This is a guest post by Ben Judah
As gunshots are fired along the soon-to-be border between North and South Sudan nervous eyes in the Israeli establishment are looking towards the Horn of Africa. They are not frightened of an avalanche of violence, but of refugees.
Unheard of a decade ago there is now a growing population in the Holy Land who are neither Jews nor Arabs, of which 35,000 are black Africans. Their numbers have soared 2500% since 2006 and the Jewish State is nervous that this is just the beginning. The authorities say over 1,100 entered the country illegally every month since February, a figure to be compared to just 19,000 immigrants for the whole of 2010.
Refugees are crossing the Sinai desert, escorted by Bedouin tribesmen that smuggle drugs to Israel and guns to Hamas. The migrants say they are tortured and raped in their hands. This problem is only set to worsen as the Sinai is not fully under the grip of the Egyptian government, whose forces are deployed in the dense conurbations of the Nile as Mubarak’s twilight rule goes on and on.
In Israel itself the municipality of Eilat says it can no longer cope with the influx, stressing public services underinvested in by a state committed seemingly committed to settlement construction. In south Tel Aviv whole areas of poor, mostly Russian Jews are now mixed race. This has sparked angry demonstrations with a racist tone by the Zionist right and self-righteous marches from the Israeli left.
The migrants live in a limbo without proper documents, unsure of their future. Israel, a society founded by refugees, has only granted 141 refugee status cases since its foundation. A furious debate has been kicked up in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over the refugees. Can Israel afford to admit them? Is the Netanyahu-Libermann government respecting their rights?
As the state commits itself to build a detention centre and a desert fence I spoke to the migrants themselves and investigated what effect this human tide is having to a country so unsure of itself in nervous times, in a special feature for the new news hub Think Africa Press.