JERUSALEM: Israel launched a high-profile deportation drive against African migrants yesterday with an airlift of South Sudanese whose government said they would be welcomed back as economic assets.
The planned weekly repatriation flights from Tel Aviv to Juba have been played up by the Israeli government amid uncertainty as to how it might deal with much greater migrant influxes from Sudan, a hostile country, and war-ravaged Eritrea.
“Today the government commences the mission of returning the illegal work infiltrators to their countries of origin,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet, using a term Israel applies to the vast majority of the some 60,000 Africans who walked in over its porous border with Egypt in recent years. Hastened by protests, some violent, against the migrants in a Jewish state that sees them as a threat to public order and demographics, the government seized on the South Sudanese, whose de facto refugee status was rescinded by an Israeli court this month given their fledgling country’s relative stability.
The decision was supported by Juba. Formally independent from Sudan since last July, the African country received clandestine Israeli help for decades prior and counts on wider investment in its struggling agriculture and oil sectors.
“South Sudan and Israel, we consider ourselves brothers and sisters because we have very strong relationship,” Clement T. Dominic, the South Sudanese official overseeing the airlifts, told Reuters. “The situation is good at home, and that is why we are encouraging them (migrants) to come back,” he said.
Dominic put the number of South Sudanese in Israel at 700, less than half the 1,500 figure given by the Netanyahu government — a discrepancy that may be due to administrative confusion over those who arrived before Juba’s independence.
African migrants’ deportation drive begins in Israel
