Little SudanWhat should Israel do with its thousands of Christian and Muslim African refugees?
Posted Monday, May 5, 2008, at 12:51 PM ET
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently referred grumpily to a "tsunami" that "we need to take every measure in order to stop." He was speaking not about Palestinian terrorists but about a wave of more than 7,000 African asylum seekers who have crossed the Egyptian border into Israel over the last year, at least 2,000 of them since January. The Africans crossing into Israel are Muslims and Christians. They come mostly from Sudan and Eritrea but also from Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, and Congo. They are refugees looking for a safe haven and legal asylum. And Israel has absolutely no idea what to do with them.
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StumbleUponIsrael loves to be the first on the scene when there's a humanitarian crisis: In 1977, Menachem Begin welcomed 66 Vietnamese boat people spotted by an Israeli cargo ship near Japan; more recently, Israel sent medical teams to India after the 2001 earthquake and arrived in Asia with emergency aid after the tsunami in 2004. But if Israel embraces thousands of African refugees, millions in Egypt alone could try to follow. All developed countries worry about the effects of an influx of poor refugees. But the problem is especially delicate for Israel, which worries about someday losing its Jewish majority to the growing Palestinian population (especially if it does not relinquish control of the West Bank). And then there's the country's location: It's not as if there are other prosperous democracies in the region for refugees to choose among. Maybe it was only a matter of time before Africans decided to opt for this shorter trek over the long voyages to Europe and North America.
And so for now, the Israeli government stands on shifting and uneasy middle ground. The country has given one-year temporary residency (which comes with medical benefits) to up to 600 Darfurians fleeing genocide and six-month working visas to about 2,000 Eritreans. Meanwhile, it has held thousands of others in desert detention centers while still others live in makeshift, slumlike quarters around the Tel Aviv bus station. Mark Hetfield of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society says that conditions in Tel Aviv are worse than any he has seen in visits to dozens of refugee camps in Africa and East Asia. "There are 150 people using one bathroom. There is rotting food. There is no discipline or taking of ownership, because everything is so temporary," he said. (For photographs, click on the accompanying slideshow. More images here.)
Olmert is talking both about erecting a border fence and establishing clear asylum procedures for assessing cases individually, which Israel currently doesn't really have. The systems of the United States and Canada are good models that civil rights lawyers in Israel say they'd love to follow. But it won't be easy to do so. And if Israel's asylum procedures get fairer, will that just encourage more refugees to come?
Like more than 140 other countries, Israel is a party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which forbids expelling or returning a refugee to a country where his or her life or freedom would be threatened. The convention also says that refugees should not be punished for entering another country illegally. It's up to individual countries to put these principles into law. In Israel, those seeking asylum used to turn to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, which heard their stories and made a recommendation about whether Israel should grant temporary residence. The governmental committee that reviewed UNHCR recommendations almost always followed them and granted residency in about 11 percent of cases.
In the last two years, because of the overwhelming numbers, these minimal procedures have broken down. Instead, UNHCR and Israel have made group designations based on refugee nationality: Roughly speaking, Darfurians have gotten residency, blocks of Eritreans have gotten work permits, and other refugees have been out of luck. They generally haven't been deported, but they're not in the country legally, either. Often, the country's approach seems entirely "ad hoc and arbitrary," says Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical law professor at Tel Aviv University who represents the immigrants. If there is room at a detention center when the police pick up refugees at the border, they can be jailed for many months. If not, they can end up, right away, on a bus bound for Tel Aviv.
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