Sudanese refugees pose ethical dilemma for Israel
By Joel Greenberg
March 17, 2007 (MAALEH HAHAMISHA, Israel) — With hip dreadlocks, casual sweat shirt and assumed name he uses around this kibbutz, David, a young African, hardly seems like a survivor from one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
But he is a refugee from strife-torn Darfur, one of about 340 Sudanese who have made their way to Israel in the past two years, sneaking across the border from Egypt only to be arrested and jailed as infiltrators from an enemy state.
Some incarcerated, some confined to kibbutzes, the Sudanese have posed an ethical dilemma for Israel, a country created as a haven for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and now faced with the arrival of refugees from what some world leaders have called another genocide.
The Israeli government argues it must be cautious with infiltrators from Sudan, a country listed by the U.S. as a sponsor of terrorism and suspected of being a base for Al Qaeda and Palestinian militant groups.
But Holocaust experts and human-rights activists have criticized the treatment of the refugees, asserting that Israel should feel especially obligated by its own history and values to welcome them.
David, 26, lost his father and brother in Darfur when Arab militiamen loyal to the Sudanese government attacked and torched his village three years ago. His elderly father was burned alive in the family home, and his brother was shot before his eyes. The fate of his mother and sister is unknown.
He was detained and tortured in Khartoum and eventually made his way to Egypt.
In Israel, David was jailed for a year before a judicial review officer ruled he could be moved to a kibbutz or moshav farming collective, where he and other refugees do menial work and can’t leave without escort.
The refugees are in limbo. Denied asylum in Israel and unable to go back to Sudan, they lack any recognized status that would enable them to move and work freely.
“I don’t know who I am,” David said. “Without documents, I can’t travel. I go from my work to my room and I can’t go out. I lost a year for nothing, and I’m worried about my future.”
Like other refugees, David did not give his real name for fear of retribution against relatives still in Sudan.
About half the detained refugees remain in prison. The rest have been released to restricted living arrangements at communal farms and villages, many after spending a year or more behind bars. Women with children are taken in by a privately run shelter.
Muslims and Christians
At least a third of the Sudanese refugees are Muslims from Darfur and the rest are Christians from southern Sudan and people fleeing conflict in other areas of the country, according to United Nations officials and Israeli human-rights groups.
The treatment of the refugees, particularly those who have made harrowing escapes from Darfur, has brought protests in Israel.
“As Jews who have the memory of the Holocaust embedded in us, we cannot stand by as refugees from the genocide in Darfur knock on our doors,” Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, said during a visit there by a group of the refugees this week. “The memory of the past, and the Jewish values that underpin our existence, require us to show humanitarian solidarity with the persecuted.”
The Darfur conflict, which has included deadly assaults on civilians by government-backed militias, has been called a genocide by the U.S. According to estimates, more than 200,000 people have died since fighting broke out in 2003, and more than 2.5 million have been forced from their homes.
Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli historian and Holocaust scholar, submitted a brief to the Israeli Supreme Court in support of a petition by two rights groups, the Hotline for Migrant Workers and the Refugees Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University, which compelled the authorities to grant judicial review.
“As a Jew and as an Israeli, I feel that I have an obligation,” Bauer said in a telephone interview. “These people should be granted asylum in Israel, because we cannot deal with refugees from a genocide the way the British dealt with German Jews who reached Britain in the beginning of World War II and were put in internment camps.”
The Sudanese trek across Egypt’s Sinai desert and pay Bedouin smugglers to help them cross the remote border, usually giving themselves up to Israeli army patrols. Most are driven by increasing hardship in Egypt, where they lack residence and work permits and have been subject to arrest.
Nearly 30 Sudanese were killed in Cairo in December 2005 when police broke up a refugee protest. The incident raised fears of deportation and led to more refugees making their way to Israel.
Possible security risk
The Israeli government has argued in court that because it cannot investigate the background of all the Sudanese, they are assumed to pose a risk. Some officials have warned that if the refugees are granted asylum, it could lead to a flood of Sudanese at Israel’s borders.
“No one is being sent back,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. “But when you look at the volume of the problem and the capabilities of Israel, it’s clear that Israel cannot be expected to be the solution.”
Regev said his ministry is working with the UN to resettle the refugees elsewhere.
Anat Ben-Dor, an attorney at the Refugee Rights Clinic, said that by failing to grant asylum, Israel is violating clauses of international conventions on refugees that it helped sponsor in the aftermath of World War II.
UN officials, who have been interviewing the newcomers to determine who should be granted refugee status, have so far failed to persuade other countries to take the Sudanese.
In the refugees’ dilapidated living quarters at Maaleh Hahamisha–a few bare rooms with beds on linoleum floors–David has hung an Israeli flag.
It represents a hope that the country will eventually grant him asylum, just as it did to a group of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and Bosnian Muslim refugees in the 1990s.
“I love this country,” David said. “My future is here.”
(Chicago Tribune )