Africans in Israel caught between jail and deportation to unknown country
As the April deadline for a free plane ride out of Israel draws closer, refugees and migrants struggle with the question: is home a country where they are no longer welcome?
African refugees and migrants protest outside the Saharonim Prison, an Israeli detention facility for African asylum seekers near Kziot, where at least nine others have been incarcerated as part of Israel’s new policy of prison or deportation for migrants. February 22, 2018.
"Would you transport me if I was white?" Africans in Israel protest, holding posters emblazoned with the question, their faces smeared in white paint.
Tens of thousands of Africans fear their stay in Israel is coming to an abrupt end. Israel has given many of them until April 1 to leave for an unnamed African destination in exchange for $3,500 and a plane ticket. Otherwise, they face open-ended incarceration
Africans in Israel, including Jews of African origin, have also faced a number of incidents of discrimination in recent years. In 2015, an African-Israeli soldier serving in the Israel Defence Forces became the victim of an unprovoked, racist attack by two Israeli policemen.
The April deadline is being slammed by many inside and outside Israel as an apartheid of sorts.
Groups of Israeli doctors, academics, poets, Holocaust survivors, rabbis and pilots have also appealed to halt the plan. But the government remains steadfast, bristling at what it considers cynical comparisons to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany.
TRT World's Joseph Hayat has more on the story.
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