Forecast Highs

The area between the old and new bus stations in south Tel-Aviv is on its way to becoming a ghetto made up of African refugees living in the most squalid of conditions and turning the already run-down area into a time bomb the municipality can no longer ignore.

The few blocks adjacent to the new bus terminal are crawling with close to a thousand African refugees, with the lucky ones crammed into 8 dilapidated bomb-shelters while hundreds more sleep out in Lewinsky Park bordering Lewinsky, Har Zion, Levander, Matalon and Golomb streets. The area is already home to about 40,000 foreign, mostly illegal, workers from all over the world who provide cheap labor for a variety of contractors, and many headaches for the Israeli immigration police.

In Lewinsky Park, hundreds of refugees from Eritrea, Sudan and the Ivory Coast, mostly men between the ages of 20 and 35, but also several dozen children, spend all day sitting in small groups on the park grounds with nothing to do. At night, many of them cram into the small underground bomb shelter on the park’s premises. The few plastic mobile toilets provided by the municipality adjacent to the shelter have long ago filled to the brim with feces, bottles and newspapers used as toilet paper. The stench around the toilets is intolerable and only getting worse the longer the municipality leaves them in that condition. It is impossible for anyone to use them in their current state. Flies swarm all over the area and harass the men who sit close by.

The park is now completely taken over by African refugees, drug users, pushers, petty criminals and some hawkers. Police cars make the rounds every half hour or so. People don’t come here with their children anymore. For anyone familiar with the ghettos of Johannesburg and Sao Paolo, it is no great leap of the imagination to envision how a small area inhabited by desperate refugees, left to fester in appalling conditions by the state, swells in size and numbers to a point where the refugees control the streets and even the police don’t enter.

Lewinsky Park and its surrounds still have a ways to go before turning into unruly ghettos, but the warning signs are clear. There are about 200 refugees in the park at any given time, with more arriving daily. At night, many of them roam the surrounding streets. Once the park overflows, the municipality will have to make a decision on what to do with these people, as there is scarcely any room left in the shelters around the park. With nowhere to sleep and no food, the refugees will make their own arrangements.

In the eight [known] converted bomb shelters underneath buildings surrounding the park, close to a thousand African refugees eat, sleep, and wash in squalid and unsanitary conditions. Scabies is rampant, and other diseases are starting to take hold. In one shelter inhabited by a group of about 150 refugees, mostly young men from the Ivory Coast, share a tiny, dirty kitchen in which they cook the rice donated to them once-weekly by Israeli volunteers. Bread is delivered once a day. Dishes are washed in a small bucket, also used by some in the shelter for their bath. The showers and toilets are dirty and run down, and filthy water covers the ground up to about 10 centimeters. The mattresses are dank and dirty, with up to five people sleeping on the same one. There are no windows in the shelters and the air is bracken. In these conditions it won’t take long for diseases to start and spread. Across the hall from the Ivorian shelter is a smaller room where a group of young Eritrean women live. The conditions are slightly better but neither they nor their Ivorian neighbors have any work and wander around the old Tel-Aviv bus station, waiting for something to happen. Volunteer workers fear unwanted pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The shelters are being rented out by African organizations helping refugees, but the municipality, realizing the growing social and health problems these shelters pose, wants to close them down. The plan is to provide as many refugees with employment as possible, in coordination with the hotel association and the agricultural workers association.

The plan is good on paper, but the numbers at this stage don’t add up. Of the close to one thousand refugees in the shelters, only several dozen have been provided with employment in Eilat’s hotels and on farms. The refugees are coming faster than the authorities can find housing and work for them. This is not stopping the municipality’s director of welfare, public health and humans services, Zeev Friedman, from overseeing the plan, because, as he puts it, “the problem is not going away and is only getting bigger.” There are reports of similar shelters popping up in north Tel-Aviv around the Basel Street area, as well as in neighboring Bat Yam to the south.

What worries volunteers helping these refugees most are about 200 youths, aged 12-20, who are the most vulnerable and could easily be enticed to enter the world of drugs and crime. One organization is trying to establish, together with the Tel-Aviv municipality, a youth center not far from Lewinsky Park to provide a place where these youths can be educated and helped.

Dr. Mike Naftali, President of Brit Olam, the International Israeli-Jewish Volunteer Movement, is coordinating efforts together with the municipality’s social affairs department to deal with the growing problem in south Tel-Aviv, and on a larger level, to convince the government to adopt a strategy that will deal with the constant influx of African refugees. “Israel is part of the new world, the globalized world, characterized by the sudden and large movement of people seeking asylum and immigration,” Naftali says. Referring to the growing number of refugees in Lewinsky Park, Naftali says a solution to their situation is urgently needed. “In six months time they won’t be sitting in this park at night wondering where they’re going to get money and food. They’re going to be thinking of ways to break into my house. There is going to be crime, prostitution and disease,” Naftali, an expert in refugee camp issues says. “It costs the government US $25,000 annually to keep a young refugee in jail,” Naftali says, making a point that volunteers, working with the authorities, could help refugees find work and defuse the social time bomb their current condition represents.

There are currently about 8,000 African refugees in Israel, 6,000 of which arrived in 2007. Over 1,000 African refugees made their way to Israel in the three months of this year alone. Many of them are in the Ketziot refugee transit camp in the south, where they are provided with adequate conditions, but no prospect of employment and development. Naftali argues that a smart government strategy would be to put these people in some of the empty or near-empty absorption centers scattered throughout the country, and not leave them in Ketziot or the open parks and underground shelters. Ketziot, unlike many absorption centers, is in open desert in the south and nowhere near any industrial parks or places of employment. If placed in these centers, the refugees could find employment much easier, and this would take the financial burden off the government, which uses NIS 250 of tax-payer money per day per refugee at Ketziot. “If they were working the government wouldn’t have to feed them or clothe them, just provide a roof over their heads. This would mean however that Israel is allowing African refugees to stay, and that alarms many who want to keep the Jewish state’s fragile demographic balance steady,” Naftali says. While acknowledging that in the modern era it is very easy for African refugees to phone home and encourage others to come to Israel, Naftali argues that Israel can handle several thousand refugees without that being a threat to its demographic makeup.

Africa is always going to be a problem area and this is the latest wave of refugees.

Even if the government built a fence along the border with Egypt, the refugees would still come from the Jordanian side or via the sea. There is a big wall dividing Mexico and America, and still the refugees come. Spain has millions of them. Israel is part of this globalized world and will have to learn how to cope with this phenomenon,” Naftali says. Exasperated with the Israeli government’s slow response to the problem, Naftali has held meetings with African officials, including countries Israel has no diplomatic relations with, to try and create the conditions for voluntary repatriation. “Many of the refugees here can’t go back to their home nations because they will be persecuted for coming to Israel, so Israel can’t send them back,” Naftali says, adding that while the refugees are here, they need to be treated like human beings. “Like it or not this is the world we’re living in. Europe has ten million refugees. Jordan and Syria are absorbing refugees from Iraq. If there were peace in the Middle East we would be absorbing the Iraqis. The situation in Africa is not improving and we have to prepare ourselves to keep the refugees here for anywhere up to 20 years,” Naftali says.

Israeli arms dealers are also “heavily involved” in some of the armed conflicts in Africa, says Naftali, and so Israel as a nation cannot “escape responsibility to care for some of the refugees it itself helped create.”