June 24, 2013

The 40 or so African asylum seekers — majority Eritrean and Sudanese — who sang, danced and waved their flags at the World Refugee Day event in Tel Aviv last Thursday seemed full of pride and momentary joy. The event, sponsored by various aid organizations, including Amnesty International, Hotline for Migrant Workers and ASSAF, was an overall feel-good affair — though of course with grave undertones, as refugees and their supporters mourned those brethren who had died on the long, hard road to Israel and those 1,500-some migrants awaiting an uncertain fate in ” target=”_blank”>Hasharon Garden. Dozens of amateur photographers — almost outnumbering the Africans — surrounded the group of bouncing migrants, frantic to capture their energy.

“Our goal was to share our culture,” said Isayas Teklebrhan, a leader at the Tel Aviv branch of ” target=”_blank”>starred in an Al Jazeera news short last year. “We sent the musicians to show people our community, and what our country looks like as a people.”

But Teklebrhan said in an interview at his group's offices the next afternoon that the asylum seekers playing traditional African music onstage had a hidden message for the aid organizations who threw the event.

” target=”_blank”>stunning new online spread by PBS Newshour, roughly 60,000 Africans have sought asylum in Israel since 2006. But even once they've made it through northern Africa and the harsh, hot Sinai desert — where kidnappers and Bedouin gangs reportedly inflict upon them unthinkable tortures, including beatings with electric cattle prods, rape, starvation, and “plastic bags melted onto flesh,” while demanding ransom payments of $30,000+ — these thousands of downtrodden find a whole new world of hostility waiting in the Holy Land. Via PBS:

Many African migrants who work in Tel Aviv's restaurants, staff hotels, clean streets and work on construction crews are in Israel legally, but the visas they've been given are typically not work visas.

It's printed in plain Hebrew, right on the visa, says [Sara Robinson of Amnesty International], “This is not a work permit.”

So the migrants work under the table. This allows employers to take advantage of the migrants, underpaying them or violating handshake agreements. The work is hard, manual labor and the pay isn't much.

The migrants’ families have paid so much ransom, selling houses, animals and even their gold, says Sister Azezet. “They want to repay, but here, they can't even work.”

Much like in Southern California, where there exists a widespread misunderstanding about why, exactly, so many Mexicans and Latin Americans are risking their lives to hop the fence into the U.S., many right-to-center Israeli citizens are under the impression that the majority of Africans in Tel Aviv have come to exploit the Israeli system and strike it rich in the Middle East's rare first-world oasis. Meanwhile, they argue, the migrants are turning South Tel Aviv into something of a little Eritrea, rife with petty crime. “All of a sudden you're walking inside your country and it looks like a different country with a different culture,” one rabbi told PBS.

” target=”_blank”>Levinksy Park in particular has become a central camping ground for homeless migrants; volunteers can often be seen handing out soup to the park's inhabitants.

Although African immigration has ebbed recently due to the Israeli government's fancy new fence at the Egyptian border (worth over $400 million), the migrants who already fled to Israel are under constant threat of imprisonment and/or deportation.

Refugees can be sent to the desert prison for being involved or suspected in any crime, said Rozen of Hotline for Migrant Workers, including being the victim of a rape — all thanks to Israel's horrifying Anti-Infiltration Law, which essentially says that non-citizens can be held for over three years without trial, simply for not being a citizen.

There are currently a few thousand spots left in the prison for anyone who steps out of line. And Rozen said that over the last year, 2,000 Sudanese prisoners have been coerced into returning to Sudan under the threat that they will otherwise be jailed in Israel indefinitely.

Africans in Tel Aviv were delivered an extra jolt of panic earlier this month when news leaked that Israel was planning to send its huddled masses to one or more unnamed African countries. ” target=”_blank”>African Refugee Development Center, since Israel's establishment, “fewer than 200 individuals have been recognized as refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention.” Compare that to other countries around the world who also took part in the convention, where the UN reports that about 84 percent of Eritreans are granted refugee status.

Human Rights Watch painted a grim profile of the country in its ” target=”_blank”>Ynet.

Because believe it or not, most Eritreans want to live in Israel just about as much as Israel wants them to live in it.