Asylum Seekers Arrested In Tel Aviv Raid After Authorities Announce Holiday Reprieve
Friday was a rainy day in Tel Aviv. The head of the immigration authorities, Amnon Ben Ami, had issued a press release promising to cease all arrest operations for the duration of the Christian holidays and New Year’s Eve.
The Levinsky Park multi-lingual library, an open library located at the center of the park, was closed due to the rain. Its regular visitors, children from asylum-seeking families, were left in the rain, wandering between the many homeless asylum seekers residing in the park. One of the girls, 9 years old, from a South Sudanese family, seemed worried. Her father had not returned home. While I was aware that her family had been granted temporary protection on humanitarian grounds (unlike most South Sudanese residents, who were deported this past summer), I was concerned, knowing all too well the “Oz” immigration unit often arrests people despite their protected status.
My concern was heightened because, only a couple of hours earlier, I was informed through a phone call from Juba that of the 700 deportees to South Sudan, 17 had died already, most from illness or violent attacks. My girlfriend Saranna and I decided to help the girl look for her father. Walking down Levinsky Street, we came across one Christmas procession after another, each of a different community: a Nepali, then a Philippine, and finally, an Eritrean procession. The girl accepted offers from the revelers, cheerfully joining the marches one after another, leaving her worries behind for a moment. Luckily, we found her father looking for her down the street.
The next day, Saturday evening, the neighborhood filled with Oz immigration vans. A major operation was going on. The public statement informing the communities that no operations would take place over the holidays turned out to be a deception designed to create a sense of comfort within the communities, thereby facilitating a major arrest operation. Perhaps some bureaucrats in the Ministry of Interior even enjoyed the little joke: no operation on the holiday, but a major operation on the eve of necessary preparations for the holiday. What a grotesque image: a group of Philippine ladies, dressed in their Christmas costumes, the contents of their shopping bags full of presents for their kids spread out in the street around them, as they desperately searched for their documents, the absence of which would result in detention and deportation. For the first time in over five years of activities in the neighborhood, the immigration officers even made an attempt to detain Saranna, proving their skills in discerning even a minute trace of non-Jewish origin.
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