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.
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