JERUSALEM – Hundreds of Israelis and African migrants marched down Tel Aviv’s main boulevard on Friday to protest a government plan to build a detention facility to hold those who enter the country illegally.
The government estimates that more than 30,000 Africans, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, have entered Israel through the porous southern border with Egypt since 2005.
The Africans say they are fleeing conflict and poverty in their countries in hopes of finding relief and jobs in Israel.
“I have had enough of people calling us terrorists and that we are sick and bring disease to the state of Israel,” Mubarak Saleh, 17, a refugee from Darfur, told the crowd in Hebrew. “I am asking for the possibility to stay here until our countries are safe to return.”
But many in Israel think the migrants are overwhelming the small state and threatening the country’s Jewish character.
In poor neighborhoods of Tel Aviv where they are concentrated, Jewish neighbors say crime rates have gone up as the Africans cram into tiny apartments or sleep on cardboard boxes on the ground inside the vegetable markets.
Still, many Israelis say the government should not turn away people fleeing repression, noting the country’s own role in sheltering Holocaust survivors after World War II.
Last month, Israel announced plans for the detention center and began construction of a fence along long stretches of the Egyptian border.
The migrants began to cross the Israeli-Egyptian border in 2005, after Egypt violently quashed a demonstration by a group of Sudanese refugees in Cairo, killing several people.
They continue to face treacherous journeys as they make their way through Egypt’s Sinai desert. The Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights recently issued a report in which migrants described suffering torture, rape and abuse at the hands of Bedouin smugglers on their way to Israel.
