African Refugees II

Immigration in Israel: African outcasts in the promised land

As African refugees are put into camps and attacked by racist gangs, Donald Macintyre

reports from Tel Aviv

Donald Macintyre

Monday, 25 June 2012

Amine Zigta is not a timid man. If he was, he would not have risked his life by escaping

indefinite enforced army service in Eritrea, or making the hazardous journey through Sudan

and the Sinai desert to Israel. Nor would he have kept open his corner bar in south Tel

Aviv after 15 local hoodlums shouting "what do you care, you black son of a bitch?" broke

off table legs in March to assault him after he refused to serve teenagers below the legal

drinking age. "But now," Mr Zigta, 36, says in fluent Hebrew, "I am afraid, all the time. At

night I can't sleep. I am in danger."

Given subsequent events, his fears are understandable. On 23 May, with a demonstration

against African refugees planned for the evening, he locked up at around 4pm. Hours later,

residents phoned to say demonstrators were breaking in. Mr Zigta went to two police

stations for help and was still waiting at a third when he got another call to say a police

patrol had finally turned up. When he arrived, he found the plate glass windows smashed

by bricks, tables upturned and all his stock stolen by looters.

This month, a motorcyclist hurled a firecracker into the bar, injuring a customer. An

Eritrean woman working there was threatened by two men that "her stomach would be cut

open with knives", he says. "I have been to the police but they say they can't guard the

place 24 hours." Friendly local Israelis phone in warnings when trouble is afoot. "But then

they are told: why are you helping this man?"

Mr Zigta's experience is extreme. But otherwise he typifies the 60,000 African men and

women who have crossed the still-porous Egypt-Israel border since 2005. Many of the

more recent have braved kidnappings, torture and rape by their Bedouin traffickers. Of the

50,000 "infiltrators" (the official term has been condemned by the US State Department)

still here, Eritreans and Sudanese cannot be deported because the dangers at home

qualify them for "collective protection" under international conventions. A third group,

1,000 South Sudanese, are being deported after a court ruling that the new state is safe

to return to.

But with a suspended deportation order hanging over them, the remaining African asylumseekers are in legal limbo, unable to secure refugee status and therefore access to health

and social services. Their entry documents forbid work, and though Israel's Supreme Court

has ordered the state not to enforce this, the Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, says he intends

to find a way to do so. A new law permits detention of refugees for three years, and so

Israel is constructing a 12,400-place desert prison camp – along with tented facilities

across the country – "to house tens of thousands of infiltrators until they can be sent out

of the country", Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this month. The inmates will not

be allowed to work.

Until this month, when the government decided to keep new "infiltrators" in jail, refugees

have been detained and screened before "conditional" release. They generally say they

were humanely treated by the soldiers on arrival. It's after that that life got difficult.

The Independent