Not all fun and games in the park

Yohannes Bayu could arguably be considered the greatest migrant success story in Israel’s brief history, a poster child for what the human spirit is capable of overcoming if allowed an opportunity.

Educated, eloquent, determined, Bayu could have chosen to resettle in any other country after being forced to flee his native Ethiopia and the oppressive government that did not take too kindly to his political activities there. In 1997, when it came time to choose a place to seek refuge, he naturally looked toward the Middle East.

“Israel was my first choice,” says Bayu, a 40-year-old bespectacled man with a calm disposition and a soft-spoken manner that immediately puts his guest at ease. “Normally, refugees don’t choose where to go. When they flee danger, they run away from wherever they are. Then they look for any place that’s safe. So you try one area, and when you realize that area is now safe, then you try another and then another. That’s normally what a refugee goes through. My case is a bit different because I chose to come here. I have to facilitate myself, and I had access to get a visa anywhere in the world.”

As an activist in nongovernmental organizations dedicated to raising HIV- and AIDS-awareness, Bayu had amassed considerable contacts among foreign groups and aid officials.

Had he so chosen, he could have requested a permit to relocate to the United States, where his brother currently lives. Nonetheless, he insisted on Israel.

“Ethiopia and Israel have a natural kind of connection,” he says from the offices of the African Refugee Development Center, the nonprofit aid organization that he founded and which helps migrants attain legal status and resettlement in safe countries.

“The major thing that made me come here [was the fact that] Israel was a signatory country to the 1951 Refugee Convention [the UN document that stipulates countries’ obligations in defining refugee status and offering physical protection for those deemed to have fled areas of conflict and danger],” he says.

The historical context of Israel’s creation was also a key determining factor for Bayu.

“Because of all that history, all of Jewish history and the Holocaust, I thought to myself, ‘That’s the best place to get protection, because they know what it means to flee a country feeling persecution.’ So I thought I would get a level of protection here that isn’t available anywhere else in the world,” he says. “I was disappointed. It’s not what I expected.”

BAYU, WHO is one of just 150 foreigners that have been granted refugee status in Israel, has been living in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem for years. Every day he commutes to south Tel Aviv, which has become the center of racial strife that has been exacerbated by recent events. The news media has been awash with reports of neighborhood tensions and violence directed toward migrants and asylum-seekers from Sudan and Eritrea. Late last month, a neighborhood rally in south Tel Aviv attended by right-wing lawmakers spun out of control, with some demonstrators smashing the windshields of African motorists in the working-class Hatikva quarter.

African-owned shops and restaurants were ransacked and looted and a number of migrants were assaulted.

Now the government’s plans to build large-scale detention centers in the South for migrants as well as the arrests that have begun in preparation for deportations in an effort to assuage the anger of local residents in the communities have angered Bayu and others who insist that the state undertake its obligations under international law to provide for asylum-seekers.

“Every country has a right to have a proper policy to deal with the situation, but Israel doesn’t have a right to detain asylum-seekers and refugees because Israel signed the international convention, period,” he says. “By international law, you cannot detain refugees.

Countries can temporarily hold people until their status is determined, but after that you must release that person. We strongly object to this kind of treatment. You cannot put them in a camp.”

Government officials believe that holding migrants in a detention center would dissuade others from attempting to cross the border from Sinai. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is also touting plans to build a fence along Israel’s southern frontier, though the effectiveness of this measure would be limited, according to Bayu.

“Israel has put in millions and millions of shekels into a fence, which has been tried in many countries in an effort to stem the tide of migrants,” he says. “It’s a waste of money, but Israel has a right to do so. We do not object.”

“The state is about to spend billions on a camp for detained migrants, but if it would spend that money here, south Tel Aviv would become Geneva. That’s what the people are demanding.”

For Bayu, who waged a prolonged legal battle and a 23-day hunger strike until the High Court forced the state to grant him permanent residency and recognize him as a refugee five years after arriving in the country, the solution to the migrant problem is a relatively simple one: granting the estimated 60,000 Sudanese and Eritreans the right to work legally.

“We want to find a solution not for the refugees, but for the state, for the neighborhood,” he says. “On the one hand you know you can’t send them back tomorrow, in a week, in a month, or in one year. On the other hand, you don’t provide these people with the necessary documents to integrate into all of society. You’re talking about 60,000 people today [although some estimates put the number of migrants in the coutry at 70,000 to 80,000). If you provide them with the proper documents, you won’t even see that these people are in existence. You don’t see them. Everyone will disperse.”

“They are concentrating in one area [south Tel Aviv] because that is where they get support. The government policy until now has been putting them together in one area, but if you provide them with something, they will go to different places. If I have a work permit, I don’t need my community to support me. I would support myself. Then I can go to Ashdod, or wherever, and I’d find a job. [It’s the government] that is creating this problem [by having the migrants] concentrate in one area.”

Part of that support system includes Israeli volunteers who have donated food and clothing to hundreds of Africans who have camped out in Levinsky Park, just a few meters from the new central bus station in Tel Aviv.

Yigal Shtayim, a Tel Aviv-based painter, was roused to come to the aid of refugees after the Knesset passed controversial legislation in January that permitted the state to imprison illegal aliens for a period of up to three years and to levy harsh fines against Israeli business owners who employed them. This year, he founded Soup4Levinsky, a volunteerbased program that invites citizens to bring homemade food to the migrants in south Tel Aviv. Shtayim says that the recent violence and tensions have only helped his cause.

“It has only heightened the motivation,” he says. “It’s brought us more donations and more volunteers. It may be paradoxical for those who planned otherwise, and I’ll tell you why. This horrible incitement against these people harms those who care for the truth. You can’t say that an entire group of tens of thousands of people are all rapists and thieves. It’s just inconceivable.”

Shtayim insists that the portrayal of migrants as criminals is off-base. As evidence, he cites statistics published by the Knesset’s Research and Information Center, which commissioned a study that concluded that the rate of crime among migrants is less than half of the Israeli average.

“I’m at greater risk of being the victim of crime talking to an Israeli than I would be talking to a refugee,” Shtayim says. “It’s such an ugly lie, and it reverberates among the Jewish population. The Jews have a much greater awareness of what it is to be a refugee, and you don’t need to be a genius to understand what is going on in Sudan. There is an entire industry of injustice at work here. I always tell those who oppose the migrants, ‘Even if we have to expel them tomorrow, there’s no reason we should expel them while they’re hungry.’” So far, the local residents have not been receptive to Shtayim’s message.

Avi, a taxi driver who lives across the street from Levinsky Park, insisted on using an alias for fear of retribution if his name appeared in a newspaper or media outlet. Having just finished his shift, he is chatting with a friend at a local felafel eatery adjacent to the park, taking stock of the scene in front of him: hundreds of African asylum-seekers sprawled out on a lawn and altering the landscape en masse. He says he keeps his friend company at night out of fear that one of them might be mugged or assaulted.

“We didn’t emerge from the death camps in Europe in order for us to now begin feeding the entire continent of Africa,” he says indignantly. “It’s not possible, either. We are not the right people for the job. Now, what you have here is a really unpleasant situation.

“On the one hand, we have people who are here illegally as infiltrators,” he says. “They come here illegally. If your enemy had entered the country in the same way, he would either take a bullet to the face or he would have to sit and answer questions posed to him by the IDF or whoever catches him. And they certainly wouldn’t free him and allow him to roam around Tel Aviv and Levinsky Park or anywhere else in the country.

“This is a very inconvenient lifestyle [for the residents of south Tel Aviv] because we, the white locals, seem like an easy bunch to deal with – people with a lot of money living the good life,” he says. “We are almost in the exact same situation as them, except that we are living off a small salary; but we don’t have that much. There is a tension here with the migrants in the neighborhood, and people do not know how to live with this tension. It’s an unpleasant situation and a very sensitive one.”

Avi makes no effort to conceal his desire to see the migrants leave despite the fact that he has had positive, even friendly encounters with them.

“I’m a cab driver,” he says. “I haven’t experienced any unpleasant incident or anything like that. I can say this unequivocally. Perhaps because it is because I know how to speak English, or maybe it is because I’m quite the chit-chatter, or because I’m a street guy. They come into my cab and they pay and they behave like normal human beings. I haven’t encountered any instance in which somebody tried to sneak out of payment or not pay cab fare. As a cab driver, I can say that my encounters with them are very nice and warm. When you asked me if I experienced any unpleasant episodes, I won’t lie to you and say that I have. But I certainly can understand other people who are bothered by them.”

Avi says the anger of the local residents stems not from the difference in the Africans’ appearance but from the authorities’ lax enforcement of laws and city ordinances in relation to the migrants, which create a situation in which Jews are victims of discrimination in their own country.

“Let’s say you’re an Israeli citizen who was born here and served in the army,” he says. “There are bereaved families, families who have lost relatives, brothers, sisters, parents. They mourned relatives on the altar of this state, and suddenly they [the migrants] arrive and rent shops. The day that my friend opened up a felafel stand, the Tel Aviv Municipality came to him asking for permits, business licenses, health licenses, municipal tax, value added tax, you name it. If I go with you to every place where a Sudanese or an Eritrean opened up a business, you’ll see that nobody there pays municipal taxes.

“They’ve started opening supermarkets. In the past, they’d open up tiny kiosks where they would sell to their friends. Nowadays, these kiosks have turned into coffee shops with room for 300 customers. If a local resident would open up an establishment that size here in the center of the city, it would cost them a fortune, and the municipality would be in their face, preying on their every move. If you’re Eritrean or Sudanese or anywhere else from Africa, nobody will even bother to check how many bottles of beer or wine they sell.

You should see how they sit in these shops all day and all night drinking and getting drunk. The businesses there are open as if they are detached from the State of Israel.

“This is Little South Sudan,” he says.

DANIEL LEV, a 33-year-old business owner who opened a restaurant on Levinsky Street six months ago, is aghast at how radically the fabric of the neighborhood has been altered in the last five years.

“Once, south Tel Aviv was an area where a lot of young people hung out,” says Lev, himself a resident of Kiryat Shalom. “Nowadays it’s all foreigners and migrants. Even the Filipino migrant workers have left because they’re afraid to walk around here at night.”

“People are afraid to come eat in my restaurant,” he says. “There are rapes and muggings left and right, at any time of the day. People have stopped getting off the buses here. They used to get off the bus and walk around Levinsky Street to go shopping, but now they just prefer to go straight to the central bus station and walk around there for half an hour before going home. Women no longer feel safe walking around here. Businesses on this street have seen their profits fall by 80 percent. At 8 in the evening, this street used to be packed with people. Now it’s empty.

“There is great fear here, and it’s serious,” he says, adding that he has witnessed instances of assault committed by migrants against one another. “I’m afraid of getting mugged; I’m afraid of getting killed.”

Lev is resentful of the perception that has taken hold among segments of the public that have come to view south Tel Avivians as intolerant racists who reject the migrants simply by virtue of their skin color. He says that Jewish volunteers who have come to the migrants’ aid are misinformed and that the Africans are not as destitute as one might think.

“Jews and racism don’t go together,” he said. “If we weren’t Jewish, [deporting the migrants] wouldn’t be a problem.”

“All of these people in line for food aren’t here because they have nowhere to sleep and they have no money in their pockets,” he says, pointing toward the Africans waiting to be fed by Soup4Levinsky. “Most of them are working and most of them have money. They sleep in the park to save on expenses, because they know that in the winter and the summer there will be people who will help them. What do you think? That a migrant would prefer to pay money to rent an apartment with 10 other people when he can sleep in the park for free? For them, it’s a hotel. They get up in the morning and people feed them omelets.

“If you ask an Eritrean, and I have friends from Eritrea who have been here since 2007 and they are wonderful people who speak Hebrew, they will tell you that they are willing to work for 2,000 or 3,000 shekels per month and sleep on the street so they can save on expenses,” he says.

One of Lev’s customers is Assomou Ano Jean, a 34-year-old migrant from civil war-torn Ivory Coast. He has spent 12 years in Israel and has no plans of leaving, especially now that his fiveyear- old daughter has started kindergarten.

If the government has its way, Ano Jean will be repatriated back to his country, as will migrants from Ghana, South Sudan and Ethiopia who are in the country illegally.

“I came to Israel because of the politics in my country,” he says. “I came here as a foreigner, and I had refugee status but it was canceled. The government says I have to go back to Ivory Coast since they won’t renew my residency status, but I don’t want to go back. The situation is not safe in Ivory Coast. If I go back now, people there will see that I’ve returned from abroad and they’ll assume that I have money, so they will kidnap me. They can attack me at night, and I have my [three] children to worry about.”

Avi foresees another difficulty in repatriating Africans who he believes will insist on staying in the country, a prospect that he finds worrisome to the state’s Zionist character.

“When you ask a question about a foreign population here in the Land of Israel, then you are asking yourself a number of questions,” he says. “Why did the State of Israel first come into existence? To serve what purpose? So that we are now going to start feeding the entire world? It’s absurd.”

Bayu, however, disagrees. He says the government’s drive to expel the migrants to countries in the midst of political strife and war will pose a threat to their well-being.

“The refugees are not here forever,” he says. “They’re not here to live forever. The vast majority want to go back [to Africa]. There may be a few individuals who do not want to go back because of a reason, because they saw when their family was killed in front of them or because they fled a war and they would like to stay far away from that. There aren’t many like that, but the majority is eager to go back.”

The ARDC chairman accuses Israeli politicians of stoking the public’s fears of foreigners while disseminating lies about the dire humanitarian situation in their homeland. He dismisses suggestions that the migrants came here solely for economic reasons.

“That’s what the government says, and that is what the migrants say openly, but privately they will tell you that they cannot go back [home],” he says. “The politicians know this. This is how they create this kind of incitement. There are so many reasons behind that. Some of them are getting popularity and attention which will help them stay in office. You see some members of Knesset are popping up who you’ve never heard of. This is an advantage for them. They want to run for office, so they come into the neighborhood and engage in incitement. If Israel was able to send them back, this would’ve happened long ago.”

Not all fun and games in the park

As the government begins to implement measures that will reduce the country’s migrant population, infiltrators and south Tel Aviv residents agree on one thing: the status quo is unsustainable.