The National, September 17, 2012 Earlier this month, 21 Eritrean asylum seekers, including a 14-year-old child and two women, spent over a week trapped between fences on the Israeli side of the Israeli-Egyptian border. As the temperatures soared, the group was not provided with any shelter; the “most moral army in the world” gave the refugees only …
Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2, 2012 It was a winter morning in 1982. Shimon Yehoshua, 21, had finished three years’ mandatory military service a week before. He’d arrived at his home—two rooms shared with his parents and nine brothers and sisters—in time to catch the last flames of Hanukkah. Shimon lived in the Kfar Shalem …
Agence France-Presse (AFP), June 13, 2012 Abraham Alu, a 35-year-old asylum seeker from South Sudan, hasn’t left his apartment in south Tel Aviv for five days. He has run out of money and food. But he is too scared of the immigration police to venture further than the courtyard. Alu used to sell plastic work …
IRIN, May 17, 2012 Blessing Akachukneu was already looking for a new place to live when her south Tel Aviv apartment, which doubles as a day-care centre, was firebombed in April. Her Israeli neighbours, she explained, had complained to the landlord about the noise from the day-care centre and she had been asked to leave. …
Inter Press Service, March 19, 2012 Hundreds of African refugees and Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday night under the banner ‘It’s dangerous in South Sudan’ to protest the imminent expulsion of 700 Sudanese asylum seekers, including children. A small group of counter-protesters attended to show their support for the government’s decision to deport …
The Caravan, February 1, 2012 When I put my silver digital recorder on the table, Kidane Isaac, an Eritrean refugee, eyes it and shifts in his chair. He angles his broken straw fedora downwards, tipping the rim lower, as though to cover his face. The hat, which has a black band and a hole in the …
Foreign Policy, August 19, 2011 The media has been quick to depict the Israeli tent protests as a middle class movement. But there are other groups taking part: Palestinians, low-income Jewish Israelis, migrant workers, and African refugees. While all of these groups face a number of serious problems—as does Israel’s middle class—one was living outdoors …
Counterpunch, April 22, 2011 Several weeks ago, Israeli authorities arrested M, a pregnant woman, along with her three-year-old, Israeli-born son. The young family—sans the father, who had been deported several months before—was briefly detained then expelled from the country. But don’t break out those Palestinian flags just yet. This was a family of migrant workers. …
Al Jazeera English, April 13, 2011 James Anei was a 16-year-old boy when he witnessed a massacre, carried out by militias loyal to the government in Khartoum. Terrified, he fled his village in South Sudan. “You see someone dying in front of you and you know this guy and you know his parents and so …
Guernica, March 8, 2011 This morning, I woke to the news that a woman had been stabbed to death in South Tel Aviv. Two men—dubbed migrant workers by the Hebrew press, but referred to as “African descent” in the English-language media, suggesting they were probably asylum seekers—were briefly held under suspicion for the crime. They …