The Israeli government says that very soon, it will begin indefinitely to imprison asylum seekers who refuse deportation. This will be particularly hard for Africans facing an uncertain future who believe that getting to the Middle East will set them on their way to Europe.
Take the case of Adam Noah. After escaping torture in Sudan, after walking 11 hours through the Egyptian desert, and after handing almost all his money to men with guns who blocked his way, Adam slipped through an opening in a border fence and lied down on the sand. The respite did not last long.
The 24-year-old told every Israeli official he met – first soldiers, then officials at a detention centre – that he was seeking safe haven. It did not go down well, as Adam recounts calmly from his Tel Aviv kitchen table. “I told them, ‘I’m a refugee’. They said, ‘we don’t have a place for refugees here’.” “I asked for the UN… They said, ‘here in Israel we don’t have the UN’. I said, ‘so let me go back’. They said, ‘no’.”
Adam did not know that he had gotten into troubled waters. Four years later, he would be labelled an infiltrator and that, as an unmarried, childless male with no official refugee status, he would be high on the list for deportation.
Adam, who told newsmen that he was tortured in prison in Sudan for refusing to fight in the military, has fallen foul of a new Israeli government plan to rid the country of the 38,000 African asylum seekers inside its borders.
The government of Israel says the country has been overrun by “illegal infiltrators” who, it maintains, are largely responsible for driving up poverty and crime in working class southern parts of the city.
It says that from the first of April this year, it will give asylum seekers – more than 90 percent are from Sudan and Eritrea – the choice between prison and “voluntary” deportation. Those who agree to leave will be given $3,500 each and deported to Rwanda or Uganda, although both governments have denied signing any agreements with Israel.
It was around the middle of Year 2000 that Israel caught the fancy of asylum seekers from Africa. Between then and 2014, when the country fortified its border with Egypt, Israel’s policy towards new arrivals has continued to change without adequate notice to the refugees.
