African refugees in Israel must stay in limbo or flee to danger
TEL AVIV, Israel – In a dusty detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, Tomas Yomani, an asylum- seeker from Eritrea in East Africa, has been biding his time for nine months while under the watch of Israeli guards.
Yomani, 30, can’t work because the nearest city is hours away. And if he misses roll call, taken three times a day, he could be deported to another African country and risk personal danger eight years after he fled Eritrea amid human rights abuses.
“I live in fear always,” he told USA TODAY in a phone interview from the camp, called Holot, or “sands” in Hebrew. “I left my country because I was afraid of being imprisoned, and now I am imprisoned again.”
Thousands of African asylumseekers like Yomani face grim choices: Stay in Israel, where they are safe but with limited freedom, or agree to Israel’s relocation program that sends refugees to Rwanda or Uganda to face more persecution and danger.
“Israel is a democratic country. I didn’t think it should be this way,” Yomani said.
Israel’s treatment of African refugees has come under attack from local human rights groups, who say a country founded by Jewish refugees persecuted during World War II should be more understanding of the asylum- seekers’ plight.
“The entire world is dealing with millions of refugees. It’s baseless for Israel, a developed country, to claim that it cannot take its part in carrying the burden,” said Dror Sadot, spokesperson for the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli human rights group.
Israel has granted asylum to only nine African refugees, one of the lowest acceptance rates among industrialized democracies, Sadot said.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in October that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed a deal with Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the U. N. in September to deport African migrants from Israel to Rwanda. The alleged agreement drew a rebuke from human rights groups.
The Israeli government refused to comment on the report, but Netanyahu referred to the arrangement in September when he told a Cabinet meeting, “In my visits to Africa and conversations with African leaders, I have created a base of countries will- ing to absorb these infiltrators.”
Israel has “the right, as in every country, to supervise our borders and remove anyone who is here illegally,” Netanyahu said, and Africans who have arrived in recent years “posed a real threat to the future of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
African refugees who are Jewish are granted automatic asylum in Israel, as are Jews from anywhere in the world.
The current African asylum- seekers are overwhelmingly Muslims and Christians from Eritrea and Sudan who chose Israel because of its geographical proximity and reputation as a democracy.
The asylum- seekers, most escaping genocide in Sudan or repression in Eritrea, first arrived to Israel in 2006.