Taj Haroun didn’t know anything about Tel Aviv before he came to Israel. It was 2008 and the then 19-year-old had crossed into Israel from Egypt, on the run from war in his native Darfur in Sudan. Authorities soon put the young asylum seeker on a bus to Levinsky Park in south Tel Aviv, a debilitated part of Israel’s sun-kissed economic center that outsiders don’t often see.
Haroun’s trajectory is fairly typical of the estimated 60,000 African asylum seekers—mainly from Eritrea and Sudan—who crossed illegally into Israel between 2006 and 2012. Migration has effectively halted since. In late 2013, migrants began to be rounded up and put in Holot, an open-air detention center made with the government’s hope that it would encourage illegal migrants to leave Israel. It was finally shut down last March as Israel amped up a now scratched plan to deport Africans to Rwanda and Uganda. Israel’s construction of a fence along its border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula has also discouraged further migration during the same period. Like other populist politicians in the U.S. and parts of Europe, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to carry out his own pledge to deport the asylum seekers, who are classified under Israeli law as illegal “infiltrators,” while human rights groups argue that they are simply refugees.
