BY NICOLE SCHILIT
The 100 men packed tightly in the barren room suffered from different degrees of malnourishment, a visible marker that distinguished how long each had spent in the prison. The worst off had been jailed up to four years. They were being held as prisoners in a military detention center in Eritrea, but none of them had been tried or convicted in a court.
Kedane recollects the conditions within the 5 x 10 meter room he shared with 99 other men during his four-month stay in the prison. When he talks about his imprisonment, which took place between a failed and successful escape attempt from the country, he refers to the torture and beatings nonchalantly because they had become a regrettable but normal part of life in Eritrea. In addition to the physical torture Kedane and the others were not provided clean water and were nearly starved to death. They were held in an underground cell with extreme temperatures, sweltering during the day and freezing at night. Kedane was one of the lucky ones who made it out and eventually reached Israel. When he thinks back on it it now he says, “ It was like what the Jewish people face…. maybe. It was similar” to the Holocaust.
Isayas, also a refugee from Eritrea, explains how his determination to be free motivated him to eventually escape from prison. “I could not live like this. I literally had no choice. No option was worse than it was at that time,” he said. After trying unsuccessfully to dig himself out of his cell using a fork, Isayas realized his only chance was to end up in the infirmary. He settled on poisoning himself. After he ingested bleach Isayas did make it to the prison infirmary, but he almost died in the process. When Isayas was chained to his hospital bed he slipped his skinny malnourished wrist through the handcuff and escaped. After that he walked for 72 hours on foot before reaching temporary safety.
Kedane and Isayas were born in Eritrea and this story of leaving their country is not unique. Like many others, they are fleeing mandatory, indefinite military service, arbitrary arrests, torture, and imprisonments without charges, trials, or lawyers. They are leaving a country with no freedom of movement and where they are always afraid of who is watching them. After gaining their independence from neighboring Ethiopia 20 years ago, Eritreans endure dismal conditions and what has essentially been the elimination of any form of civil society. These are the reasons persuading many Eritreans to risk the chance of imprisonment to escape the country.
Domoz was imprisoned for only three months in Eritrea. When he was caught at the border trying to escape he called the American woman he worked for. He asked her to contact the authorities and tell them that he had stolen money from her. The sentence for theft is significantly shorter than the sentence for being caught leaving the military service and trying to escape the country. That much was clear, but when asked about how the actual sentences were for each crime Domoz responded, “What is the punishment? There is no punishment in this country, it depends on the day.” Had Domoz been convicted of fleeing he likely would have been in prison for three to four years.
Some people who flee Eritrea end up in refugee camps in northern Ethiopia, however many of the travel through Sudan, often making several stops, each that may last anywhere from a few weeks to over a year. From Sudan smugglers help refugees from all over Africa cross over to start a new life in a country that they believe will be better than where they started. Since 2007, more than 35,000 non-Jewish African refugees, most from Eritrea and Sudan, have been smuggled into Egypt and across to the border it shares with Israel.
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Zebib waited in the shortest line for her turn to be interrogated. The lines on either side of her, designated for Arabic, and Tigrinya speakers were much longer but the fact that she had learned English in Eritrea gave her an advantage. Zebib had just arrived in Israel after crossing the border from Egypt into Israel during the night. During her intake interview she could barely stop crying long enough to answer the interrogator’s questions. She was not sad, just overwhelmed and exhausted from the stressful journey.
During the interview a man asked Zebib to verify details about the town she was born in to confirm she was who she said she was. The interviewer even knew who the leader of her military camp had been. Many Ethiopians try to come into Israel through the same means as the Eritreans. When they arrive they lie and say they are Eritrean because they think it will help them. Although Israelis make this distinction between Eritreans and Ethiopians, the Jewish state’s media denies that the conditions in Eritrea are that bad and refers to them as infiltrators instead of asylum seekers.
In many ways Zebib was lucky, her journey through Sinai in Egypt mild compared to many other Eritreans attempting to come through to Israel. Had she come just six months later she likely would have been held hostage by Bedouin smugglers who demand up to three or four times the amount of money a refugee had already paid. The refugees who have been held hostage were physically restrained and beaten until they were able to collect the obscene amount of money from their family back in Eritrea or in some cases family or friends already resettled somewhere else in the world. The refugees are spoken to frankly by the Bedouins who inform that they being hostile and demanding more money because they are Christians and believe that the Eritreans are going to Israel as part of a larger scheme to attack Arabs. The Sudanese, who are largely Muslim, are exempt from this treatment when they travel through Egypt.
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Maya Paley is an American Israeli currently working at ASSAF, (Hebrew acronym for “Organization for Aiding Refugees”), an Israeli non-profit organization that runs programs to support and protect African refugees including Kedane, Isayas, Domoz, and Zebib. Maya has long black curly hair that juts out of her head and creates a halo of curls that many of the male refugees compliment her on. More distinct than even Maya’s hair though is her voice, which rises several decibels above the general volume level in a room when she gets excited.
Maya has become very close with many of the refugees during the time she’s been working in Israel. For many African refugees living in Israel, Maya is the most stable and comforting component of their lives now. But still there is little she is able to do to change the conditions her friends face. The most obvious problems the refugees face are constant discrimination by passer byers as well as many employers.
“My boss gives me five hours worth of work to complete in two hours. While I am rushing the Israelis are working slow, they are relaxed and laughing,” Zebib says. Her hourly wage is less than her Israeli co-workers even though they do the same work. And Zebib never receives the money she has earned for working overtime at a cleaning company. But she is one of the luckier ones because she has a job and is able to work decent hours compared to Domoz who works 18 hour days, 6 days a week.
Isayas recently quit his job. He said it humiliated him to be paid so little. Back in Eritrea his PhD was recognized and he taught physics and was respected. Now all that is left of that world and his skills from it are the constant references he makes to matter and gravity that he includes as analogies in his speech, which is often about human dignity and democracy. He is incredibly focused on his duty to act as a representative for the refugee community in Tel Aviv, often volunteering to speak at different protests and rallies. Speaking in public allows him to harness his frustrations from his situation in Israel into something productive. While Maya supports Isayas participating in these activities, she is annoyed that he doesn’t take care of himself. She is often lecturing him that he has to eat food and cannot just smoke cigarettes instead of eating.
There are many times when Maya feels closer to the refugees than to other Israelis even. “Sometimes I feel like I am personally living on the fringes of Israeli society, along with the refugees I work with,” Maya said. “Out on dates men I’ve only just met have argued with me about the refugees, claiming that they are only here for money and that they do not belong in Israel.” Maya says that when these men have made general and false statements about the refugees that she feels it is her duty to respond and to explain who the refugees are. “Consequently, the conversation becomes very heavy and serious and usually ends with an awkward goodbye.” Maya has not been on many second dates.
This is the result of her supporting an unpopular issue among Israelis. According to her, many Israelis feel that organizations like ASSAF are promoting the deterioration of the Jewish character of the State of Israel by advocating on behalf of the rights of the refugees.
“I’m proud of the work I’m doing here. It is often the case that the person I’m meeting will want to argue with me right away, like they’ve been waiting to argue with someone about this for a long time.” She gives one recent example: a newly introduced friend asked what she did for a living before even learning her name “He instantly started yelling at me that he is against the refugees, that it bothers him to see them, and that he doesn’t care about them and they don’t belong here.” This person told Maya he knew more than she did and that she was wrong about them. People like this only fuel Maya’s commitment to her work advocating on behalf of the refugees who don’t have the opportunity to be heard themselves.
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The Israeli government’s solution to the problem has been to build a closed refugee camp in the Negev desert to house the “infiltrators”. The government says it intends to complete the facility within nine months. Maya explains that the Israeli government plans to make good on its policy barring asylum seekers from working. “Essentially, people will have a place to sleep, but they will be living in the middle of the desert in the south of the country and will not be permitted to work,” She said.
Many refugees have already been detained and treated as criminals without ever committing a crime in their respective countries. The detention center in Israel would only serve to further criminalize these innocent people, according to ASSAF. Maya says that “the main problem with detention in Israel is that because there is no proper Refugee Status Determination procedure and so few people are given refugee status here, asylum seekers can potentially be detained for indefinite periods of time, which is nothing short of inhumane.”
Many of the refugees, including Domoz who works exhausting shifts six days a week, feel that the state has begun a more aggressive approach with the media, bringing increased attention to the “problem” of African migrants through the use of propaganda. The government’s tactic of calling the refugees “infiltrators” instead of identifying them as the asylum seekers has raised public ire. More Israelis are speaking out against the refugees, and there is increased xenophobia because people are frustrated that the asylum seekers are sleeping in the parks near their homes.
The Mayor in Eilat, a southern beach town not far from the Egyptian border, is leading a campaign against the refugees by flying red flags on the lamp posts all around the city. He has even suggested building a fence around Eilat to prevent further “infiltrators” from entering the city. Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister has been quoted saying “We must stop the mass entry of illegal migrant workers because of the very serious threat to the character and future to the State of Israel,”
Yiftach Millo, the founder of ASSAF, says the extreme response by Israelis to the presence of the refugees comes from fear. They are scared that because they share a border with Africa that Israel will be flooded with even more Africans in the future, that there will be no end in sight. Others who are more sympathetic to the African population in Israel believe Israel’s major criticism is where they took the memory of the holocaust. Some say Israel took it and employed it as a nationalistic excuse of exclusion of Arabs, Palestinians, and refugees because they see these groups as a security threat and a demographic threat to the Jewish majority.
A nation that was originally established on the premise that it serve as a home to refugees is making it clear that unless you’re a Jewish refugee, you’re not welcome.
Earlier this year the Eritrean Ambassador to Israel, Tesfamariam Tekeste Debbas, told Israeli news sources that Eritrea will not accept the “infiltrators” back anymore. He claims that Israel should have sent the first one back in 2006, but now there are too many (up to 18,000) and it is too late for Israel to try this tactic. Israel only resettles a very small number of refugees each year in order to discourage future refugees from coming to Israel with the expectations that they will end up in the United States or Europe. And once the detention center is completed for incoming asylum seekers, Israeli employers will not be able to hire refugees as employees anymore, leaving the present population of refugees trapped in a country where they are not allowed to work. So the question now is, what will happen to the 18,000 Eritrean refugees already living in Israel?