The only democratic state in the Middle East sharing western values …
- The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants reported on Tuesday that three asylum seekers who left Israel for a third country over the past year have been executed by the Islamic State in Libya. According to the report, the victims were identified by family members and friends.
Before Israel built a multi-billion dollar fence separating it from the Sinai frontier, 60,000 African refugees fled civil wars, famine and poverty to find a new life there. I wish I could say that Israel had learned any lesson from the Jewish history of suffering and exile, and that it treated these refugees with decency.
Israeli Jews in Tel Aviv have mounted pogroms against them replete with beatings and firebombing of African stores. The government built concentration camp like facilities for them amidst the Negev moonscape. Israel deported some of the refugees to Sudan, where they were promptly arrested for traveling to Israel, a country to which travel is banned. The government sought desperately to find another African country that would accept them. It struck paydirt in the Rwandan dictator, Paul Kagame, the Butcher of Congo. In return for military hardware, Rwanda agreed to accept deported Africans. What happened to them after they left Israel and touched down in Rwanda was no longer the “Jewish state’s” problem.
Israel then set about persuading the Africans to leave Israel “voluntarily.” Given a choice between a desert detention facility with no hope of a normal life in Israel and a new start elsewhere, a few agreed to go. They were fed a $3,500 bribe and the false promise of work visas in Rwanda.
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At least three (and possibly more) of the victims were identified by family in Israel as their relatives, who’d been deported by Israel to Rwanda:“I recognized my relative, T., from the photos published by ISIS that appeared on Facebook before the video was released,” says Mesi Fashiya, an Israeli-born Eritrean whose parents came to Israel in the 70s. “I thought it was him, but then ISIS announced that it was a group of Ethiopians, so I began to look into it. The people at the Holot detention center also saw the photos — they hoped it was only photos, and that they didn’t really kill them. After they released the video there was no doubt…
T…came to Israel through Egypt in 2007. He lived with her for a period of time, and the two became close. According to her, T.’s mental state deteriorated after being sent to Holot, and despite her promises to try and do everything to release him, he eventually decided to sign a voluntary departure form and was deported to a third country — Rwanda or Uganda. T.’s brother, who lives in Norway, told Fashiya that T. attempted to reach Europe. He crossed Sudan and reached Libya, where he got on a boat to Europe that was turned back. The last thing they heard was that he was in a Libyan prison.
…”They [ISIS] are doing twisted things there, beheading them and then placing the heads on the bodies. It is terrible. It is difficult to believe that these things happen, even to people you don’t know. But when it happens to someone you do know, a relative who was promised a better life when he leaves, and this is what happens in the end.
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African refugees deported by Israel to their eventual deaths at ISIS' hands on the Libyan coast. (Eritrea-chat.com)The surviving family told Haaretz that after landing in Rwanda, that country immediately sent them packing:
According to Mesi, T. “went back to Uganda or Rwanda – I think Rwanda – where they are not accepted. From there he went on to Sudan, and from Sudan to Libya.” She said that he was not able to remain in Libya, and tried to reach Europe by boat. “I understood that the boat was returned to Libya,” she said, “where they were arrested. Rumors have it that the extreme Islamic group snatched them from the jail itself.”
The rest is grisly history.
Israel’s abuse of African refugees exposes Zionism’s xenophobia
In 2012, Israel built an expensive high-tech fence along its land border with Africa. But in the six years previous, about 60,000 people fled political repression and ethnic cleansing on the African continent, trekked across the Sinai Peninsula, crossed the border into Israel and requested asylum. Two-thirds of these refugees, Eritreans, were escaping slavery, the other third, Sudanese, were escaping ethnic cleansing.
These 60,000 people amount to just half a per cent of the population residing in Israeli-controlled territory, and just a tiny fraction of the 50 million refugees in the world today, the highest tally since World War Two. According to the international refugee law it co-signed and co-authored after the horror of the Holocaust, Israel should have accepted their asylum applications and allowed them to live full lives.
Instead, Israel refused to grant almost any of the Africans legal work permits, keeping them impoverished. It funneled them into the country’s poorest neighbourhoods without investing any extra resources in those ghettos, increasing competition for scarce resources and generating resentment against them. It then incited extra racism against them, accusing them of being diseased criminals and potential terrorists.
The government’s unwillingness to allow these refugees to resettle in Israel is particularly egregious, because it receives tens of millions of dollars from the United States every single year for that explicit purpose. In the past decade, Congress has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in refugee aid money to the Israeli government, who funnel it to the Jewish Agency, a sectarian group that only assists Jews and has not spent a penny on any actual asylum-seekers.
Racist incitement by political and religious leaders has caused hatred of the African asylum-seekers to mushroom to alarming levels. Israeli Jews have smashed African storefronts, firebombed African homes and a kindergarten, and attacked African people in the streets, even stabbing a one-year-old African baby in downtown Tel Aviv. If they are caught, the perpetrators of these acts of racist violence are given mere slaps on the wrist, no more.
With public sympathy for the asylum-seekers all but extinguished, the government passed a law permitting it to round Africans up off the streets, out of Israeli cities, and into desert containment camps. Once there, the government applies its stated policy to “make their lives miserable”, in order to pressure them to grudgingly agree to be deported back to the tortures they originally fled from, instead of languishing in these jails for what might be the rest of their lives.
