Israelis Split Over Looming Deportation of African Migrants

Jerusalem, 3 February, 2018 (TPS) -- On one of the outer walls of Tel Aviv’s central bus station is a simple graffiti inscription undoubtedly aimed at the thousands of African immigrants who have moved into the area neighborhood in the last decade. “Charity Begins at Home,” the inscription reads.

A few blocks away, another building is inscribed with a very different message: “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt – Deuteronomy 10:19.”

The two statements neatly encapsulate the raging argument that has been tearing into Israeli society in recent months over the deportations of African migrants, many of who call the Shapira neighborhood adjacent to the central bus station their home, that are scheduled to commence in the coming weeks. Some locals see the foreigners as victims who turned to Israel at a time of personal need and must be afforded asylum and hospitality. Others say they are a menace that have turned already problematic neighborhoods into full-blown slums.

Shapira, built as a blue collar neighborhood in 1930s, has suffered from neglect for decades. The sudden and massive influx of African migrants a decade ago pushed the neighborhood, which was already plagued with poverty, crime and drugs, over the edge.

“My mother can’t leave her home unless I come and get her,” says Gabi, a resident of Shapira. “The stairwells are full of infiltrators. About 20 of them live in each apartment. They get drunk here, they do drugs and no one feels safe.”  

Today, nearly 44,000 people live in south Tel Aviv, nearly one-third of whom are African migrants. The combination of an existing population, already in a low socioeconomic bracket, along with a population of migrants and refugees, coupled with the ongoing municipal neglect of Shapira, has resulted in a neighborhood on the brink of a humanitarian crisis.

“This is Israel?!”, rhetorts Chen, another Israeli resident of Shapira. “This isn’t Israel. This is Sudan, this is Africa. Does any of this look Israeli to you?” she asks, motioning at the Levinski park across the street from the central bus station, which, even in the middle of the day, was filled with unemployed migrants lining the park’s benches. Chen later showed us to the spot where Ester Galili, a 70 year old woman, was beaten to death by a drunken Sudanese individual after the two got in an argument. “They’re savages,” said Chen.

While some attribute the neighborhood’s dire situation to the arrival of the migrants, others insist that both the neighborhood’s African and Israeli residents are victims of neglect, and that in order to distract from that, higher ups are pinning the two groups against each other.

“These people did not sit on the rivers of Sudan and dream of South Tel Aviv,” Gidi Aizen of the Smadar Ben Natan & Pomerantz Humanitarian Law office tells Tazpit Press Service (TPS). “They’re here [in Shapira] because they were dropped off here by the state. It’s easier for Bibi [Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and [Culture Minister Miri] Regev to blame all the problems on the Africans, because it means they don’t have to deal with the complexity of the issues, and more importantly, that they don’t need to actually lift a finger to do anything to actually help south Tel Aviv.”

Recently, the Israeli government decided to deport all single, male African migrants who have not been granted humanitarian protection, or are pending approval for an asylum request to a “a third country” widely believed to be Rwanda despite that nation’s denial of an agreement.  

The looming deportation has put the issue of the African migrants front-and-center among Israelis, who are split over whether or not deportation is the right move, not to mention the moral one. Some human rights organizations have accused the state of shipping people off to their deaths, citing the illegality of deporting refugees and placing them in harm’s way.

“We’ve gotten dozens of similar reports of people arriving in Rwanda and then being taken into a side-room where their documents and the $3500 they got from Israel for leaving are confiscated, and after that, they’re turned over to smugglers and slave traders,” says Aizen.

Aizen also noted a chilling photo of ISIS militants standing over African hostages on the coast of Libya, prior to executing them, saying that  “a lot of those people were Sudanese refugees that Israel deported.”

However, supporters of the deportation challenge parts of that account.  “All of the horror stories you hear about kidnappings and drowning and such, may have happened to people who tried to continue their journey to Europe via Libya and the Mediterranean, but they face no danger or risk of persecution in the safe third countries,” Yonatan Jakubowicz of The Israeli Immigration Policy Center, tells TPS. “The agreement was personally supervised by Israel’s attorney general, and approved by the District and Supreme Courts of Israel. There is a lot of demagoguery and lies spread by those who object to the deportation,” he adds.

According to Jacubowicz, the vast majority of African immigrants are not refugees according to the Geneva convention as various human rights groups claim, but are rather economic migrants from Sudan, or deserters from the Eritrean army. “Israel does not view draft dodgers as refugees, and that is why it is requesting of them to return to their country, or relocate to a safe third country if they feel this is not on option for them” he says.

Aizen did not negate those claims but rather asserted that viewing the issue as simply “draft dodging is simplistic. “In Israel we like to praise army service and such, but the Eritrean army is not like the Israeli army. There is no real democracy in Eritrea, and there is a mandatory military service, which includes forced manual labor that can often last for decades,” he says.

A very large part of the controversy surrounding the issue is a lack of consensus within Israeli society surrounding the question of whether or not the migrants are in fact refugees, and therefore, entitled to a refugee’s status and protection by the state, or actually work migrants who have simply come to Israel in order to enjoy the benefits of western civilization.

African immigrants can submit a request for refugee status, however, out of nearly 20,000 applications submitted over the years, only 11 have been granted with refugee status. Those opposed to the deportation see this as proof that the state is intentionally dragging its feet in order to avoid granting asylum to those in need, citing the fact that the percentage of requests granted in other western countries is far higher, while supporters of the deportation hold that the low amount of requests approved just goes to prove that they are economic migrants, not refugees.

The issue gets even more heated and controversial when both objectors and supporters of the deportation evoke the Jewish people’s history as support for their claims. On the one hand, some opponents claim that it is the moral duty of the Jewish state to provide asylum for all those fleeing discrimination, while on the other side of the argument are those who claim it is the Jewish state’s priority to provide security for the Jewish people and to protect the Jewish majority within Israel.

H., a Holocaust survivor from Tel Aviv,  who declined to be named, vowed that in the event that the deportation is carried out, she will provide asylum for those in danger, vowing to “hide them in the bathroom if needed.”

“These people escaped a genocide, they wandered the world as refugees and have finally made it to the holy land after crossing the Sinai Desert by foot – I’m supposed to look at them and not see myself?!” she asserted.

On the other side are those who accuse anyone making such comparisons as disrespecting and cheapening the Holocaust. Such was the case when Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked took to Facebook to accuse the objectors of generating “fake news” surrounding the deportees’ fates and disrespecting the memory of the holocaust “in a shameful manner.”

While the moral debate has been taking center stage, there is another one which has started to take hold – the economic debate. Many restaurants and other small businesses in Tel Aviv rely on the African community to fill jobs that most Israelis do not want – such as cleaners and dishwashers, and many restaurant owners fear the economic ramifications of a deportation. Recently, a group of 180 Tel Aviv restaurant owners issued an open letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu urging him to cancel the deportation.

“In our eyes and in the eyes of our employees, the forced deportation of the asylum seekers is an expulsion of our friends.. we are worried that many of them will be in mortal danger,” the letter read, “This is a small group of less than 40 thousand men and women, and the [issue] of them being too concentrated in South Tel Aviv can easily be solved by dispersing them in other areas. Deporting them and exposing them to severe dangers is not the solution.”

“We were all taught in the [Israeli] education system and in the IDF to accept others and to help the weak. Everyday, we are obligated to that sentiment in our businesses and we call upon the government to stop the deportation and to apply the compassion and morality that define the State of Israel and that serve as the basis for its existence,” the letter concluded.