Israeli authorities have begun arresting dozens of African migrants, as reported by +972′s Mya Guarnieri. It is the latest in an effort to crackdown on individuals who over the years have entered the country illegally. The move comes despite a court order that the government allow them one week to turn themselves in voluntarily. The one week period expires on Thursday.

A municipal worker moves the lawn at Lewinsky Park amid loitering Sudanese refugees, including one sleeping on the ground, Tel Aviv, June 11, 2012 (photo: Roee Ruttenberg)

The government hopes to deport an unspecified number of migrants in the coming days, mostly back to South Sudan. Joseph Monyde Malieny, a postgraduate South Sudanese who has been in Israel since 2006, has written on +972 an email plea urging the government to allow his fellow nationals to stay.

Figures vary on the exact number of South Sudanese who are in Israel. Asaf Weitzen, an attorney with the Hotline for Migrant Workers, estimates the number to stand at around 700, while the government places the figure at more than double. Due to their newly-independent state, the South Sudanese are no longer technically afforded the same protections their northern Sudanese neighbors are, namely the right to remain in Israel.

By its own admission, Israel cannot repatriate Sudanese – and Eritreans – back to their home country, as it is a signatory to an international convention that serves as a guideline for the treatment of refugees. (That has not stopped Israeli Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, tasked with dealing with the issue, from suggesting that war-torn Eritrea is just as dangerous as Israel’s southern city of Sderot.)

Sudanese and Eritrean nationals make up 85 percent of the estimated 60,000 African migrants currently in Israel. Meaning, deportating all non-Sudanese and non-Eritreans will not really put a dent in the number of African migrants in Israel. It may indeed encourage others not to come, as the government hopes and claims. But it might also further highlight Israel’s policy of not deporting Sudanese and Eritreans, and thus draw more of them to Israel.

The government insists it will detain those who are here in order to prevent others from coming.  But activists here say such moves are in direct violation of Israel’s obligations under its international commitments. For Weitzen, what-to-do is clear:

We are always saying the solution is to give them basic human rights, to give them the right to health care, give them the right to work, this will allow a spread of population, and ensure the moral obligations of Israel.

Levinsky Park sits in the heart of the slummy center of Israel’s financial center. That has been the case for decades, as it was meters away from Tel Aviv’s old central bus station.

The corner near Levinsky Park, Tel Aviv, June 11, 2012 (photo: Roee Ruttenberg)

Now the park serves as the congregating point for recently-arrived African migrants. The government here calls them “infiltrators,” with one official referring to them as a “cancer.” Ironically, Levinsky Park sits adjacent to a local police precinct.

Plainclothes agents check the papers of Sudanese loitering at Levinsky Park, Tel Aviv, June 11, 2012 (photo: Roee Ruttenberg)

On Monday, at least two men dressed in plainclothes were scouring the park checking papers and radioing-in information before returning to the police station.

Those at Levinsky Park call themselves refugees with nowhere else to go. 27 year-old Abdulla Ali came from Darfur in Sudan nine months ago, escaping the war there.

The condition in Sudan is harsh. Economically. Politically. Here it is different. And I myself came here because I need to change my life for the better.

Question to Abdulla Ali: “What happens if you go back to Sudan?”

I don’t know. I don’t know to answer that question. I can’t answer.

Over the years, less than 200 individuals have been officially recognized as refugees, and thus, allowed to legally work.  The rest cannot.  They spend their days loitering in places like Levinsky Park. Some turn to theft and petty crime. That has angered local residents of the surrounding neighborhood, and led to a recent upswing in sentiment against them.

27 year-old Sudanese refugee Abdulla Ali spends his day at Lewinsky Park, Tel Aviv, June 11, 2012 (photo: Roee Ruttenberg)

In response, earlier this year, the government passed the so-called “Anti-Infiltration Law.”  When enforced, the law will allow for the immediate detention – without trial – for up to three years of individuals who illegally enter the country. A proposed detention facility in the country’s south will now be expanded to accommodate some 25,000 people. Many in the Israeli public claim that the country – already strapped with a military expenditure which accounts for a large portion of its annual budget – can’t afford having the Africans here. But for Weitzen, Israel can’t morally afford otherwise:

Can Israel send people to their death? …or to a place where their human rights will be offended seriously? I think the answer is no.

Abdulla Ali, the migrant from Darfur, hopes other Israelis agree, and again soon:

We respect Israel and the government of Israel. And we hope they can respect us. Whoever is willing to help us, whoever gives us his hand, he will find us to be honest people.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai has called African asylum seekers “infiltrators” who threaten “the Zionist dream,” adding, “Jobs will root them here.”

But if foreigners are such a threat and jobs will root them here, then why does Yishai’s ministry continue to issue work visas to migrants?

It could have something to do with the fact that the manpower agencies—the companies that turn huge profits by importing foreign workers—have a strong lobby in both the Knesset and Ministry of the Interior.

But, wait, what does the MOI have to do with manpower agencies? Doesn’t the MOI just issue the visas and handle deportations?

In 2009, there was a major governmental restructuring that changed the supervision of both migrants and the manpower agencies that recruit them.

Rivka Makover was once the manager of the registration department in the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Labor. From 2004 to 2009, Makover supervised the licensing of manpower agencies, shutting down hundreds of those agencies over shady business dealings.

While Israeli labor law stipulates that agencies can charge approximately 1,000 US dollars for arranging jobs and visas, many charge far more. Chinese laborers have reported paying as much as $30,000 in fees. Indian workers usually pay upwards of $10,000; Filipinos between $5000 and $10,000.

In 2009, Makover’s position was eliminated, her responsibilities transferred to a body under the umbrella of the Ministry of Interior—putting all the power related to migrants in the hands of the MOI.

Since the restructuring, employees at both Kav LaOved and the Hotline for Migrant Workers say that enforcement of labor laws regarding manpower agencies has become noticeably lax, with some complaints against manpower agencies going completely ignored.

Maybe that’s because the MOI has been too busy issuing work visas. In 2009—the year that Israel announced it would deport children of migrant workers; the year that the government began inciting against African asylum seekers; the year that the Oz Unit attempted to take Africans out of South Tel Aviv—27,000 new migrant laborers entered Israel on state-issued work visas.

In 2010, the state embarked on a campaign against asylum seekers, including advertisements in which actors claimed that foreigners had taken their jobs. But, in 2010, Israel actually issued more work visas to bring more foreigners than it had in 2009, granting 32,000 new migrants work permits.

According to MOI spokeswoman Sabine Hadad, an additional 11,000 legal migrant workers arrived in Israel in 2011 on state-issued work visas. 2012 has seen the state bring 2300 new workers. While both 2011 and this year have seen significant drops in the number of new workers, the question remains—why bring them at all? Why not allow Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers—groups that cannot be deported and that are forced into unemployment and homelessness—to work?

Further, the current number of legal migrant workers stands at nearly 75,000. As migrants typically get 63-month work visas, it’s safe to say that most of these 75,000 have arrived in the past five years—the same time the country saw an influx of African asylum seekers. There are now between 45,000 and 60,000 African asylum seekers here. If the state wasn’t so intent on bringing new workers, if the state would draw from the existing labor pool, each and every one of those asylum seekers could have jobs. They wouldn’t be sitting around in parks in South Tel Aviv.

The big difference between those Israel gives work visas to and those that don’t? Those that pay the manpower agencies, a powerful group that has close ties to the MOI, get work visas. Those who don’t pay don’t get work visas. It’s that simple.

By Itamar Mann

The amendment to the Prevention of Infiltration Law, passed in the Knesset late Monday night, makes no differentiation between unauthorized migrants pending deportation and asylum seekers: they are all grouped together under the law’s ominous title, and a non-discriminatory policy of detention, potentially for life, is inflicted upon all of them. This far-reaching measure contradicts Israel’s international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The fact that law-makers rejected the Hadash party’s proposal to add a provision saying the law will be interpreted in accordance with the Convention suggests that they knew what they were doing.

As long as Israel observes this law, and does not deport asylum seekers to their countries of origin, it does not risk simply killing them. But its new policy is designed to prevent the migrants coming into Israel’s territory from anything beyond mere survival – what philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called bare life. The individual the new law envisions will be fed and housed, but will be stripped of any form liberty, dignity or due process of law.

Why is Israel putting its domestic legislation in direct conflict with international law? As Aeyal Gross recently explained, the law employs a logic of deterrence. In this context, Israel’s monopoly over violence is allied with existing violence of non-state actors well beyond Israel’s southern border.

As I have learned from several of the asylum seekers I have had the opportunity to speak with, people are now more hesitant than ever to take the perilous journey through the Sinai desert. As has been extensively reported by international human rights monitors such as Human Rights Watch, Bedouin smugglers often inflict hair-raising torture and rape on the migrants that choose to use their services. While these behaviors are intended to blackmail the migrants’ families left behind in countries like Eritrea, they also send a warning to other would-be asylum seekers and migrants traveling through the area. They thus serve Israel’s stated policy objectives, keeping vulnerable populations away from its borders.

Like in other places in the world, what we see at the border can therefore be described as an economics of pain. The Eritrean asylum seekers kept captive by the Bedouins in desert facilities pay good money – when they are tortured – for the chance to enter Israel. The new law should therefore be understood as an extension or version of the very same logic employed by the smugglers in Sinai. But as philosopher Paul Kahn has shown, pain is precisely what the liberal imagination cannot reduce to economic value or utility, and is therefore not simply deployed as a means toward policy ends. How, then, are the cruel strategies of smugglers in Sinai employed by the Israeli government?

The new Infiltrators’ Law reflects that there is still a residue of liberal imagination in the Israeli legislature. After all, it has not decided to codify a policy of killing asylum seekers, torturing or raping them. Thus, the deterrence employed by the smugglers is shifted, while maintaining the same underlying premise. A remaining available means is the option to take away liberty, and perhaps even dignity. In other words, the government thinks it can still produce a form of life that is not actively destroyed, but that is rendered unworthy of living.

Relying on Hannah Arendt, it is safe to assume that this strategy will quickly prove futile. In her classic essay “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” (in The Origins of Totalitarianism), Arendt recounts the stories of refugees and stateless people in the interwar period. As she explains, these people would commonly and strategically commit petty crimes. This way, they could promise themselves prison sentences, preventing their deportation while ensuring food and board.

In other words, for some people, being reduced to bare life can provide a modicum of protection. Granted, this may not be true if detention sentences are truly perpetual, which the law provides for. There is, however, an easy way to ensure that infinite sentences are not realized: by making sure that more and more people cross the border into Israel. Along the fault lines of the Global North and the Global South, the experience in this context has proven consistently similar. At some point, detained migrants are set free, as capacity in detention facilities cannot be stretched any further.

The measures employed by smugglers, such as torture and rape, are partially effective in deterring asylum seekers only because, for a limited duration, they impose on their victims fates that are worse than death. But as long as in many countries in Africa growing food shortages and oppressive regimes produce living environments that fall short of bare life, the Israeli transformation of the economics of pain to a policy of reduction to bare life will not succeed.

If Israel continues neglecting its obligations under the Refugee Convention, it risks creating a humanitarian disaster, as more and more people who cross the border remain without status, housed in ever more populated detention facilities. If these conditions do not lead to a humanitarian disaster inside Israel’s borders, this will only be thanks to Israel’s present gatekeepers – the torturers and rapists who blackmail the world’s most vulnerable.

Itamar Mann is a human rights lawyer and a doctoral candidate at Yale Law School

For more on this issue:
Knesset passes controversial bill on prolonged detention of refugees without trial
Israel’s “war on work infiltrators”
Proposed law would indefinitely jail refugees seeking protection
WATCH: Refugees smuggled to Israel face organ theft in Sinai

My deepest apologies for the error.

I met with Yohannes Bayu yesterday, the founder and director of the African Refugee Development Center, an local NGO that aims to assist the 30,000-45,000 asylum seekers in Israel. I’d been accustomed to meeting at the ARDC’s office in South Tel Aviv, the heart of Israel’s foreign community. But, yesterday, we met at a coffee shop in Jerusalem as the ARDC is currently moving. And, due to racism, the ARDC lost a lease they’d signed for a new Tel Aviv office.

An African refugee at a protest in 2009 (photo: flickr/Activestills)

In July of 2010, 25 South Tel Aviv rabbis signed the “Edict Forbidding the Rental of Apartments to Infiltrators,” forbidding Jewish Israelis from renting to undocumented migrant workers and African refugees–a group the government and now the public refer to as “infiltrators.”

After the ARDC decided to lower overhead costs, they began looking for a new office. They found one in South Tel Aviv, signed the lease, and packed up–only to have the landlord back out at the last minute. Bayu understood from the landlord that the cancellation was related to the religious edict and the racism in the neighborhood. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t rent to you [and your organization],’” Bayu, a Christian Ethiopian, recalls.

Since the 2010 edict, a number of refugees in South Tel Aviv have reportedly seen their leases cancelled or have encountered landlords that refuse to rent to them. Several right-wing demonstrations against African asylum seekers have been held in the area in the past year and a half. The most recent took place earlier this month and was led by Israeli settlers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including Knesset Member Michael Ben Ari (National Union) and extreme right-wing activist Baruch Marzel, a former member of the outlawed Kach party.

According to Bayu, the state of Israel has recognized less than 200 refugees since 1948. Bayu is among them.

The first African refugees arrived in Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A slow trickle of asylum seekers continued since then but the pace stepped up dramatically and visibly in the mid-2000s due to the conflict in Sudan. While Israel does not process refugees request for asylum, nor does it give the group work visas, the state tacitly acknowledges their status by not deporting them.