Kibbutz Ketura, Israel (JTA) — Ahmed, Fatima, and their three children, approached the Sinai border with Israel after walking two miles barefoot in the middle of a cold winter night.
Avoid the Egyptian military patrols, said the Bedouin smugglers, whom the family paid with money borrowed from Sudanese friends. “If they catch you, you could be shot or deported back to Sudan.”
The 12-hour trip from Cairo was the last leg of a multi-year journey from the violence of Darfur to Sudan’s dangerous capital, Khartoum, to the teeming streets of Cairo.
Ahmed had been imprisoned in each city. Israel was their last hope for what Fatima calls “a normal life.”
Two hours after crawling under two security fences, their 5-month-old baby’s cry pierced the silence. An Israeli military spotlight flashed on them. “Do you know where you are?” the soldiers called in Arabic.
After identifying themselves as Sudanese, Ahmed lowered his 2-year-old son from his shoulders and held up his Sudanese passport, as well as the worn yellow card from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. The card had been obtained in Cairo and saved them from being deported back to Sudan, as the Egyptian police had threatened.
In a ritual repeated almost weekly for two years with Sudanese sneaking into Israel, Israel Defense Forces patrols gathered up the tired family, placed them in an ambulance and transferred them to the Border Police.
The Border Police sent Ahmed to Ketziot prison for violating the Infiltration Law, a 1954 statute enacted against enemy combatants.
If the experience of others is any precedent, Ahmed could remain incarcerated for at least a year, until Israel figures out what to do with him and nearly 200 other imprisoned Sudanese.
Fatima and the children were sent to a battered women’s shelter in the western Galilee that has largely been taken over by Sudanese refugees whose husbands are in prison.
Ripple effects
The failure of the United Nations to cope with the doubling of refugee applications in the past decade or to intervene to prevent the genocide in Darfur has had ripple effects throughout the world. That now includes Israel and the Jewish world.
Israel is torn between its commitment to universal humanitarian concerns and its own security interests. The prevailing government preference is to deport the refugees back to Egypt — if Egypt will guarantee that it will not deport them back to Sudan.
A four-month JTA investigation into the plight of the refugees and the Israeli government’s handling of the situation found a system that even the top Israeli official adjudicating each of the cases has said often violates Israeli and international law.
After two years of legal challenges and growing Israeli news media attention, the issue now is coming to a critical juncture.
The practice of arresting and indefinitely detaining Sudanese asylum seekers on security grounds is about to be tested in Israel’s courts even as Israeli Border Police are showing signs of resisting the orders to arrest and detain the refugees crossing the borders.
Major international human rights figures have embraced the cause, and some Israeli politicians and activists are pressing for resolution of the crisis.
Some of these activists have strong ties to the U.S. Jewish community, which has embraced the cause of Darfur as a top humanitarian priority.
“Sudanese refugees are right now considered enemy nationals since Sudan is an Islamic fundamentalist country,” explained Anat Ben Dor, Israel’s leading refugee rights lawyer. “Yet Israel is a signatory to the International Convention on Refugees, which guarantees humane treatment and a safe haven from genocide.”
Israel helped write the convention after World War II. Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were routinely refused safe haven because they, like the current Sudanese, were classified as enemy nationals.
Ben Dor, 40, directs the Tel Aviv University Law School Refugee Rights Clinic. In late February, she filed suit against the government for its alleged treatment of three refugees.
The Israeli High Court was scheduled to hear a suit on March 21 that challenges the legality of the refugees’ detention. That petition is being brought by the Hotline for Migrant Workers and the Refugee Rights Clinic against Israel’s defense and interior ministers.
It argues that even though 80 Sudanese have been released into alternative detention after an informal internal review process set up after a similar suit last Passover, the lack of formal judicial review makes the detention illegal.
Under Israeli law, if the Sudanese are charged for violating the Law of Entry, like other nationals who sneak into Israel, the government must review their cases every 30 days and justify their imprisonment.
But since Sudanese are considered “enemy nationals,” they are charged under the harsher Infiltration Law, which has no review mechanism. Under this law, Israel can hold detainees for indefinite periods of time.
Currently, 45 Sudanese are in Masiyahu prison near Tel Aviv, 85 in Ketziot near the Egyptian border, and about 60 at four other prisons, according to Yonatan Berman, a human rights lawyer.
Another 110 Sudanese, including children, are in alternative detention, meaning crisis centers, kibbutzim or moshavim, where many of them work and live but are not free to leave.
Another estimated dozen Sudanese men in the Sinai are partnered with Israeli women and have children, but cannot enter Israel for fear of arrest.
‘That is discrimination’
Sigal Rozen, 39, co-founded the Hotline for Migrant Workers with a grant from the New Israel Fund. This organization brings undocumented workers to the U.N. High Commission on Refugees offices to get documents that verify their refugee status so they can qualify for a temporary work visa.
“There are people from all over the world who come to Israel,” Rozen said. “If a Turk and a Chinese come across the border with a Sudanese, only the Sudanese is imprisoned. That is discrimination.”
Most Israeli officials involved in the issue declined to speak on the record. But in private conversations and in Knesset testimony, officials contend that beyond the immediate security concerns about individual Sudanese, the greater fear is the ripple effect of even more refugees seeking asylum.
The fault lines drawn around the refugee battle between those advocating deportation and those advocating granting asylum is “a paradox,” as one high-ranking Jewish organizational official called it.
“Israel is deeply sensitive to the issue of genocide,” this official said, “but it is also worried about a massive influx of Sudanese at its border.”
The number of Sudanese seeking protection in Israel started to increase after Egyptian police killed 27 and injured several hundred Sudanese refugees protesting outside the UNHCR office in Cairo at the end of December 2005.
None of the Sudanese who have crossed into Israel in the past 18 months has been granted asylum or temporary refugee status, according to Michael Bavli, head of the UNHCR office in Israel.
This contrasts with the some 200 asylum seekers from many countries, including some Sudanese, who had been granted permanent asylum in Israel between 1985 and 2005. An additional 700 non-Sudanese refugees were granted temporary asylum during that time.
A Knesset lobby headed by Labor Party member Avishai Braverman and Likud member Gilad Erdan formed last November to “push for the release of all the prisoners who have sought asylum in Israel,” said the lobby spokesman Yehuda Minkovitz.
Its focus is having the prisoners released and then advocating for at least some being granted permanent asylum status in Israel.
“I am ashamed as a person and as a Jew,” Braverman told JTA, referring to the practice of imprisoning asylum seekers. “We of all people have to know how to behave.”
Yosef Israel Abramowitz is an award-winning journalist and founder of socialaction.com. JTA correspondent Dina Kraft in Israel contributed to this piece. The names of the refugees have been changed to protect them from reprisals against family members in Arab countries.
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