Sudanese in Israel Hope They Have Found a Home

MOSHAV HEREV LA’ET, Israel — It is a simple tin shed on the edge of a carrot field, but the young man from Darfur is relieved to call it home.

There is room enough for a pair of beds, a small refrigerator and a stove. Outside, a wooden table is propped under a tree. Here, he savors his meals, feels the sun on his face and fills his notebook with the details of his long journey to Israel.

It is a welcome change from the 13 months he spent in an Israeli prison, locked up for illegally entering the country — one of some 300 Sudanese arrivals whose illegal entry via Egypt and status as citizens from an enemy country landed them in prison.

The son and grandson of a line of ruling sheiks in his village, the 29-year-old prefers not to be identified by name. He fears for his family’s safety should it be discovered that he has ended up seeking refuge in Israel, a place he once knew only as an enemy.

In his journal, the young man recorded his first day out of jail as “Freedom Day.”

“It was a very important day in my life, a turning point,” he said. “I felt as if it was my first day in Israel. I never had really seen Israel before.”

After rounds of Supreme Court appeals, parliamentary hearings and a public push by human rights groups, some of the detained Sudanese are beginning to be released to collective farms known as kibbutzim and moshavim, while their official refugee status can be determined and a country of asylum found. About 190 remain in custody.

Roughly 200 of the Sudanese in Israel are Muslim, including about 100 who fled the bloodshed in Darfur. Others include Christians who say they are fleeing persecution from southern Sudan and those simply looking for work.

In Egypt, their prior haven, they struggled with poverty and dismissiveness — and sometimes outright hostility — from the authorities. Some of them had been part of a Sudanese encampment in a Cairo park in December 2005, meant to try to pressure officials in the nearby United Nations office to relocate them. When they refused to follow the orders of Egyptian authorities to disperse, they were blasted with water cannons and dragged away. Twenty-seven people were reportedly killed in the melee.

Some of the Sudanese in Egypt then began moving on. Israel attracted them simply because it is easy to get there from Egypt, but many say they would be content to stay if granted asylum. Most begin their trip by bus from Cairo to towns closer to the Israeli border. From there they cross the desert on foot, sometimes with hired Bedouin guides.

Once in Israel, they usually sit by the roadside waiting for an army patrol to pick them up. When they first started coming, they assumed they would be taken to local United Nations offices. After they began hearing that they would be jailed in Israel, they still came, so desperate were they to leave Egypt.

The young man now living in the tin shed said he had no choice but to leave Egypt after being followed and harassed by security police after he was ousted from the Cairo encampment in the 2005 raid that cost his wife her life. He found her name on a list of the dead, he said, after days of going from hospital to hospital searching for her.

The presence of refugees from the Darfur conflict, which the United States calls genocide, presents Israel with a particularly difficult problem.

Israel, founded in the shadow of the Holocaust, has felt a responsibility to harbor refugees — plucking Vietnamese boat people out of international waters, for example.

But now, government officials fear that if word spreads that Israel is a good place to settle, their country could be overwhelmed by large waves of refugees from Sudan and elsewhere in Africa. Mediterranean countries, particularly Spain and Malta, have been stunned by surging African migration, much of it illegal.

“Israel is endeavoring to be as humane as possible,” said Mark Regev, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “Israel has a special understanding of the genocide in Darfur. We have a very real compassion for the refugees, and no one is being turned back.” But, he added, “Israel does not have the capability to deal with all of Africa’s refugees, so we have to be mindful.”

Mr. Regev said Israeli authorities were in discussion with Egypt about sending some Sudanese back there, and with other governments and international organizations about their possible repatriation.

Israeli human rights groups like the Committee for Advancement of Refugees from Darfur, which has led efforts to get the Sudanese out of jail, say officials are deliberately exaggerating the likelihood of drawing more refugees as an excuse for inaction.

Even after the government agreed to substitute their time in prison with placements on farms for a time, the release process is slow, advocates say.

Yosef Lapid, a former justice minister, noted the parallel with “the historical curiosity” of German Jews who escaped Hitler, landing in England only to be put in detention camps because they, like today’s Sudanese refugees in Israel, were considered enemy nationals.

“I don’t think that the Jewish people can look the other way when such a horrible genocide is being conducted. It is our obligation to be as of much help as we can,” said Mr. Lapid, a Holocaust survivor.

[A group of Sudanese recently were taken on a tour of the museum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. They stood silently, some wiping away tears as they looked at photographs of corpses and cases displaying children’s dolls and a mother’s final postcard. “It was very hard to see this, really shocking,” said a 24-year-old man who fled Darfur last year. “It reminded me of my own people. I hope one day we can have a museum like this in Darfur.”]

Theo Kaminer, who is coordinating the kibbutz movement’s efforts to take in the Sudanese, said the farms felt a moral obligation.

“If not us, who will help them?” he said. “No one else is lifting a hand. These people are refugees from a Holocaust.”

The young man now living in the tin shed emerged from a low-security jail in central Israel last month, arm in arm with other Darfur refugees.

He and another of the released Sudanese, who also asked not to be named, now spend their days working the farm’s irrigation system in the eucalyptus- and cedar-lined fields.

The second refugee, 39, said he was relieved to be out of prison, but grateful that it had been so different from his time in Sudanese custody. Then, he said, he was beaten routinely. Now, he prays to be reunited with his family.

During a break from work, the young man sits at the table by the tin shed and thumbs through his notebooks.

In neat blue ink, he has written a timeline of his life and the names of his relatives and their birthdates.

The day Arab militiamen swept their village, shooting to kill and setting fires, he fled to the nearby hills on foot. He remembers dense smoke and screams. But he does not know the fate of his mother and eight siblings, including his twin sister.

When he crossed into Israel, after an all-night trek through the desert, his throat was parched and his hands bloodied. But he felt a need to record what happened.

“I had one pen in my pocket and started writing,” he said.

He says he wants a permanent home — be it in Israel or some other country that will accept him.

For now he awakes at dawn to pray and takes in the sunrise.

“I feel like my life was hidden in darkness and now there is a little bit of light,” he said. Then he climbed on a tractor and headed to work.