Wednesday night saw the culmination of weeks of national and local incitement
against the African refugee/asylum-seeker population in Israel. Hundreds of
local residents and settlers from the West Bank settlements rampaged through
south Tel Aviv neighborhoods attacking Africans and smashing African
businesses.
A Congolese activist was thrown to the ground and
beaten after leaving her house to try and talk to demonstrators. The woman, a
well-known activist back home in the Congo, who had held talks before she had to
flee the country with Nelson Mandela, said she “felt lucky to have escaped with
her life” after being set upon by a crowd of dozens.
Earlier in the
evening at the start of the demonstration MK Miri Regev (Likud) said “the
Sudanese were a cancer in our body.” And MK Danny Danon (Likud), head of the
“Deportation Now” movement, called for the immediate removal of all Africans
from Israel. This is the latest in a long line of incitement by our elected
officials, including Interior Minister Eli Yishai, MK Michael Ben- Ari (Habayit
Hayehudi) and extreme settler leaders including Baruch Marzel. Human
Rights groups have begun working on whether there is a case for incitement
against them.
Approximately 60,000 asylum seekers have entered Israel
since 2005. 80 percent of the asylum seekers are from Eritrea and 5-10% come
from across Sudan. Since 2005, less than 20 have received refugee
status.
Huge pressure has been placed on poor neighborhoods in south Tel
Aviv and peripheral cities in the South of the country, where the communities
are religious, conservative and very wary of a large foreign community suddenly
living alongside them.
Without the legal right to work or access to any
government services, asylum- seekers rely on the support of small NGOs and a
small UN High Commissioner for Refugees office in Tel Aviv.
Despite the
circumstances they have gone through before their arrival – and the harsh
conditions they face here in Israel – crime rates have consistently been below
the national average in all years that statistics have been released
(2005-2011).
Hints by the Tel Aviv police chief that those numbers have
increased since the start of the year were followed by his suggestion that
asylum-seekers must be given work permits, and also met by scepticism from
refugee rights activists who claimed the numbers are being manipulated to help
the Tel Aviv police get a larger allocation of the funds from the Finance
Ministry to deal with “infiltrators.”
Politicians in Israel are doing
nothing to lower the tensions in the neighborhoods worst affected, in fact they
regularly come to incite the local activists. Without clear and unequivocal
statements from our elected officials against these senseless acts of violence,
the situation will continue to get worse. We now have to post overnight guards
at our shelters for single mothers and children and are waiting with trepidation
the inevitable next round of escalation that could even lead to
murder.
The writer is a program manager for the African Refugee
Development Center. He is an immigrant from London and a graduate of Noam UK.
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