Looming peril

While numerous pontificators and self-styled social commentators bewail the proliferation of violent crime in our cities, few make mention of where most of the increase comes from. It may be politically incorrect to note, but many of the violent crimes in the Tel Aviv area, for example, are perpetrated by non-locals.

Reports of spine-chilling attacks in Tel Aviv followed hot on each other’s heels over the past two weeks. All were committed by foreign infiltrators.

The biggest headlines were made, understandably, by the sadistic rape and battery of the teenage couple in the Gan Ha’ir car park, where the suspect is a Nablus-area Arab who crossed the Green Line illegally.

That lurid incident eclipsed many others, not least because other assaults, horrific though they were, occurred in slum neighborhoods far from the fashionable northerly urban digs. Stabbings, muggings, robberies and rapes are so rampant there that most go uncovered by the press. Much of south Tel Aviv is under a veritable reign of terror imposed by African illegals who entered the country via Sinai.

On Wednesday, Omut Adduk, 20, who identified himself as Sudanese, was indicted in the Tel Aviv District Court for breaking into a Hatikva quarter apartment last month, stealing NIS 250 and then raping the woman he found sleeping there. The prosecutor summed up what many feel: “Women can no longer feel safe even inside their homes.”

A day earlier, six Africans, who identified themselves as Sudanese and Eritreans, were surprised by a police patrol at a parking lot on Tel Aviv’s Hasharon Street, near the old central bus station. They surrounded a disrobed, beaten, struggling and screaming 19-year-old Israeli woman. One of the men was apprehended raping her. Four attackers were detained. Two escaped.

This was the second such incident in that immediate vicinity within a week.

There are conspicuous inclinations to sweep both such crimes and the identity of the criminals under the rug.

Sub-Saharan infiltrators have long enjoyed profuse sympathy from media movers-and-shakers as well as from trendy pro-African lobbies. These have essentially banned from our public discourse terms such as “infiltrators,” “illegals” and “economic migrants.”

They prefer to sugarcoat diverse Africans as “refugees” and refer to them, as “Sudanese,” though many hail from as far away as Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal and the Ivory Coast.

Vociferous “refugee-advocates” vehemently oppose the illegals’ deportation, claiming unrest in their home countries. However, the time has come for all concerned Israelis to ask whether our tiny, beleaguered state should be expected to take on the problems of the entire African continent – east and west. Can our vulnerable Jewish state, already facing existential demographic challenges, afford the interminable influx from the south? Fence-construction along the Egyptian border has so far only shifted entry points and not stemmed the flow (exceeding, by ultra-conservative estimates, 1,000 infiltrators a month). In several instances the brand new barrier has already been breached. It is time to own up – nothing will work if no mass deportations are undertaken.

As long as infiltrators assume that once through, they become untouchable and able to stay, they will keep coming.

Significantly, we were just warned that climate change and desertification may impel many more Africans to seek better lives elsewhere. Exceptionally liberal Israel, on Africa’s doorstep, is sure to become an even more powerful migrant-magnet that it already is. Just as Europe tries – even if belatedly – to bolt its gates, Israel still refuses to face the daily reality created in our cities by lax mind-sets and ideology-driven denial.

To be sure, this is hardly an exclusively Tel Avivian danger, though the city perforce generates more headlines.

Infiltrators have taken over much of Eilat and Arad. They abound in Ashdod, Ashkelon and even Bnei Brak. They have begun appearing in the Sharon region too.

Tel Aviv intends to field its own municipal patrols and to crisscross its streets with surveillance cameras. Yet such local initiatives, well-intentioned and welcome as they may be, are hardly likely to make a dent in what incontrovertibly looms as a peril of national proportions.