Jerusalem – African migrants who entered Israel illegally will be given cash incentives if they leave on their own soon, or they will face expulsion, the Interior Ministry said Friday.
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A tent city is being built to hold other migrants, the vast majority, who can stay for now, the ministry said.
About 60,000 Africans have trekked through Egypt and other Muslim countries to reach Israel over the past few years. Many are looking for work, while others are seeking political asylum.
A Jerusalem court has ruled that some 4,500 migrants, mostly from South Sudan, Ivory Coast and Mali, are to be expelled.
Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad said Friday that those who willingly leave within the next week or two will receive cash incentives of 1,000 euros ($1,200) and a plane ticket. She said that otherwise, they will be expelled.
Earlier, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said it would take months to expel them.
He told Israel Radio that that a tent city and holding facilities are being built for other migrants who are living in major population centers. He said they will receive food and health care and will have good living conditions there.
Because many are from Sudan, an enemy of Israel, and Eritrea, a country with a flawed human rights record, the line between refugees and economic migrants is blurred. Therefore, Israel has quietly allowed most migrants from those two countries to stay without processing their asylum applications.
Yishai warned that an influx of migrants could destroy Israel’s Jewish character. In some places, entire neighborhoods are inhabited by migrants. Tensions are high in southern Tel Aviv, where a series of rapes, robberies and violence have been blamed on the Africans, sparking protests.
Police say the crime rate among the migrants is lower than for Israelis.
Court decisions are pending regarding migrants from other African countries, mainly Eritrea and Sudan.
The migrants infiltrate Israel’s porous border with Egypt, exploiting the widespread lawlessness in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Israel is erecting a barrier along the roughly 200 kilometer (125 mile) border with Egypt. But the migrants continue to arrive at a rate of about 1,000 a month, and some report being raped, tortured and extorted by the Arab Bedouins who smuggle them through.
“rapes were blamed” was there any concrete guilty verdicts. Why are they singling out the African migrants. There are migrants of so many nations. I hope it’s not a concerted racial thing.
Back int he70’s the Arabs did all the jobs the Jews did not want to do then the up-raising happend, which cuased a serious shortage in workers. These migrants are doing jobs that no one else would or could do. They contribute to the economy. Not withstanding the legal issues.
“District 10”
You would think that the Israelis could come up with a solution that didn’t look like South Africa, didn’t involve concentration camps, and wasn’t expressly for the reason of “preservation of the racial purity” of the state. Kind of nullifies the moral justification of Zionism, no?
Not only should the illegal African immigrants be expelled, but also the Russian immigrants, who are halachically not Jewish, and in many cases harbor anti-semitic attitudes. Jews should not have to fear attacks by anti-semitic Russians, in their own country.
? Is South Africa offering refuge to African “migrants”?
Most you are forgetting one major point. THEY ARE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. And as such they should be deported immediaetly and not receive one penny. They are a drain on the Israeli government & citizens. Seal the border so no new ones can come in and get rid of the others before 60,000 turns into 600,00 and then you have a real problem.
What I can’t understand, is why is it EY was finally able to seal the West Bank, and stop suicide bombers from entering EY proper (remember all of the sucide bombers in 2002), and yet, it can’t do the same pertaining to its border with Egypt, and keep undesirables out? Does everybody believe that these illegal immigrants just appear out of nowhere, and step across the border? The IDF must know that these refugees have been crossing into EY, but have not taken any actgion to turn them away, for political reasons.
How quickly we Jews forget our immediate past!
From 1933 onwards, ehrliche (and not so ehrliche) Yidden were fleeing from hostile regimes in an increasing number of European countries, and seeking asylum in other, more hospitable, lands. From 1948 onwards, Jews from Arab nations were expelled and sought asylum elsewhere, too.
I do not condone any criminal activities by these black refugees, but we Israelis *must* remember what happened to our parents and grandparents, and how they struggled to find someone somewhere to be sympathetic to their desperate plight.
I am one of the few Israeli contributors to VIN, so perhaps I have a greater interest in this issue than the armchair analysts based in north America.
Why do we bother doing this? We learned all about concentration camps in the Holocaust. Then we came to Eretz Yisroel and pushed the Palestinians into concentration camps, to solve the “Palestinian Problem” .. … because we didn’t want too many goyim there, so we could have a Jewish majority, and make believe we have free elections and a democracy…
Why don’t we just build concentration camps for these people. We know how! We already do it.
We don’t need to even give the world the embarrassing things we do. We can do what we did with the Palesinians. We drive them into concentration camps, and tell the world, including ourselves, that they went there on their own. It was their choice. If the Medina says so, 99% of Yidden will just believe it, as we believed about the Palestinians. We never knew that we had actually driven those many thousands of Palestinians from their homes and towns into these concentration camps. Like the city of Lod, for example, where they had 20k Palestinians. We forced out 19k, and allowed 1k to stay. Then we told everyone lies about their leaving for personal reasons… LOL And we blindly believe it… we believe anything Israel tells us.