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Israel begins the deportation of African migrants
A South Sudanese boy holds onto the arm of an Israeli aid worker as he boards a bus at the south Tel Aviv bus station to be delivered to Ben Gurion Airport, 17 June 2012, as Israel deports hundreds of African migrants. PHOTO/Jim Hollander/EPA
(Reuters) – Israel has deported a planeload of migrants to South Sudan early on Monday, the first of a series of weekly repatriation flights intended as a stepping stone to dealing with much greater influxes of migrants from Sudan and Eritrea.
About 60,000 Africans have crossed into Israel across its porous border with Egypt in recent years. Israel says the vast majority are job seekers, disputing arguments by humanitarian agencies that they should be considered for asylum.
“It’s a drop in the ocean, but it’s an important start,” Interior Minister Eli Yishai said at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.
Many in Israel see the Africans as a “threat to public order and to the demographics of the Jewish state.”
Street protests, some violent, have put pressure on the government, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned of Africans “flooding” and “swamping” Israel, threatening “the character of the country”.
The government has seized on the few hundred South Sudan migrants, whose de facto refugee status was rescinded by an Israeli court this month, and whose government, sympathetic to Israel, is happy to take them back. Attempts to return migrants to Eritrea or Sudan are unlikely to be met with similar cooperation.
South Sudan received clandestine Israeli help for decades before its secession from Sudan last year, and is counting on Israeli investment in its struggling agriculture and oil sectors.
