The underground bomb shelter in Levinsky Park near Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station has, in recent months, turned into a squalid, staggeringly overcrowded little refugee camp. Some 200 African men, mainly from Eritrea, sleep crammed into every possible nook and cranny in two airless, low-ceilinged rooms and a corridor. The dirty concrete floor is heaped with mattresses and blankets, and scattered with scraps of food and debris. Hanging from the walls are plastic bags stuffed with clothing. Two cut-out illustrations have been tacked up - one of Jesus, the other of Bob Marley.
Africans refugees in Israel.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
There are no windows, no shower, no refrigerator. Recently five portable toilets were installed outside the entrance by the Tel Aviv Municipality. Nearby, the most bereft ones from downstairs can be seen picking through the overflowing garbage bin.
"When I was in Sudan the government was deporting people back to Eritrea, and I heard people were going to Israel. I didn't have the money to go anywhere else, so I wanted to come, too. I am a Christian, so it's better for me to live in a Christian country," says John, 28, a tall, genial English teacher. Climbing the bomb shelter's crowded stairway to talk on a park bench, he says he fled his violently unstable homeland for Sudan after his father disappeared at the hands of Eritrean government agents. After a time in Sudan, he paid smugglers to take him to Egypt, and from there, he and 37 other African refugees made it past the bullets of Egyptian border guards and climbed a barbed wire fence into Israel.
"Immediately I raised my hands to the Israeli soldiers who came to take us," he says. After two days in IDF custody, they were bused to Beersheba, where he caught a taxi with three other refugees to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. That was about a month ago. Since then, John has been living in the bomb shelter.
The people are there temporarily; they move out as soon as African laborers or refugees take them into South Tel Aviv apartments, or when they find menial work so they can share the rent. Immediately, their places are taken by new African refugees crossing from Egypt and coming to Tel Aviv every week.
These people didn't make the brutal, potentially fatal journey from Africa just to find temporary work and a bed for a few months; they're looking for a long-term solution. "I want asylum," says John. "I expect the Israeli government to do something to help me."
Last weekend Egyptian border guards reportedly shot to death an Eritrean woman trying to get over the fence, and arrested her two daughters, eight and 10. On January 30, two Ivory Coast refugees were killed in the same circumstances. Since African refugees began coming from Egypt in the latter part of 2005, several have been killed by Egyptian border troops, and many more have been captured and badly abused. Even for those who evade Egyptian border security, throwing in with refugee smugglers from Africa to Israel is a treacherous journey.
"There were 17 of us lying on top of each other in the back of a Toyota truck for five days across the Sudanese desert, through the sandstorms," recalls John, as other Africans gather around to listen in the evening drizzle. "In Cairo, they put me and another guy in the trunk of a car - I'm tall, and he was a fat guy - and drove us for four, five, six hours through Sinai."
Nevertheless, the refugees keep coming. Early last Friday morning, 123 Sudanese reportedly crossed over. Every week, dozens more arrive and are held by the IDF, then - if there is no more room in Ketziot prison in the Negev, which there usually isn't - they're taken to Beersheba and pointed in the direction of the buses leaving for Tel Aviv.
By summer 2006, in the first year of the migration, there were fewer than 200 African refugees in this country. By last summer, there were about 2,000. Today there are some 6,000, according to local UN and refugee aid officials.
The oft-cited example of Menachem Begin's granting of asylum to 66 Vietnamese boat people in 1977 no longer applies to the situation here. Neither is this mainly about Darfurians escaping genocide - only 500 to 600 refugees are from Sudan's Darfur region, and they are the only asylum-seekers the government has agreed to let stay, granting them temporary resident status.
It's not correct to say that the country is being swamped or overwhelmed by African refugees. The majority are now working on farms, in factories, in restaurants, cleaning houses and doing other bottom-wage jobs. Furthermore, their number is small compared to the roughly 200,000 foreign laborers in this country, about half of whom are here illegally. If foreigners willing to do the lowest jobs at the lowest pay were really such a threat, they wouldn't have been allowed to settle here for the last 20 years.
The potential threat, rather, comes from the millions more African refugees in Egypt, and the ones thinking of going to Egypt from Sudan, Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Congo, Kenya, Sierra Leone and other destitute, deadly African nations. About the only way Israel can avoid presenting a temptation for them is to become even more menacing to refugees than Egypt and the rest of Africa are - which is probably an impossible thing for a prosperous democracy to be.
Another means of stopping the migration that's out of the question, at least for now, is sending them back to Egypt. The government tried that once - last summer with a group of refugees that included 44 Sudanese, and despite Egypt's promises not to send them back to Sudan, it deported at least five of them, exposing them to the vengeance of the Sudanese government they'd already risked their lives to escape.
As for sending the Eritreans back home, the government is heeding the reported warning from local UN officials that this would put them in the same sort of mortal danger that deported Sudanese would face. Recently, Malta and Libya deported dozens of refugees back to Eritrea, and it is suspected they were either killed or tortured in prison, says Tally Kritzman, an attorney who represents many Eritreans for Tel Aviv University's Refugee Rights Clinic.
