After college, I lived in Egypt for a number of years. During my time there I volunteered to teach English to the refugee population, predominately from East Africa and Iraq. The classroom where I taught was nothing more than the bedroom of a rented apartment in a rickety building in a far off slum of metropolitan Cairo. The students — fifteen, twenty, twenty five in the room — would sit shoulder to shoulder, with barely enough space to write, looking up at me, hopeful and determined to learn English, a language that, statistically speaking, very few of them would have an opportunity to ever use in an English speaking country.
Whether the lesson was about passive voice or pronunciation, I was often amazed at their determination to continue their interrupted educations. Despite the loss of their homes and the hardship they faced in Cairo, here they were, taking a courageous step forward in the face of adversity.
Even among such a compelling crowd, there were a handful of students who really stood out. Daher, a young man about my age from Somalia, was one such student. He had soft eyes and an easy smile, exactly the type of features that made it so difficult to imagine him growing up in wartorn Mogadishu.
After class, he would wait patiently in the back of the classroom while other students asked their questions. Once they had shuffled out, he would approach and, with his kind smile, hand me a page torn from his notebook. Each week it was a different assortment of bizarre words, culled from English language TV. Telepathy. Garbage disposal. Fire engine. I realized that Daher spent most of his waking life in front of that TV because, like all refugees in Egypt, he was denied the right to work, and as a young Somali, was legitimate afraid of both the Egyptian police and the Sudanese gangs.
One day he didn’t show up for class. After his third absence, I began to worry about him. I asked some of the other Somali students, who said they hadn’t heard from or seen him. As the weeks turned to months, I began to lose faith that Daher had simply found a more spacious English class or a more experienced teacher, and to worry that he had been picked up by the police, notorious for their arbitrary detention of refugees.
So you can imagine my surprise when, months later, Daher called me. After the typical greetings, he said ” Guess where I am?” Knowing that Daher was a refugee with no travel documents and no permission to leave his country of asylum, I offered what I thought was an educated guess. “Are you in Egypt?” I ventured. He laughed. “No, I’m calling you from Tel Aviv.”
In a way, this wasn’t so surprising. It was 2008, a few years after the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, had drastically cut back on their resettlement program whereby thousands of refugees were able to begin new lives in Western countries. With the number of refugees growing quickly, and the resources allotted to each individual dwindling, many thousands of refugees were voting with their feet. They were rejecting the unsafe conditions in Egypt as well as the impotence of the UNHCR. Some were traveling to Libya and from there, braving the Medittereanian in dangerous vessels in order to reach southern Italy. Others were flying to Syria and then traveling by foot north, through Turkey and, finally, to Greece. And thousands, like Daher, were taking a less circuitous route through the Sinai to Israel, just a few hundred miles away.
Many were seeking refuge, and some economic opportunity, in places we know well, places we may have visited, places where we may have family and friends–Eilat, Tel Aviv, Beersheva, Jerusalem.
This week’s parshah (Shoftim) deals, in part, with the issue of asylum. God commands the Jews to establish “cities of refuge.” These cities would provide sanctuary to Israelites who have inadvertently killed another Israelite. The Torah provides the example of a woodcutter whose axe head flies off the handle, striking an onlooker and killing him. This woodcutter, without premeditation or malice, has taken a life, and has reason to fear the vengeance of the deceased’s family.The cities of refuge were to be established to provide sanctuary to the woodcutter and others in a similar situation.
Care is taken in the description of how to set up these cities. We are to “survey the distances” and “divide the land” to the west of the River Jordan into three parts. In each part, we are to designate a city of refugee. As Rashi explains in his Commentary, the purpose of dividing the land into three parts and preparing the road is to ensure that the Israeli settlements lie within an accessible distance from a city of refuge. “Lest,” as the Torah reminds us later in the same portion, “the avenger of the blood pursue the killer, while his heart is hot, and overtake him, because the way is long…”
As someone who has worked for a number of years in refugee protection in the Middle East and the U.S., this injunction to make not the way long strikes me as a clear expression of the ethical principle at the heart of today’s asylum law. It is incumbent upon us, as Jews and as human beings, to facilitate passage for those in dire need; and to refrain from placing obstacles and roadblocks in the path of those seeking sanctuary. For a peripatetic people who have known hostility in many countries and rejection at many borders, it is not surprising that our sages have admonished us to make our cities of refuge accessible in times of need.
And yet this was not Daher’s experience, nor the experience of many of the estimated sixty thousand asylum seekers and other migrants in Israel. At the Egyptian border, Daher’s party was fired on by Egyptian soldiers with longstanding orders to shoot to kill African migrants of any sort crossing into Israel. One man was killed, and Daher and the others scattered across the border. They wandered through the Negev for two days with scant water until the Israeli military found them and provided emergency aid. At this point, Daher and the remainder of his party considered themselves fortunate, not only to be saved, but to be taken to a detention facility rather than summarily returned across the border under Israel’s controversial policy of “hot returns”. In contravention of international law, Israeli border guards routinely returned African asylum seekers to the Egyptian authorities with providing them the opportunity to request asylum. According to Ha’aretz, in the first nine months of 2009, for example, 217 individuals were returned in such a fashion. Upon return, such migrants-including asylum seekers-are given one year prison sentences, fined, barred from applying for asylum in Egypt, and prohibited from contact with representatives of the UNHCR. In a number of cases, Egypt has returned recognized refugees from Sudan and elsewhere to their countries of origin, where they face substantial risk of persecution.
Yet Daher (who now goes by David according to Facebook) was fortunate. After a few months, he was released from detention and allowed to stay in Israel temporarily. Although he, like the vast majority of asylum seekers, was not given a work permit not any form of government assistance, he was thankful to have escaped Egypt and begun, however tenuously, a new life for himself. Yet without permanent legal status or an opportunity to make his case for protection in court, he is vulnerable to potential detention and ultimate deportation at any moment. And given he has no work permit and no other source of financial aid, he has to work illegally, where he is subject to the whims and prejudices of his employer without any of the protections that should be afforded to all workers in a developed country like Israel.
Unfortunately, Daher’s experience reflects broader trends in Israeli policy. Since 2009, the Israeli Ministry of Interior has taken over adjudicating asylum claims from the UNHCR. In 2009, 812 asylum seekers applied; two were granted. The following year, 3,366 applied, and 6 were granted. These dismal grant rates are a fraction of one percent, shockingly low when compared to the grant rates in other developed countries, from France (17%) to the U.S. (50%). The well-documented accounts of hostile, adversarial asylum interviews, conducted in some cases by former police officers now trained as asylum adjudicators, suggest a broad pattern of unprofessional and demeaning treatment. Many asylum seekers and their pro bono legal representatives from Tel Aviv University report being accused of lying, intimidated by hostile interviewers (who reportedly refer to themselves as “interrogators”), and questioned repeatedly by different officials in the style of a criminal investigation, sometimes over the course of several days. These practices fly in the face of established principles of refugee protection, and raise serious concerns about Israel’s adherence to the biblical injunction to “make not the way long.”
The policy reflects attitudes among the population and, more troubling, Israeli leaders. In recent months, there has been a spate of verbal and physical attacks on African migrants in many areas of Israel, especially in South Tel Aviv, where many live tenuously in substandard housing. Apartments have been set ablaze, a refugee kindergarten was hit with a Molotov cocktail, and business have been vandalized. Asylum seekers have been verbally harassed and, in at least one incident, physically attacked. As is well-documented by respected Israeli and international human rights groups, the people encouraging these assaults are not fringe elements of Israeli society but rather right wing members of Knesset, mayors of large Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv, and high placed government officials, including the Minister of the Interior, Eli Yishai. At public rallies, Knesset debates, and on television, these officials have used words like “invaders,” “enemies,” “infiltrators,” “cancer,” “national calamity,” “ticking bomb,” “transmitters of disease” and “existential threat” to refer to Africans in Israel.
These are not easy truths to grapple with. In the years immediately after the Second World War, Israel was an adamant supporter of international refugee law and one of the first countries to sign the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which formed the foundation of modern refugee law. Yet today I’m afraid that Israel is failing in its obligations under the very Convention it helped to craft. This difficult reality is made all the more painful by the fact that Israel is a nation of refugees. The ulpanim and the social system designed to integrate enormous waves of Jewish refugees could easily be used to educate, incorporate, and rehabilitate some of the thousands of asylum seekers in desperate need of protection in Israel today.
Providing basic protections to asylum seekers is not only an obligation under international law, and an opportunity to show the world Israel’s humanitarian face, but an aspect of Jewish tradition stretching back to the concept of cities of refuge.
Thank you, and Shabbat Shalom.
Max Shmookler
August 24, 2012
