White Nights: Africans Seek Asylum in Israel
After walking thousands of miles from their home countries into Egypt, thousands of Africans make yet another new journey. Disenchanted with their treatment in Egypt, they risk mortal danger to cross the armed border into Israel. They are smuggled over this frontier stretch, marked in parts by nothing more than a weak fence. Led by local Bedouins, they brave armed patrols, and sometimes gunfire from Egyptian border guards, to get...
more »White Nights: Africans Seek Asylum in Israel
After walking thousands of miles from their home countries into Egypt, thousands of Africans make yet another new journey. Disenchanted with their treatment in Egypt, they risk mortal danger to cross the armed border into Israel. They are smuggled over this frontier stretch, marked in parts by nothing more than a weak fence. Led by local Bedouins, they brave armed patrols, and sometimes gunfire from Egyptian border guards, to get across. Dozens of testimonies have been given in recent years by those who made the journey, about tortures, rapes and extortions carried out by their Bedouin smugglers in the Egyptian desert peninsula of Sinai.
It is estimated that some 60,000 men, women and children have managed to arrive in Israel since 2006. Alarmed by what it described as a near-doubling in the influx of Africans seeking work or claiming refugee status, Israel began erecting a fence along the frontier in 2010. As most of the new fence is already built in 2012, the numbers of those who make it across are dramatically decreasing.
They come from countries such as Sudan, Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Ghana and beyond. Some have troubling stories to tell about life in their homelands. Those who can prove they are refugees fleeing war or atrocities might be granted asylum and a chance for a new life. Yet most are absorbed in growing ghettoes of poverty and neglect.
The first newcomers in 2006, refugees fleeing genocide in Darfur, had raised the Israeli public attention. The Jewish history is a cause of the sparked internal debate, over the state’s moral obligation to provide shelter for such refugees. As many asylum-seekers are Muslim, another layer is added to the current test that the Jewish state faces. However, the rhetoric against their presence in Israel is becoming strident. African immigrants, collectively referred to as 'infiltrators' in official jargon, a term condemned by the US State Department, have been labelled 'a cancer in our body' by an Israeli lawmaker. The Prime Minister argues that the majority of new arrivals are economic migrants, not genuine asylum seekers. In addition he asserts that many Israelis see African immigrants as a law and order issue and worry about the viability of the Jewish State in the face of mass immigration.
On 2012, an Israeli court ruled that people from South Sudan could now return home safely since their country gained independence from the North in 2011.
The temporary papers granted to new arrivals state clearly that they are not allowed to work. Consequently, the poorer parts of Tel Aviv and other towns have seen an influx of thousands of intermittently employed young men who are blamed for an alleged sharp rise in crime in these areas.
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