Israel has ramped up its imprisonment of non-Jewish Africans in desert camps. With a thousand asylum-seekers detained at the time of going to press, and the potential to hold 11,000 in ‘open’ detention centres, Israel will soon have the biggest warehousing complex for asylum-seekers anywhere in the world.
Nearly 60,000 African asylum-seekers have journeyed to Israel over the past decade, more than half of whom have fled from Eritrea. Despite well-documented human rights abuses suffered by Eritreans, and their fellow travellers from Sudan and Ethiopia, the Israeli government continues to paint them as ‘work infiltrators’ who selfishly travel to the country in order to improve their quality of life. A dramatic reduction in new arrivals – since a fence was erected on the Egyptian border – has failed to soften this hardline attitude.
