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When it comes to asylum seekers, Israel has forgotten its roots

These days, with relative ease and without any major obstacles, the Israeli government is pushing a new bill that allows it to detain African asylum seekers for 20 months without proper due process.
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December 8, 2014

These days, with relative ease and without any major obstacles, the Israeli government is pushing a new bill that allows it to detain African asylum seekers for 20 months without proper due process. This bill is only slightly different from the previous amendments to the Anti-Infiltration law, which the Israeli High Court of Justice overturned in September, calling it an “Inherent infringement of the right to human dignity”.  The government is refusing to accept the court's message:  imprisoning innocent people, with the sole aim of deterring other asylum seekers from entering Israel, is a violation of basic rights and liberties.

Israel's detention centre for African asylum seekers opened in December last and is vary aptly called Holot – sands, in Hebrew. Holot is located in a secluded part of the Negev desert, far away from any cities or towns. 2,400 people are currently held there, asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. Many have never heard back from the authorities after submitting their asylum claims. Those who did, were rejected out of hand.  Those who are out detention, an total of 47,000 people, fair no better. 

You would expect the government of Israel to have heard of the genocide in Darfur. After all, it is raging there for more than 11 years.  You would expect the Israeli government to have the ear and the heart to listen to stories not so dissimilar to the stories that still haunt many Jewish families. But they clearly do not. How else can they explain the fact that not one Darfuri has ever been recognized as a refugee by the state of Israel? 

Instead, the government calls them “infiltrators”. Likkud MK Miri Regev, Chairwoman of the Knesset Internal Affairs committee, has called Sudanese asylum seekers “a cancer in our body”. But they are not infiltrators and they are not cancer. If anything, they are us, seventy years ago.

It seems no one in the Israeli government has ever heard of Eritrea either, a country known globally as “the North Korea of Africa”. In the world, Eritreans get 89% recognition rate of their need for protection. In Israel, only two have been recognized as refugees. For some reason, all the genuine Eritrean refugees went to Europe or North America or are in the refugee camps in Sudan in Ethiopia. Israel seems to get only the ones who “just want to work and get rich”.

Sudanese and Eritreans come from countries where violations of human rights are well documented globally. Yet for years, the Israeli government refuses to acknowledge that they may actually be people genuinely fleeing persecution.  Israel does not forcibly deport them, but it gives no real protection. It does offer them xenophobia, criminalization and detention in generous quantities.

The Israeli government has forgotten the famous biblical dictum: “do not wrong or oppress the stranger, for you a stranger in the land of Egypt.” Its policies and legislation on asylum seekers from African follow a different order of the day, phrased best by former minister of Interior Eli Yishay: “make their lives miserable”. This order roars louder than High Court of Justice's rulings, human rights, and our own history. 

It could have been different. The government could have accepted that the Eritreans and Sudanese are here for now and stop trying to hide them in a detention centre in the desert. It could given them work permits so they can live in dignity and move out of the crowded neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv and by that ease the pressure in those areas. But such steps don’t get the popular vote. And with constant problems security and the economic situation, who cares about a few pesky Africans? There are few left to come to the defense of African asylum seekers in Israel today. It is one test of character and morality that Israel is so far failing miserably. Will things ever change? perhaps only when the State of Israel remembers re-connects to its roots.

Sharon Livne is based in Tel Aviv and works for ASSAF – Aid organizationfor refugees and asylum seekers in Israelhttp://assaf.org.il/en

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