goes near the fence, infiltrators will continue to enter Israel," he said.
Source: the globe and mail
Author: Patrick Martin
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