Netanyahu pledges to deport African migrants

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged various steps to deport more of the country’s remaining 38,000 African migrants.

At Sunday’s cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said, “I have decided to establish a special ministerial committee that will meet already this week with representatives of local [south Tel Aviv] residents... in order to set in motion practical solutions to this problem.”

“The main purpose will be to return the neighborhoods to their local residents and to deport illegal infiltrators from Israel whose place is not here, just as we have deported around 20,000,” he said.

The prime minister told a story about meeting a 72-year-old woman named Sofia who he said was having many difficulties because her building, in which she lives on the sixth floor, was “filled with illegal infiltrators.”

He also took a shot at the High Court of Justice about the status of most of the migrants.

In the past, the court has ruled that most of the migrants meet the international Convention on Refugees protections for being unable to be returned to their countries of origin – mostly Eritrea and Sudan.

Netanyahu emphasized that he viewed the migrants as infiltrators who “were not refugees. A very small number of them are refugees. They are illegal infiltrators [who are looking] to find work in the State of Israel and we have the right like any nation to guard our borders and to remove from our borders whoever entered illegally.”

Further, the prime minister said he had saved the country from having its Jewish majority endangered by ordering the building of a border wall between Egypt and Israel, which cut-off what had become a flow of sometimes thousands of illegal migrants per month.

In related developments, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Interior Minister Arye Deri met to plan legislation to circumvent the impact of last week’s major High Court ruling, which undermined a major aspect of the government’s migrants’ policy.

The key aspect was a decision that the government cannot detain thousands of migrants indefinitely who do not have refugee status and who refuse deportation to an unnamed country in Africa in exchange for a few thousand shekels.

The crux of the work-arounds that the government appears to be considering are finding a new third-country who will receive the migrants even if they are deported involuntarily.

Rwanda and Uganda have been receiving deported migrants, but only those who self-deport.

The decision marked the fourth time that the High Court in recent years has fully or partially scrapped a government policy to aggressively pressure African migrants to leave the country who entered illegally.

In the years leading up to 2012, a flood of African migrants crossed into Israel illegally, at one point reaching around 64,000.

Since then, the government has tried a variety of pressure tactics, including extended or indefinite detention, to reduce the number of migrants, while taking harsh criticism from the human rights community and the High Court.

Broken into three main parts, while the key decision, blocking indefinite detention, went against the government, two other parts of the High Court decision came out in the government’s favor.

Regarding the issues of whether the state’s deporting migrants to an unnamed third country is a sound policy and whether the state is performing sufficient oversight on what happens to the migrants, the High Court confirmed the state’s policy.