Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of African Refugees: The Contradiction between Jewish State and Democracy

July 15th, 2013 marked exactly 75 years to the day after the Evian conference of 1938, which was held in an attempt to manage the outflow of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. State representatives at the Evian conference refused to open their borders to Jewish refugees simply because they were Jewish.

On July 15th, 2013, Israel began their deportation process of South Sudanese and Eritrea refugees because they were not Jewish. In the same year,  Israel ignored pleas from the Israeli Supreme Court to stop Israeli demonization and arbitrary imprisonment of African refugees that have been coming into Israel since 2006.

In rejection of the Supreme Court, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened concentration camps restricted specifically to African “infiltrators.”

Infiltrator is a demeaning term used by Israelis to refer to African refugees as hostile and dangerous, a term that was equally used to describe Jewish refugees during World War II. Many Jews had to cross through other countries in order to reach a port where they could sail to North America just as refugees from South Sudan have had to pass through Egypt to find transportation to safety. In these concentration camps, prisoners are held indefinitely and in many instances until death, in the midst of the desert bordering Egypt. The term “concentration camp” is not one that I use lightly as an interpretation from my own analysis, rather the direct translation of the law written in 2013 permitting these camps use the exact Hebrew term for “concentration camp.”

The Israeli government’s deportation plan, in short, is designed to create intolerable living conditions for South Sudanese refugees until they agree to deport themselves back to South Sudan, where they face prosecution for for fleeing.

Israel provides no alternative plan or deportation partnership with any other country that may accommodate these refugees. Instead, Israel sends them back to their own country, where the risk of suffering and death is almost certain. If you have been following my earlier publications on Cambodia and Nauru Island, particularly my latest piece on Australia’s failed partnership with Cambodia to manage Nauru Island refugees, there are troubling similarities between the Australian and Israeli camps for refugees, as well as the self deportation plan designed in each state. Both countries create intolerable living conditions so as to pressure migrants to make the decision on their own to return to their country of origin. Furthermore, both Australia and Israel strategize their policies in this manner to maintain their democratic reputation within the international community, while avoiding the emboldened headlines of a state that commits widespread human rights abuses. .

The real tragedy is the success of these types of strategies, and the realities that face refugees who flee to wealthy democratic states.

There are several ways in which Israel maintains a democratic reputation, one of which is in regards to their peripheral inclusion of Ethiopian Jews. At the bare minimum, they enjoy the same citizen rights as Israeli Jews. That being said Ethiopian Jews have endured easily one of the most outrageous acts of state sponsored racism, which involved injections of long-term birth control solely for Ethiopian women who were not informed of the effects of the medication prior to accepting it. This resulted in a drastic reduction of the Ethiopian birth rate in Israel.

However, even Ethiopian Jews discriminate and exclude Sub Saharan African refugees. This exclusion is because alliances with any non-Jews will without doubt harm the legitimacy and influence of the Ethiopian movement in Israel, as their well-being heavily relies on their popularity among Jewish-nationalist Israelis.

One may ask why South Sudanese refugees are fleeing to Israel in the first place, seeing as there are also outflows of refugees fleeing into Libya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and to a lesser extent Uganda. In an interview conducted by David Sheen, an Israeli journalist that has been covering and publicly exposing Israeli “ethnic cleansing” of black Africans, Jacob Berry talks about his story as a refugee fleeing from Darfur to Israel. Berry says that in Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabia, refugees are far from safe. This is because authorities in all of these nondemocratic countries send refugees back to South Sudan immediately, where the death penalty awaits them as a punishment for the crime of treason. Moreover, Berry says that even when refugees are forced to cross the Egyptian border in order to reach Israel, Egyptian police will shoot them without prior investigation. Berry expresses how in South Sudan, Israel is perceived as a democracy that citizens idolize. They are not privy to the information online or on TV that might portray a picture of Israel that is different from the one they visualize. Berry himself confesses that because of Israel’s democratic reputation, he expected to be welcomed in Tel Aviv. Moreover, he assumed that as genocide survivors, South Sudanese migrants and Israeli Jews would be able to share a common ground. This was not the case.

As 60,000 African refugees were swept into Israel between 2005 to 2013, Israel built a fence along the Egyptian border as anti-African rallies began throughout Tel Aviv and neighbouring cities. Coverage of these rallies began in 2011, and the rallies continued violently into 2013. Israeli people marched in support of their government’s policies that prohibit Africans from working, discourage landlords from renting to Africans, and imprison African migrants without trial. Michael Ben-Ari, an Israeli politician and former member of the Knesset, as well as a leading figure in anti-African rallies in Tel Aviv, uses these rallies in favour of his right wing political party, Otzma Yehudit . The basis of his fight against African refugees is built upon fear of corrupting the purity of the Jewish State.

In The Nation’s interview with Ben-Ari, he says that “It’s threatening because this will no longer be a Jewish state. Our state is different from other countries […] Our country is a Jewish state. A Jewish and a democratic state.” Ben-Ari admits that these two features of Israel contradict themselves, but that Israel is waging war against the phenomenon of assimilation.

One reason why conditions are so harsh for South Sudanese refugees is because although Israeli discrimination is primarily perpetrated by the government and legal infrastructure, citizens are adopting these same modes of discrimination.

The Israeli state and defence ministry is primarily responsible for criminal and discriminatory oppression towards African refugees, as well as the demonization of Africans as disease spreaders and threats to the country. However, Israeli citizens are largely in solidarity with the state’s ideology and exclusionary measures. This is largely the fault of Yulia Shmuelov-Berkowitz, a legislator from the opposition party in 2012 that called for Israelis who advocate for African rights to be locked in prison alongside the prisoners indefinitely.

The Israeli defence ministry is also largely responsible for some of the major humanitarian crimes and exclusionary ideologies against African refugees. In 2015, 800 refugees were drowned  in a boat carrying them to Italy over the Mediterranean. In response, the Israeli defence minister praised Netanyahu’s grand success in his efforts to keep refugees out. In other responses to this horrific incident, Yisrael Katz, a leading politician in the right wing Likud party who coordinates both ministries for transportation, atomic energy and intelligence, posted on Facebook: “. . . You can see the rectitude of our government’s policy to build a fence. . . which blocks the job-seeking migrants before they enter Israel. The elections are over–you can give us some credit now.”

High ranking government officials in Israel took pride in the drowning of 800 South Sudanese refugees, even after the intervention of the Supreme Court in 2013, showing just how deeply ingrained anti-refugee sentiments and racism are in Israeli society.

All South Sudanese refugees are asking for is that Israel participate in the standards that it co-authored as a democratic member of the international community.

Currently, the ethnic cleansing of African refugees is murderous and inhuman. To this day there are thousands of people dying in concentration camps in the middle of the Israeli desert without heating, without medical facilities and usually without food. They lack health facilities that even rapists and murderers are entitled to, facilities that Israel takes pride in extending to other places in need such as Haiti, but that refuse to protect the minimal standards of living to Africans in their territory simply because they are not Jewish.