I am a political activist who has worked and lived in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This blog chronicles my time in Palestine and also provides news and analysis about Palestine and the situation on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Friday, December 20, 2013
David Sheen: Israel violates international norms over African refugees
Dear friends, Please find below David Sheen's very good article published by Al Jazeera on the Freedom Marches and African refugees in Israel. Sheen, an Israeli independent journalist and activist, has been documenting Israel's racist treatment of African asylum seekers for the last 3 years. Please see my blog post from October which includes a 10 minute video made by Sheen on the subject (click here). The post also includes a link to Sheen's excellent blog/webpage, which has other articles, videos and information on the situation faced by African refugees in Israel.
I have also included a links to a number of other good articles on the current Freedom Marches, as well as on Israel's "Infilitration" laws, which are used to incarcerate African asylum seekers. In solidarity, Kim
Asylum seekers from East Africa deserve fair treatment
African
migrants on a highway near Beer Sheva, walking to Jerusalem in protest
after abandoning a detention facility in the Negev Desert, Dec. 16,
2013. Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
Today Israeli immigration officers forcibly removed
more than 200 African asylum seekers from outside the Knesset, Israel’s
parliament, who showed up to protest their forced detention. The
protesters, refugees from east Africa, had marched from an
indefinite-detention facility in the Negev Desert, a two-day journey by
foot. They will reportedly be jailed for up to three months before being
returned to detention.
Tensions began on Dec. 10, when the Knesset passed an amendment to
the Anti-Infiltration Law, which authorized the detention without trial
of approximately 55,000 Africans currently living in Israel. On Dec. 12,
Israeli prison officials began transferring Africans from the Saharonim
prison to the brand-new Holot facility, which is still under
construction only a few hundred meters away in southern Israel. Once the
first 1,000 beds are filled with Africans from Saharonim, the
government plans to move another 2,000 Africans now in Tel Aviv to the
detention center.
Last week’s amendment was rushed through committee to replace the
January 2012 amendment that authorized the incarceration of asylum
seekers for up to three years. In September, Israel's Supreme Court
unanimously ruled that the legislation violated Israel's
quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. In order to avoid another judicial
rebuke, the government is contending that the newly built detention
facilities are not jails because they permit two daytime furloughs of a
few hours each.
After only one weekend at the new facility, many of the asylum seekers
who were transferred did not see it the same way. On Dec. 15, the
African migrants left the complex and set off toward Jerusalem
to demand freedom and refugee rights. They said there are no
significant differences between the old jail and the new one. Of those
who remained behind bars, most have gone on a hunger strike.
The asylum seekers’ demands — to have their applications for refugee
status considered and to be allowed to live freely without major
restrictions while they are under review — are supported by
international law. But Israel wants them all gone, regardless of the
persecution they experienced before entering the country and their
stated fear of being returned to their countries of origin, because they
are not Jews.
The Israeli government has shown itself willing to make a mockery of
international agreements and to mistreat long-suffering refugees whose
only crime is not being born Jewish. If the world accepts the Israeli
government’s demand that the state have a Jewish ethno-religious
character, they will enable Israel’s flouting of international norms and
green-lighting all of these abuses as well as the many more that will
inevitably follow.
Roots of the crisis
The detention of the Africans on its soil was not the government’s
preferred solution. As the high court deliberated about what to do with
the migrants, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed an envoy to
negotiate with a number of African countries, hoping to persuade them to
take in the asylum seekers in exchange for money, agricultural
technology, weapons and military training. To Netanyahu's chagrin, no
African nation agreed to the terms.
By forbidding most asylum seekers to work and criminalizing wiring money
out of the country, the government hoped that migrants who arrived to
make money more easily would give up and go home. By imprisoning asylum
seekers who had not been convicted of crimes, the government sought to
persuade the Africans to accept the state’s offer of $1,500 upon release
if they leave the country.
The U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) protested the government’s
carrot-and-stick offer to asylum seekers who were sitting in Israeli
jails. Then–UNHCR head William Tall blasted the secret deal, saying
repatriation from prison “can’t be considered voluntary by any
criterion. It is explicitly not voluntary return.” He added that most
Africans in Israel “don’t receive full access to the refugee apparatus,
and when there’s no access to the refugee apparatus that can lead to
their release, then there is no voluntary return.”
So far, about 1,500 asylum seekers have left the country in this manner.
The government now hopes that others will follow after it increased the
fee for self-deporting to $3,500 last month. Unless the detention
center is expanded — there are no plans to do so at present — its
maximum capacity is only about 10,000 people. Even if every bed in the
facility were filled, that would leave more than 40,000 asylum seekers
living among Israelis.
These asylum seekers from Africa constitute the first large group of immigrants to Israel who are not Jews.
International obligations
A careful analysis of the asylum crisis shows that Israel is not
meeting its international obligations in the treatment of refugees.
About 85 percent of the asylum seekers in Israel are from Eritrea and
Sudan, two countries with human-rights records so abominable that even
the Israeli government is loath to force those who fled to return. The
other 15 percent arrive from African countries further afield, such as
the Congo and the Central African Republic. But of the African asylum
seekers living in Israel, only a tiny fraction, less than 0.2 percent,
have received refugee status.
In every one of these countries, there exist serious threats to physical
safety and political freedom. Not every person who hails from these
countries is automatically accepted as a refugee, however. State
signatories to the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees —
145 countries, including Israel — may review each applicant’s case on an
individual basis. However, the convention states that people cannot be
punished for entering a country without permission if they did so to
escape persecution in the country of origin and if they present
themselves to the relevant authorities without delay. Thus Israel is
violating international norms by detaining asylum seekers fleeing
genuine persecution.
To enter Israel, refugees from eastern Africa pass through Egypt, the
only African country that shares a border with Israel. Until last year,
the desert border between the two nations was easily passable by foot.
To cut off this method of entry, the Israeli government authorized the
construction of a fence running the length of the border, and it was
completed earlier this year. Since then, the number of asylum seekers
entering the country has been reduced to a trickle.
The Egyptian passage has become a source of contention as well as anger
and sadness. Israelis opposed to the arrival of asylum seekers claim
that the Africans cannot be refugees in Israel, that they could have
been refugees only if they had remained in Egypt. Advocates for the
asylum seekers say that the migrants faced persecution in Egypt, noting
that Egyptian forces attacked asylum seekers in Cairo in 2006 as they
protested for refugee rights, killing dozens.
The Egyptian territory that abuts Israel, the Sinai Peninsula, has
become treacherous territory for foreign Africans. In recent years,
gangs that smuggled asylum seekers to the Israeli border for a fee
realized that they could keep the foreign Africans against their will
and threaten them with torture unless their families wired ransom
payments. To ensure the continuation of this source of income — $600
million in the past four years, according to European External Policy
Advisors, an NGO — after Israel’s fence was finished and the number of
Africans passing through the Sinai dropped sharply, the gangs began to
kidnap, torture and hold for ransom Africans who had no intention of
trying to reach Israel in the first place.
Israel’s share
According to the UNHCR, 479,300 people around the world submitted
refugee-status applications in 2012 — more than in any other year in the
last decade. Of these applications, 355,500 were made in Europe, and
83,400 were made in the United States, the country that had the most
applicants. Asylum seekers in Norway, Sweden and Switzerland account for
more than 1 percent of those nations’ populations. In Israel, asylum
seekers account for less than 0.5 to 1 percent of the population,
similar to the figures for Greece, Belgium and Austria.
Ironically, developing nations host a far greater share of the
world’s refugee population than do industrialized nations. For example,
Iran and Pakistan each host over 1 million refugees, as do Jordan and
Syria, two countries that border Israel. In Africa, Kenya, Chad and
Ethiopia each host hundreds of thousands of refugees, and eight other
African nations host over 100,000 refugees each.
As of last year, more than a quarter million people have fled Eritrea
seeking asylum, and over half a million people have fled Sudan. Since
85 percent of the 55,000 African asylum seekers in Israel are from
Eritrea or Sudan, that means the country has received 6 to 7 percent of
the refugees who fled those two countries.
To be sure, their numbers are not insignificant, and their integration
poses challenges for the government and for Israeli society. There are
also about 84,000 foreign workers in Israel and some 93,000 tourists who
have overstayed their visas.
Israel has absorbed millions of immigrants in the 65 years since since
it was founded. Twenty-five years ago, it took in over a million people
from the former Soviet Union as that empire was disintegrating. But in
all those cases, the people it absorbed were Jews, loosely defined as
having at least one Jewish grandparent.
Jewish people all over the world are encouraged by the government to
immigrate to Israel, and they are offered attractive financial
incentives to do so. As soon as they arrive in the country, they are
automatically granted full citizenship, with all the benefits that
entails and then some. These privileges follow from one of the first
laws passed in Israel, the 1950 Law of Return.
The reason for the disparity in the treatment of Jewish immigrants and
non-Jewish would-be immigrants runs to the very heart of Zionism.
Israeli society rejects asylum seekers because they’re new, they’re poor
and they’re darker-skinned. But over the decades, successive waves of
Jewish immigrants also encountered hostility from native Israelis
because of the same prejudices. The asylum seekers from Africa
constitute the first large group of immigrants to Israel who are not
Jews. That is the real reason the government is trying to drive them
out.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to account for the latest developments.
David Sheen is an independent
journalist and film maker living in Dimona, Israel. Sheen began blogging
when he first moved to Israel in 1999 and later went on to work as a
reporter and editor at the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. His
full-length documentary on ecological architecture, "First Earth," was
translated into a dozen languages and published by PM Press in 2010. He
is currently writing a book about African immigrants to Israel and the
struggles they face.
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