Gratitude

Author's Note: I'm becoming ever-familiar with the failings of the blogger/traveler balance. I've had all of 30 minutes of internet access this week and only a few hours to write so what you're reading is an early draft of something larger I'd like to write after this fellowship ends and time allows. Until then, shit just got real. If you need more something more digestible, start after the last picture of this entry. This is an amazing story. AC

We started our day outside of North Tel Aviv, Israel’s Silicon Valley and harbor of private wealth, touring at A Better Place, an Israeli company which is actually producing electric cars for the world. They really mean it this time. We roam the facility, sneer an appropriate amount at a propaganda video, drive the cars (which ride smoothly and soundlessly), and meet the PR master who, after hearing we’re from New York, lets it slip that she and her husband have a pied-à-terre apartment on Central Park West.

It’s all very impressive. Israel is going to be (again) at the forefront of yada yada yada; making the world at large better while materializing a boon to Israel’s obvious anti-oil politics. We leave for South Tel Aviv.

A spell of time among African refugees changes things a bit. We walk through Neve Sha’anan, which is a neighborhood abutting the old Central bus station in Tel Aviv. Anyone who’s been to this neighborhood knows it’s not a place you want to stick around unless you have to. It’s grungy, seedy, filled with Kingdoms of Pork and pip shows.

We pass through Levinsky Park which has become a home for African refugees leaving the various genocidal unrest of Darfur, the South Sudan, and Eritrea. They enter the country illegally and eventually migrate to Tel Aviv by bus from places in Israel like Beer Sheva and other tiny communities where they’re not wanted and cannot be supported. Our guide works for an organization devoted to sheltering and feeding some of the children, sustaining them through education, and helping them acclimate to Israeli life. He walks through the park where at night a community of displaced sleep, finding single pregnant women—many of whom the victims of rape during their exodus to Israel—and taking them to the shelter he operates. (By summarizing, I am shorting the scope of the work he does).

The refugees are called “infiltrators” because the term refugee is too charged and refugees (given Israel’s history) is not a legal designation willingly given by the government. For a country whose critics lob charges of it (at best) being a displacer of people and (at worst) a genocidal robber of determinations, the paradox is stark. For a Jewish country, the plight of others fleeing genocide and total privation adds an undercurrent that prods the liminal corners of this reality. Should Israel become known as a country that, by policy, openly welcomes refugees who are neither Palestinian nor Jewish would be problematic.

Accordingly, the plight of the infiltrators is a political third rail. Not a single political party in Israel (despite an abundance of work visas) is interested in attaching the refugees to their agenda. Nonetheless, Israel has absorbed as many infiltrators as it has legal immigrants in 2010 and there are currently 22,000 African refugees inside the border, a large number for a small country.

We meet E at the headquarters of the organization. He left Eritrea when he was 19, some seven years ago, a decision he says he made to “preserve life.” Back home he wanted to go to college but when the violence picked up they closed the university to stifle debate. He lived in a camp with 15,000 other people before leaving for Israel. There were other places to go, but he was short on money and, despite the Egyptian policy of shooting infiltrators on sight, the trek through the Sinai was the cheaper option.

E braved it and arrived. He now lives in Tel Aviv, speaks English and some Hebrew. From the years 2003-2007, his family had no idea where he was. In 2009, he secured a 50% scholarship to IDC, a college in Herzliya which hosts its courses in English. His major, fittingly, is in government. In order to pay his tuition, E works a sanitation job from seven at night until five in the morning. During the day he attends classes taking on a full course load. He says he averages two hours of sleep per night. His biggest difficulty is staying awake during school and so he always sits in the back of class to avoid the embarrassment of being caught falling asleep. When asked about his long-term plans in Israel or abroad with his family, he says, like a number of refugees in his position, he doesn’t have any plans. “I don’t have time to think about that.”