MIDEAST: Holocaust Memories Hover Over Sudanese Refugees

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Jun 15 2006 (IPS) - Some 200 Sudanese refugees who have crossed the border from Egypt into Israel seeking asylum are posing a thorny moral dilemma for a country that was born out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

So far, the Israeli authorities seem deaf to the refugees’ plea to allow them to make a home, at least temporarily, in Israel. The remonstrations of leading Jewish figures, who are insisting that the Jewish state cannot ignore the plight of refugees fleeing persecution and slaughter in their own country, have also failed to soften the authorities.

In the last six months, the Sudanese refugees, some of them survivors of the carnage in the war-torn Darfur region, have crossed into Israel from Egypt. All have been arrested. Some have been lucky enough to win release and have been taken in by kibbutzim (collective communities). But others have been in administrative detention for months, waiting to be brought before a judge.

Israeli human rights organisations have begun taking up their cause, but their fate – those in jail and those in kibbutzim – remains unclear.

Many of those trying to cross the border have been pushed back into Egypt by the Israeli authorities. Under Israel’s so-called “rushed return” policy, if 24 hours have not elapsed since the person crossed into Israel, and if they did not manage to get further than 50 km from the border, they can be returned to Egypt.

Those who are not sent back are placed under arrest for crossing illegally into Israel. When they have been brought before a judge, the state has argued that they pose a threat to Israel because they are citizens of a Muslim country that has no diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, and where cells of al-Qaeda are operative.

The courts, however, have not bought the “enemy country” argument posed by the state, and some of the refugees have been released and taken in by the kibbutzim who have pledged to adopt them until alternative arrangements can be made.

But some have been languishing for months in administrative detention, having never been brought before a judge. The High Court of Justice, following petitions by Israeli human rights groups, has ruled that the state must find a solution ensuring that refugees in detention enjoy due process.

The Hotline for Migrant Workers, a watchdog group that assists foreign workers in Israel, and the Refugee Rights Clinic of Tel Aviv University’s Law School, have both asked the attorney-general to ban the “rushed return” policy, which they say violates the United Nations refugee convention, to which Israel is a signatory.

Interior minister Roni Bar-On has not hidden the fact that it is government policy to force the refugees back into Egypt. “The problem is that there’s no cooperation with the Egyptians,” he said in parliament recently. “There are even cases where we try to push (the refugees) back and (the Egyptians) push them into Israel. It’s truly a game of arm- wrestling over the border.” The interior minister added that the wave of Sudanese refugees trying to get into Israel in recent months had to be stopped, otherwise the country would be flooded with Sudanese asylum-seekers.

In recent weeks, the human rights groups have been joined by a number of high-profile Jewish figures in their call for Israel to treat the refugees with compassion and offer them a home, at least temporarily.

In a letter he sent to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the chairman of Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust museum, called on the government to “show solidarity” with the Sudanese refugees. “As members of the Jewish people,” wrote Avner Shalev, “for whom the memory of the Holocaust burns, we cannot stand by as refugees from the genocide in Darfur hammer on our doors.”

Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust scholar who added his name to the High Court petition, has said that the refugees should be granted temporary political asylum until a home can be found for them in Israel or in another country. Addressing the “enemy country” argument, Bauer reminded the court in his deposition that German Jews fleeing the Nazis were sometimes viewed as “enemy citizens” by the Allied countries.

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel has called on Israel to absorb the Darfur refugees who have arrived in the Jewish state. “We as Jews are obliged to help not only Jews,” he said in a recent interview in the daily Haaretz.

“I was a refugee and therefore I am in favour of admitting refugees. I thought it was very laudable when Israel became the first country to admit the Vietnamese boat people. History constantly chooses a capital of human suffering, and Darfur is today the capital of human suffering. Israel should absorb refugees from Darfur, even a symbolic number.”

In the late 1970s, then prime minister Menachem Begin granted asylum to a group of 250 shipwrecked Vietnamese people. An Israeli ship picked them up after vessels from Japan, Norway, Panama and East Germany ignored them. Begin granted them citizenship, referring at the time to the plight of the Jews who fled Nazi Europe.

A representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Israel has said that his agency is trying to work out a solution with the Israeli authorities. “Resettlement in a third country is the first solution,” said Michael Bavly. “I can say one thing that will not happen – they are not going back to Sudan.”

Haim Oron, an Israeli lawmaker for the left-wing Meretz party who has taken up the refugees’ case in parliament, told IPS that he will “not relent” until the Sudanese have been granted entry permits to Israel “at least until the situation in Darfur stabilises. From a moral standpoint we have to be especially sensitive to this issue. Because these are refugees fleeing genocide.”