by yosef israel abramowitz
jta
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kibbutz ketura, israel | With two miles of bare footprints behind them, Ahmed, Fatima and their three children approached the border with Israel in the middle of a cold winter night.
Their Bedouin smugglers, whom they paid with money borrowed from Sudanese friends, warned them to avoid Egyptian military patrols. Getting caught meant being shot or deported to Sudan.
And they needed to get to Israel. Alive.
Ahmed and Fatima, Sudanese refugees, were on the last leg of a multi-year journey that started in Darfur. They first went to Sudan’s dangerous capital, Khartoum, and then to the teeming streets of Cairo, where in December they were allegedly beaten and arrested by Egyptian security forces.
Police clubbed Fatima, then five months pregnant, in the stomach, and shot her aunt to death, point blank.
Fatima and her husband survived. Twenty-seven Sudanese refugees did not. They knew they needed to leave Egypt.
Israel was their last hope for what Fatima calls “a normal life” without the “fear of being sent back to Sudan.”
Two hours after dusting off their dark clothing, covered with sand from crawling under two security fences, their 5-month-old baby’s cry pierced the silence of the frigid Negev air.
The response was an Israeli military spotlight and a series of questions. The Israeli soldiers gave the children their green military coats before turning over the family to the Border Police, who would soon send Ahmed to prison, and Fatima and the children to a shelter.
Ahmed could remain incarcerated for at least a year, until Israel figures out what to do with him and the more than 120 other Sudanese refugees imprisoned for violating a 1934 law punishing “enemy nationals.”
Faced with genocidal threats from Iran and terrorist groups, a legacy of the Holocaust, and even echoes of the Exodus 3,700 years ago, Israel is torn between its commitment to universal humanitarian concerns and its own security interests.
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 media attention, the issue is coming to a critical juncture.
Sudanese refugees are considered enemy nationals since Sudan is an Islamic fundamentalist country, said Anat Ben Dor, the country’s leading refugee rights lawyer and leader of Tel Aviv University’s Refugee Rights Program.
“Yet Israel is a signatory to the International Convention on Refugees, which guarantees humane treatment and a safe haven from genocide,” she said.
Israel helped author the convention in the aftermath of World War II. Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were routinely refused safe haven because they, like the current Sudanese, were classified as enemy nationals.
Similarly, these Sudanese have no choice but to seek a new home. Nearly 450,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Another 2.5 million have been displaced.
Major international human rights figures have embraced the cause, and a handful of Knesset members and activists in Israel are pressing for a resolution of the crisis. Some of these activists in turn have strong ties to the American Jewish community, which has embraced the cause of Darfur as a top humanitarian priority.
Under Israeli law, those who sneak through the Sinai desert into Israel are charged with the Law of Entry. In those cases, 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 official review mechanism. As such, detainees can be held indefinitely.
A year ago at Passover, activists petitioned the Israeli courts claiming that it was illegal to incarcerate the Sudanese refugees because it does not allow for individual judicial review.
As a result of that challenge, the government appointed a special investigator to interview the prisoners and make recommendations to the Minister of Defense on the status of each one. Of the dozens of cases reviewed, not one was found to be a security threat, Ben Dor said.
Advocates for the refugees won part of their battle when, on March 21, the court ruled that the government must explain why it’s treating the refugees as infiltrators from an enemy state within 45 days of putting them in jail.
Irwin Cotler, Canada’s former minister of justice and human rights attorney to such well-known dissidents as Natan Sharansky and Nelson Mandela, has joined with the Israel Bar Association in filing supporting documents on behalf of the Sudanese to the Israeli High Court.
“If Israel grants refugee status or temporary resident status to the Sudanese, it can be Israel’s own modest contribution to speaking up against the genocide rather than interring them and making the opposite statement,” he said.
Some officials fear a ripple effect could result if Israel grants asylum to the refugees. No one knows how many Sudanese would seek refuge in Israel if the detainees are released from prison and accorded good treatment in the Jewish state.
Israeli government officials say the situation is difficult, and they are trying to deal with the issue in the most humane way possible.
“Jewish history has made us especially sensitive to genocide. No one is being sent back to the inferno in Darfur,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.
The porous Egyptian border worries Israel, less because of Sudanese refugees and more because of terrorists like Muhammed Faisal Saksak. On Jan. 29, the 21-year-old Palestinian crossed the border about 12 miles north of the resort city of Eilat and blew himself up in a small bakery, killing three.
If the government wants to prioritize Israel’s security, it must consider that Sudan is one of six nations that supports Islamic terror, said Eliyahu Aharoni, deputy director of the Immigration Police, to the Knesset in late December.
“All the security services say that there is a danger when it comes to the Sudanese,” he said. “Detention or alternative detention is legitimate in a democratic country and also in the State of Israel.”
In 2005, the security forces caught 5,600 people trying to infiltrate across the Egyptian-Israeli border, including drug and weapon smugglers, women destined for prostitution, foreign workers and refugees.
In 2006, 100 of those caught trying to infiltrate belonged to terror organizations, according to Israeli media reports.
Although the numbers are fluid, an estimated 300 Sudanese have arrived in Israel over the past two years. Of these, some 120 remain in prison.
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.
With each new arrival stretching the asylum system of the state, the issue of the Sudanese has come to a boil.
A Knesset lobby headed by Labor Party member Avishai Braverman and Likud member Gilad Erdan was formed last November to “push for the release of all the prisoners who have sought asylum in Israel,” said lobby spokesman Yehuda Minkovitz.
Its focus is on releasing prisoners, and for at least some, granting them permanent asylum status in Israel.
“I am ashamed as a person and as a Jew,” Braverman said, referring to the practice of imprisoning asylum seekers. “We of all people have to know how to behave.”
Israelis have approached the situation from several directions.
Sigal Rozen, 39, helped start the Hotline for Migrant Workers with a grant from the S.F.-based New Israel Fund. The hotline brings refugees to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees offices to get protection papers, documents that verify their refugee status so they can qualify for a temporary work visa.
Rozen’s tiny fourth-floor office, next door to a Tel Aviv police station, is a hot spot for undocumented workers of all colors and nationalities who come knocking for assistance.
“If a Turk and a Chinese come across the border with a Sudanese, only the Sudanese is imprisoned,” she said. “That is discrimination.”
Rozen’s organization and others have helped about 150 Sudanese refugees find placement in alternative detention — meaning crisis centers, kibbutzes or moshavs — where many of them work and live but are not free to leave the premises.
Placing Sudanese refugees on kibbutzes is not only a humanitarian approach, said Michael Bavli, the UNHCR representative in Israel, but also a solution and pathway to future resettlement in a third country.
“Within six months on a kibbutz, we’ll find them an alternative country because suddenly they are not criminals who are sitting in Israeli prisons,” Bavli said.
Meanwhile, the Border Police have on some occasions taken matters into their own hands.
On Jan. 10, two Sudanese slipped under the Egyptian-Israeli border fence and, like hundreds before them, gave themselves up to the Israel Defense Forces. But in what is believed to be a first, the border police refused to take them; reportedly they were fed up with imprisoning Sudanese refugees.
The IDF had intelligence officials check out the two Sudanese and concluded that “their intentions are not national [security] and therefore they do not require the services of the Prison Authority,” according to a confidential IDF document obtained by JTA.
An IDF officer dropped them off at the Beersheva central bus station and told them to go directly to the UNHCR office in Jerusalem.
Since then, IDF and Border Police have circumvented the prison services four more times — interviewing the Sudanese themselves, determining that they were not a threat and bringing them to Beersheva. Individual soldiers have given the Sudanese bus money to make their way to the UNHCR offices for an interview.
The Israeli government also has tried to work with Egypt. The talks have not yet sparked policy changes in either country.
In December, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni suggested to Egypt’s foreign minister that Egypt consider a “hot return” policy, which would mean the refugees are immediately sent back into the Sinai at the time they are picked up by the IDF on the border. She also explored the possibility of an organized return to Egypt of all the Sudanese refugees who carry U.N. blue cards, meaning they were recognized as refugees in Cairo and are eligible for third-country resettlement from Egypt.
The Egyptian Embassy declined to comment on the exchange.
Ben Dor, the Israeli civil rights lawyer, said it’s important to consider that Egypt has refused UNHCR’s requests that the country assume responsibly for the refugees.
“Return to Egypt is a dangerous fantasy that distracts from finding a real solution,” she said.
Just as the Egyptian foreign minister was returning to Cairo with the Israeli request to help them facilitate their return, Ahmed and Fatima packed two small bags and quietly left the Egyptian capital, beginning their journey to cross illegally into Israel.
Three days later, when Fatima arrived at a shelter in northern Israel, she was greeted with media reports that Israel might deport her and her family back to Egypt.
Fatima quickly dictated an impassioned letter in Arabic, which was translated into Hebrew by a Druze linguist and sent to the Knesset lobby, which sent a direct appeal to Defense Minister Amir Peretz.
Peretz’s office has not responded to requests for an interview.
In her letter, Fatima briefly recounted her family’s flight.
“I beg you not to let them send us away from here ... I know that if they send us back to Egypt, we’ll go to prison and perhaps never get out,” she wrote. “We could also be sent to the Sudanese Embassy, and from there back to Sudan, and that will be the end of us. We’ll die like all the others who have died there.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California