African refugees flood UN office in Tel Aviv

The employees of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Israel are not the most popular occupants of their Tel Aviv building. Yesterday, their neighbor, a large travel company, demanded their eviction by the building's management.

That morning, the firm's workers had to walk through a crowd of hundreds of Africans who were waiting to register at the UN institution, which is situated on the building's first floor. The travel workers could barely open the doors of their own office on the ground floor.

There were precisely 430 people waiting outside the UNHCR office. Thirty of them were Sudanese, the rest came from Eritrea - the two largest groups of African refugees in Israel. Many of them had initially been arrested by the Israel Defense Forces after they infiltrated the border from Egypt. Security forces brought them by bus to Be'er Sheva, where they were then left to their own devices. The refugees made their way to Tel Aviv from there.

According to an agreement between the army and the Interior Ministry, the IDF was supposed to have taken them to Ketziot detention facility, near the Egyptian border. Attempts by ministry officials to find out why the refugees had been dumped in Be'er Sheva were not responded to with concrete answers.

The incident reflects the confusion, inconsistency and lack of coordination so characteristic of Israel's treatment of the refugees pouring across its borders.

The UNCHR has processed 6,500 requests by asylum-seekers from Sudan, and is currently reviewing another 2,000 applications. The applicants are without formal status in Israel because the state refuses to recognize them as refugees, citing the fact that they come from an enemy country. But international law prevents it from deporting them.

This, in turn, puts the state in another bind. It cannot prevent the asylum-seekers from working, even though Israeli law does not allow employers to hire citizens from enemy states. The state has come up with an ingenious solution to this problem: It equips the refugees with formal letters guaranteeing that anyone employing them will not be prosecuted for breaking the law.