Do Not Oppress the Stranger

“Do not

oppress the stranger because you think he has no one to defend him; remember how Pharaoh learned that God defends the stranger.” Nahmanides (Ramban)

By Jesse Fox

They told us it was coming, and they weren’t kidding.

This week, Israel’s new Population, Immigration and Border Authority burst into south Tel Aviv, accompanied by a fleet of buses and soldiers from the Border Police. Their orders, apparently, were to arrest everyone: those with papers and those without, foreign workers and asylum seekers, married men and single mothers.

The Authority is headed by Yaakov Ganot, a veteran of the police, Border Police and Prison Service. Ganot has been criticized by the State Comptroller and even the Supreme Court, which found that “his behavior is not suitable to a policeman and can hurt the reputation of the police.” Under Ganot’s leadership, the Immigration Administration was criticized in the past for infringing upon the human rightsof foreign workers.

On July 1st, the first day of the new unit’s existence, it carried out its first wave of arrests. According to Haaretz, several hundred people were detained. Two thirds of them were released by nightfall.

Since then the raids have continued. The neighborhood of Neveh Sha’anan, which over the years has become a lively local version of Chinatown, with adults and children of multiple nationalities and ethnicities living side by side, is no longer a safe zone for Tel Aviv’s non-Jewish residents.

While foreign workers face the very real possibility of deportation, along with their children (who were in many cases born in Israel), African refugees cannot be legally returned to their homelands. Instead, the government seeks to expel them from the center of the country, to the periphery – north of Hadera and south of Gedera. While the official logic behind this policy is not clear (at least not to me, I have yet to hear a coherent official justification for it), it has been in effect for some time now.Only now, it is being strongly enforced.

After living through wars, genocide and oppression, these refugees have found some measure of stability in Tel Aviv, and have begun to rebuild their lives here. Now, however, the government has undermined that stability, and many refugees are exploring their options outside of Tel Aviv.

This week, one of the leaders of the South Sudanese community was detained. The cops, who examined his papers and saw that he is an asylum seeker, released him. But they left him with a warning. You have a week to leave Tel Aviv, they told him. Next time we find you here, you will be arrested and imprisoned.

This man, whose wife has just had a baby, works to support his family. For a while, he also ran a community center for South Sudanese. Although he closed it down not too long ago, he had planned on reopening it in a more central location. A devout Christian, he was also thinking about studying for the priesthood in Nazareth. This week, after being ordered to leave the city, he traveled up to Hadera to look for an apartment there.

In tolerant and pluralistic Tel Aviv, African refugees have built communities. Here they have access to jobs, housing, medical care and organizations that provide them with aid and services. Outside of the center, they are isolated, with no one to defend their rights. In the country’s periphery, they are cheap labor, easily exploited and not always made to feel welcome.

In the wake of previous raids, African refugees have fled to places like Eilat, where they found plentiful employment in that city’s hotels and tourism industry. Local politicians there, however, decided that the refugees were “a burden and a nuisance,” eventually convincing the Interior Ministry to expel them from Eilat (despite the fact that Eilat’s hoteliers lobbied against their expulsion). Many eventually returned to Tel Aviv to once again start over from scratch.

Refugees and foreign workers are human beings, and they have human rights. If the Interior Ministry has a good reason why refugees should not live in the center of the country, let it state it publicly. If not, it should stop playing with the fates of thousands of people as if their lives were a game of backgammon.

This expulsion, like previous ones, will only serve to disrupt people’s lives even more – people who have already been through unimaginable situations and suffer from serious post-traumatic stress. As a nation of refugees itself, Israel can and must demand a more ethical and humane policy from its government. Israeli citizens, American Jews and the various aid and advocacy organizations have a responsibility to tell the government what it doesn’t want to hear – that we will not let it mistreat refugees and victims of persecution and genocide.

click here to view this article at sustainablecityblog.com

Refugees Keep Out!

 Handwritten poster hanging in a Darfuri refugee shelter in Tel Aviv

By Jesse Fox

Israel’s new point man on refugee issues spouts some pretty shocking opinions in an interview with Haaretz.

For about a year and a half now, I have been volunteering with the African refugee community in Tel Aviv. I’ve heard some of their stories, formed several friendships and met some incredibly inspiring and resilient people along the way.

Although in many ways the community is much better off now than it was a year or so ago, African refugees continue to face adversity and prejudice in Israel. While gradually emerging from their own personal traumas, and their collective culture shock, the refugees have met with a strange sort of hospitality on behalf of the Israeli government.

For several weeks, rumors have been circulating that the government is gearing up for a large-scale operation to arrest and expel “illegal” foreigners, including foreign workers, refugees and asylum seekers. Recently, a bill was overwhelmingly approved by the Knesset which would criminalize the refugees (Hebrew link to the text of the bill) and those who assist them.

Last week, Haaretz’s Nurit Wurgaft published an extensive interview with Yaakov Ganot, head of the Population Administration in the Interior Ministry, who agreed to shed some light on the subject (read it in English here and in Hebrew here).

Ganot, the architect of the government’s “Hadera-Gedera” policy (which prohibits refugees and asylum seekers from living and working in the center of the country) is in charge of a newly-formed government body, the Population, Immigration and Border Authority. Among other things, the authority will take over the issue of refugees and asylum seekers in Israel, and is set to begin operating July 1st.

I have to admit that I was so shocked after reading this article for the first time that I had to read it again. It wasn’t any easier to digest on the second reading.

The good news for people who care about human rights is that Ganot has no intention of forcibly deporting the 20,000 or so African refugees currently living in Israel. The bad news is that he is not inclined to do them any favors either, and apparently views them as lawbreakers by default: “The kind of thing you find nowadays in Tel Aviv, where illegal workers and infiltrators can just go about freely, this has to stop.”

In a display of circular logic that only an authentic Israeli bureaucrat could produce, Ganot explains that the refugees’ poverty is bad for Israel’s image: “They send the money home, live in horribly crowded conditions, and also give Israel a bad name, because they live in such poor conditions. A hundred people in a moldy shelter, 20 people in one apartment.” If Ganot’s new authority has any concrete plans to improve their living conditions or reduce the crowding in their apartments, he doesn’t mention them.

Ganot admits that the refugees are exploited by employers because they are illegal. The reason they are “illegal” is that they are not officially recognized by the government as refugees. Still, Ganot doesn’t understand what the big deal is: “We don’t send them back, so why do they need that official recognition right now?”

“They’re not going to be lovers of Israel because they’re hunted,”he adds. This is one of the myths put forward by the government – that these are mostly Arabic-speaking Muslims from enemy nations, and they are no great friends of ours. Many will also hint, as Ganot does, that there are security issues at stake.

From my personal experience, the opposite is usually true. While most do speak Arabic, and a great many are Muslims, the refugee community is probably among the more patriotic groups in the country. While I can’t speak for all, the refugees that I know are eternally grateful to Israel and to the Jewish people. They study Hebrew, hang the Israeli flag and some even wish to enlist in the army.

To write off the entire community as “not lovers of Israel” is not only an affront to the refugees, it is also short-sighted. Imagine what will happen when these young Darfuri and South Sudanese men return to their country speaking Hebrew and grateful to Israel for the asylum that they were granted here. What better allies could Israel ask for in a hostile state like Sudan? That officials like Ganot cannot grasp this testifies to an unfortunate lack of imagination.

In an apparent contradiction, Ganot admits that the refugees are just “scraping by,” but then goes on to criticize them for making “pretty good money,” which he says they send out of the country to their relatives: “When a Sudanese arrives here and goes to work cleaning houses, he makes pretty good money. He doesn’t pay income tax, or health tax. They live 20 people to a room. That’s [an income of] two thousand dollars.”

And, of course, Ganot cannot resist delving into meaningless and irrelevant demographic calculations: “We’ve reached a situation in which 1,680 people arrived in one month alone, when our entire aliya [Jewish immigration to Israel] is 14,000 people per year.”
He also can’t help but indulge in ignorant and racist stereotypes: “There are people who defecate in the waiting rooms, who attack and bite.”

In Ganot’s world, this is a new kind of phenomenon, which he calls “refugee foreign workers” – here by choice, not for lack of choice: “In our examinations, I would say that 99.9 percent of them are here for work. They’re not asylum seekers, they are not at any risk.”

On the South Sudanese: “Nothing is happening in southern Sudan. They didn’t come to us from Sudan. They come from Egypt, where they heard there’s a chance to make money in Israel.”
On the Eritreans: “The Eritrean ambassador met with me and he said, ‘Tell me, sir: If you had army deserters, what would you do with them?’ I said, ‘I’d put them in jail.’ He said, ‘They’re deserters. It’s not right that instead of returning them to Eritrea, you keep them here.’”

He neglects to mention that, unlike Israel, Eritrea is a cruel dictatorship that forcibly conscripts its young men in order to fight frequent and superfluous wars. The US views it as a “rogue state.” Ganot, apparently, has found a common language with its officials, who last year called on Israel to repatriate Eritrean “army deserters” to their homeland. Eritreans in Israel, for their part, are convinced that returning to their homeland would mean certain death at the hands of the regime.

And, as if his comments were not sufficiently insulting, Ganot even mocks the suffering of the refugees: “They’re upset about one thing only: That they can’t be in Tel Aviv, make a lot of money to send home, sit here and cry.”

The fact that the Israeli government has chosen to appoint someone who openly makes statements like these to a position where he is responsible for the fates of some 20,000 African refugees is revealing. As opposed to the (mostly volunteer) organizations that approach the refugee community from a position of compassion, respect and human solidarity, the government is determined to deal with the refugees as an unwanted nuisance – banishing them to the margins of society and issuing self-fulfilling declarations describing them as hostile infiltrators and enemies of Israel.

One can’t help but wonder if the politicians and government bureaucrats have already forgotten that they too, along with the entire Jewish people, were once a nation of refugees, and that in their own interminable period in exile there were also those that chose to accomodate them, and those that chose to persecute them.

Postscript: In her July 1st op-ed in Haaretz, Avirama Golan offers an interesting explanation of the phenomenon described above. In her view, the Interior Ministry’s decision to target non-Jewish foreigners is the result of socio-economic and class politics, couched in the discourse of Jewish ethnic and religious identity:

“The Filipinas who bathe our elderly, the Chinese who build our luxury towers and the Thais who cultivate our fruits and vegetables for export often displace Israel’s Arab citizens. These citizens have no lobby, and no one cares about them or their lack of employment. In contrast, the Africans, South Americans, Ukrainians and all the rest, who clean houses and do other household scut work, displace a different group – the Jewish lower class.”

This class of people is effectively Shas’ electorate. Shas holds the Interior Ministry and dictates policy to officials like Yaakov Ganot that are charged with executing it. Shas, eager to serve as a lobby for its voters, thus chooses to expell foreigners working in one sector of the economy, while “importing” more and more foreign workers for another economic sector – all the while presenting these policies in the language of “Hebrew labor,” while ignoring questions of humanism and universal values.

click here to view this article on sustainablecityblog.com

Giving Refugees More than Just a Basket of Food

by Daniel Rosenberg

Over the past several months, I have become a regular at Fugee Fridays, a grassroots organization that brings donated food from the vegetable market in Tel Aviv to three different shelters for African refugees every Friday afternoon.

I have grown to feel a part of a community of volunteers and enjoy playing with the children who live in one of the shelters as they playfully call me "hashamen", which means fatty in Hebrew.

Last week I delivered a box of food to the home of a woman who is nine months pregnant. When I arrived at her home, her husband invited me in for tea. I had the privilege of sitting down and having a cup of tea with him while he told me about his story. He escaped Chad in 1991, and he described to me the difficult journey that he experienced as he traveled through Libya and Egypt until finally reaching Israel.

He told me that the United Nations had not granted him refugee status, and he said, "You see your parents get killed in front of your own eyes and you run away, and this is still not good enough for the UN to give you refugee status."

He spoke to me about how happy he is to be able to have a job working at the pool at a Tel Aviv hotel, which allows him to support his family. He also discussed the feelings of uncertainty he feels living in Israel, since he has not officially been granted the status of a refugee, and how difficult it is for his child and the rest of the neighborhood children to receive an education.

I have developed a close relationship with the neighborhood children, but this was the first time I was able to speak with one of the adults in the community about their own personal narrative. It was a truly enlightening experience hearing first-hand about this man's experience, his hardships along the way and how he was happy to have food to eat, a roof over his head and order in the streets.

Fugee Fridays has given me the ultimate reward of knowing that I am doing some good in this world. Steven Fox, one of the founders of Fugee Fridays, told me recently that our friendships with these children constitute a positive influence for a group of kids who have been through a lot and face an uncertain future.

Perhaps the most important part of Fugee Fridays is the fact that we are sending a message to these people that we care about them and that we want to help.

The work that we are doing with the refugees is basic and direct. But, as my conversation last Friday helped me understand, if we are able to continue to send a message of human solidarity and caring to this community, then our impact will last much longer than a basket of food.

Daniel Rosenberg is currently a second year business student at IDC Herzliya. He is a native of Raleigh, North Carolina.

click here to view this article on haaretz.com

Ha Chaagiim

Fugee Seder Pesach 2009

Fugee Purim 2009 

An Open Letter to Israel from a Darfuri Refugee in Tel- Aviv

by Hamed Sadindin

I am a member of a community of Sudanese refugees living in south Tel Aviv. Since 2007, I have been living in Israel, working for a living and doing everything in my power to help my people as a volunteer at the Darfur Association.

It is very important to the Sudanese community that Israelis understand us, our culture, and the circumstances that brought us here. For this reason, I decided to write this open letter to the Israeli people.

We are a group of asylum seekers, forced to flee our homeland and our families. Since 2003, Darfur has been under attack by forces allied with the Sudanese government. The Darfuri people have fallen victim to genocide, organized rape and looting and mass displacement, with millions forced to leave their homes. Since 2004, 400,000 Darfuris have been slain and 6,000 villages in the Darfur region have been burned.

To this day, almost 4 million people stagnate in refugee camps, surrounded by violence and fear and in desperate need of food and medicine. It was this situation in our homeland that drove many Darfuris to flee north, to Egypt.

But the Egyptian government received us with hostility and violence. In late 2005, Egyptian police raided a protest encampment set up by Sudanese asylum seekers across from the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Cairo. Dozens were killed, and hundreds were left homeless and penniless. In the wake of the attack, many decided to flee north once more, this time to Israel.

The journey to Israel is not an easy one. Egyptian forces police the border with orders to shoot at African refugees. Many of those who do manage to cross the border into Israel arrived injured by bullets or having lost family members en route. We do not know how many of our people have been killed trying to cross the border.

On the Israeli side, the army carries out a policy of "hot return," turning back whomever they manage to catch. Those who are not caught in the act of crossing the border are sent to Israeli prisons, where they can stay for months on end.

Once released from prison, most refugees make their way to Tel Aviv, where they find themselves in a delicate and unstable situation. Homelessness is common, especially among people suffering from psychological trauma and injuries. Last winter, many Darfuri refugees had nowhere to spend the night, and were forced to sleep in Levinsky Park, across from the Central Bus Station.

In March 2008 our community began to organize itself, and we rented a shelter to house Sudanese refugees. The rent and bills cost us several thousand shekels a month, more than we could afford.

Although the shelter was originally meant to house only the injured and minors, we soon had about 100 people sleeping there. Over the course of the year we accommodated over 1,000 refugees, most of them only for a brief time until they managed to get on their feet and rent apartments. For most, this was their first stop in the country after being released from detention by Israeli authorities.

In September of 2008, the immigration police decided we were no longer permitted to stay in Tel Aviv. Many of us were detained. Others left Tel Aviv to seek work in Eilat. The shelter was kept open, but only the wounded and a handful of students, teenage boys who study at an ulpan in Jaffa, remained.

Since then, the shelter has filled up once again, and now houses around a hundred people. In late February of this year, we were again on the verge of closing the shelter due to lack of funds, when private individuals from the Sudanese community stepped in and offered us their support.

All that we ask from Israel is the right to work, so that we may take care of ourselves and live freely and in peace and security. The shelter is dependent on contributions from its residents for monthly rent and bills, but without work visas it is increasingly difficult to cover these expenses.

Several hundred Sudanese were granted official refugee status, and with it the right to work. Most, however, are still denied the right to work in Israel legally. This despite the fact that they are displaced refugees, and receive no support from the government.

Officially prohibited from working between Hadera and Gedera, many of us have tried to look for jobs outside of Tel Aviv, but there are few to be found. Darfuris are also forced to compete for jobs with migrant workers and other refugees, many of whom are allowed to work legally.

Unfortunately, the handful of organizations that are involved in helping us are limited in their resources and capacity to help. Also, education programs promised to us by the government have not materialized.

We are displaced people looking for peace and security. We live in Tel Aviv because it is the only place in Israel where we have access to jobs and health care. I believe that, given the right to work in Israel, we could take care of ourselves and be a benefit to the communities that we live in.

Our organization needs support. Our immediate need is for funds to cover the shelter?s rent, in order to have a place for injured people and minors to sleep.

In the longer term, all we ask is the right to live and work in Israel and take care of ourselves while we are here.

Hamed Sadindin is Director of Humanitarian Affairs of the Darfur Association/Sudan Liberation Movement Israel Branch. He can be contacted at shararanaar@yahoo.com.

click here to view this article on Haaretz.com

Down Down Bashir!

The International Criminal Court in The Hague on March 5 issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, citing seven counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and forcible displacement.

However, according to the ICC, there was not enough evidence to include the charge of genocide.

Tel Aviv's substantial community of Sudanese refugees held a large rally soon after - organized and attended by asylum seekers from Darfur - praising ICC's decision to indict Bashir.

Demonstrators chanted slogans in support of prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, as well as the United States and Israel, while booing Bashir. It was an exuberant exercise of democratic rights by a community that has too often been deprived of such expression.

While the international arrest warrant was hailed by demonstrators as an important benchmark on the path to greater peace and justice in the region, many worry that the decision threatens any weak stability existing in the area. Bashir has already responded to the charges by expelling a number of humanitarian aid agencies from the country, including Oxfam and Mercy Corps. In a country where chaos and famine remain the rule, this could have disastrous results.

Still, the ICC's actions were received by the Sudanese community in Tel Aviv as a positive development. One can only hope that this will be a step forward toward ending the atrocities and securing peace in the country.

Fugee Art Project