1 6.
Fatima, who crossed into Israel over the border from Egypt, holds her UN refugee document at a shelter in northern Israel.
Yosef Israel Abramowitz
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Kibbutz Ketura, Israel
W
ith two miles of bare foot-
prints behind them, Ahmed,
Fatima and their three chil-
dren approached the border with Israel in
the middle of a cold winter night. Snow
was falling in the Sinai.
Avoid the Egyptian military patrols,
warned their Bedouin smugglers, who
were paid with money borrowed from
Sudanese friends.
"If they catch you, you could be shot or
deported back to Sudan," the Bedouins
said.
The 12-hour trip was the last leg of a
multi-year journey stretching from the
violence of Darfur to Sudan's dangerous
capital, Khartoum, to the teeming streets
of Cairo. Ahmed had been imprisoned in
each city.
Israel was their last hope for what
Fatima calls "a normal life" without "fear
of being sent back to Sudan."
Two hours after they dusted the sand off
their dark clothing from crawling under
two security fences, their 5-month-old
baby's cry pierced the silence of the frigid
16
Aprils
2007
N
Negev air.
The response was an Israeli military
spotlight.
"Do you know where you are?" the sol-
diers called out in Arabic.
"Yes," they answered.
"Why are you here?"
"Because we were mistreated in Egypt."
"Who are you?"
"We are Sudanese."
Ahmed lowered his 2-year-old son
from his shoulders and held up his
Sudanese passport as well as the worn
yellow card from the United Nations High
Commission on Refugees, or UNHCR. The
card had been obtained in Cairo and saved
them from being deported back to Sudan,
as the Egyptian police had threatened.
The Israeli soldiers gave the children
their green military coats.
"We were afraid of the Egyptian army, not
of the Israeli army;' Ahmed recalled later.
In an often-reluctant ritual that has
been repeated almost weekly for two years
with Sudanese sneaking into Israel, Israel
Defense Forces patrols gathered up the
tired refugee family, placed them in an
ambulance and handed them over to the
Border Police.
The Border Police sent Ahmed to
Ketziot prison for violating the Infiltration
Law, a 1954 statute enacted against enemy
combatants.
If the experience of others before him
is any precedent, Ahmed could remain
incarcerated for at least a year, until Israel
figures out what to do with him and the
other nearly 200 imprisoned Sudanese.
Fatima and the children were sent to a
battered women's shelter in the western
Galilee that has largely been taken over by
Sudanese refugees whose husbands are in
prison.
The failure of the United Nations to
cope with the doubling of refugee applica-
tions in the past decade or to intervene to
prevent the genocide in Darfur has had
ripple effects throughout the world.
That now includes Israel and the Jewish
world.
Faced with genocidal threats from
Iran and terrorist groups, a legacy of the
Holocaust and even echoes of the Exodus
3,700 years ago, Israel is torn between its
commitment to universal humanitarian
concerns and its own security interests.
A four-month JTA investigation into the
plight of the refugees and the Israeli gov-
ernment's handling of the situation found
a system that even the top Israeli official
adjudicating each of the cases has said
often violates Israeli and international law.
After two years of legal challenges and
growing Israeli media attention, the issue
now is coming to a critical juncture.
The practice of arresting and indefi-
nitely detaining Sudanese asylum seekers
on security grounds is about to be tested
in the courts even as Israeli Border Police
are showing signs of resisting the orders
to arrest and detain the refugees crossing
the borders.
Humanitarian Dilemma
Major international human rights figures
have embraced the cause, and a handful
of Knesset members and activists in Israel
are pressing for a resolution of the crisis.
Some of these activists in turn have strong
ties to the American Jewish community,
which has embraced the cause of Darfur
as a top humanitarian priority.
Some 200,000 to 400,000 people have
been killed in the Darfur region of west-
See the full JTA series
online at www.jnonline.us:
• Echoes at Yad Vashem
• U.S. Jews Intervene
• Egypt's Role
• The Options