Israel in landmark UN deal to resettle asylum seekers in the West

The Israeli government has announced that it has reached a landmark agreement with the United Nations to scrap its contested plans to deport African asylum seekers and would resettle many of them in Western countries instead.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the “unprecedented understandings” with the UN refugee agency would send more than 16,000 migrants to various Western countries that are willing to absorb them. It said the new deal would be implemented in three stages over five years, with much of those remaining in Israel integrated and granted official status.

Netanyahu and his interior minister, Arieh Deri, are to make a formal announcement shortly, according to the prime minister’s office.

The deal lifts the threat of a forced expulsion to unnamed African destinations, widely believed to be Rwanda and Uganda, with whom Israel had reached a secret agreement.

The Africans, nearly all from dictatorial Eritrea and wartorn Sudan, say they fled for their lives and faced renewed danger if they returned. Israel has said it considers the vast majority of the 35,000-40,000 migrants to be job seekers and has said it has no legal obligation to keep them.

Critics at home and in the Jewish American community have called the government’s proposed response unethical and a stain on Israel’s image as a refuge for Jewish migrants.

The world is grappling with the worst refugee crisis world-wide since World War II, something that has struck a raw nerve in Israel, which was established in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The issue of black asylum seekers accusing the country of racism has turned into a public relations liability for Israel, and groups of Israeli doctors, academics, poets, Holocaust survivors, rabbis and pilots have all called for the plan to be halted. Before yesterday’s announcement, the government had remained steadfast, bristling at what it considered cynical comparisons to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany.

African asylum seekers started moving toward Israel in 2005, after neighbouring Egypt violently quashed a refugee demonstration and word spread of safety and job opportunities in Israel. Tens of thousands crossed the porous desert border before Israel completed a barrier in 2012 that stopped the influx. But Israel struggled with what to do with those already in the country, alternating between planstodeportthemandoffering them menial jobs in hotels and local municipalities. Thousands of the migrants concentrated in neighbourhoods in south Tel Aviv, where ethnic food shops and phone card stalls line the streets, and the area has become known as “Little Africa”.