Akoon is 25, a tall, very thin young Sudanese with several missing front teeth. He was orphaned in 2002 when militias attacked his village in southern Sudan and murdered his parents (as well as raping his 10-year-old sister), then held captive before being rescued by a non-governmental organisation and eventually helped to leave Sudan for Egypt.
By 2005, after repeated detention and mistreatment by the Egyptian police, who have little sympathy for refugees, Akoon could take no more. He heard that Bedouins were trafficking people across the Sinai into Israel, and managed to raise the $300 required to become part of a group of other young Sudanese on the long desert crossing.
Caroline Moorehead is a biographer and journalist.
Her eleven books include a history of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dunant's Dream; a study of pacifists, Troublesome People (Hamish Hamilton, 1987); a biography of Martha Gellhorn (Chatto & Windus, 2003); and a journey among refugees in the modem world, Human Cargo (Picador, 2006).
She wrote a fortnightly openDemocracy column telling stories of refugees and asylum-seekers for between May 2002 and December 2003 .
Soon after he entered the country, he was picked up by Israeli soldiers and taken to a prison in the desert. Two years of being shuttled between prisons ended suddenly in May 2007 when he was released and given a job in a hotel in Eilat. His position, however, remains precarious, for he now faces deportation.
Akoon is only one of a rapidly growing number of young Sudanese whose recent arrival in Israel is challenging both the government and the public over issues of asylum in ways that they have never been challenged before. Today, Israel is facing questions most western European countries have had to confront since the 1970s and 1980s: how to remain both humane and generous towards people fleeing persecution, and yet to protect national borders. No more than Europeans are Israelis finding these questions easy.
Until 2006, Israel had very few asylum-seekers. From time to time, young Sierra Leoneans, Liberians or Ivorians, driven from their homes by wars or persecution, made the long journey up through Sudan into Egypt, then crossed the Sinai into Israel. If they came from a country designated by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) as a "conflict-zone" - and therefore unsafe to return people to - they were given a six-month (and renewable) visa and allowed to work. Once conflict in their own countries was declared over - as with Sierra Leone in 2006 and Liberia in 2007 - then, in theory, they were obliged to leave. Those who failed were liable to arrest. There are currently a small number of Sierra Leoneans in prison in Israel; the Liberians who have remained after the deadline of March 2007 for their return are set to follow them.
On the network
The Sudanese story is different. Egypt, because of its historical ties with Sudan, has an open-door policy towards the Sudanese. In the conditions of conflict that have prevailed in Sudan for most of the last thirty years - civil war between north and south, and the crisis in Darfur since 2004 - enormous numbers (some say half a million or more) have fled north to Egypt in search of asylum and eventual resettlement in the west.
Among Caroline Moorehead's articles on openDemocracy:
"Jawad: an education for life"
(31 July 2002)
"Adaf: a Palestinian in Lebanon"
(16 December 2002)
"The peopling of London: how ‘they' became ‘we'"
(24 April 2003)
"Uganda: women in flight"
(22 May 2003)
"Burundi, a life in fear"
(6 October 2003)
"The Chaldeans of San Diego"
(17 December 2003)
For the vast majority, that ultimate destination remains an impossible dream. The refuge they find in Egypt becomes a trap: officially forbidden to work, these people scratch dismal livings on the streets and the outskirts of Egyptian cities, vulnerable to frequent harassment by the police.
In January 2006, their long-simmering discontent with this treatment boiled over into confrontation: a sit-in protest by Sudanese families in Cairo was broken up by the police and twenty-seven people, among them several children, were killed (human-rights groups and others say the death-toll was higher). A sense of panic spread around the Sudanese community, many of whom sought out the Bedouin traffickers and began to make their way across the Sinai. For the Israeli authorities, the Sudanese nationals like Akoon arriving on their doorstep were a potential security risk that had to met by their arrest.
Israel's small but energetic human-rights lobby did not see it that way. It argued that the Israeli government was using this draconian measures to deter other would-be arrivals. The Refugee Rights Clinic and the Hotline for Migrant Workers challenged the Israeli government in a series of forums - the administrative courts, detention review tribunals, and the high court of justice - and won. It was not right, activists maintained, to treat all the Sudanese as a group: under the international refugee treaties to which Israel is party, those seeking asylum have to be dealt with case by case.
The result of this legal victory was that the Sudanese were - singly and in groups - released, and given work on kibbutzim and in the many hotels along the coast. They were prohibited from leaving their places of work but they did earn reasonable salaries. Since this coincided with tough new immigration restrictions on workers from overseas, the arrangement appeared to suit everyone.
But not for long. The human-rights campaigners had in their way been "too" successful. The Sudanese used their mobile-phones to alert friends and relations in Egypt to the turn of events, and soon others - believing that the dangers and expense of the trafficking would be amply compensated by a more secure life in Israel - began to arrive. In 2004 the UNHCR registered just five Sudanese; in the first five months of 2007, there were 382 (a figure that excludes families and, of course, those not known to the authorities); now, sixty or seventy people may be crossing into Israel each night.
In the mirror
Israel has reacted with alarm to these numbers and what they represent. The hotel business has absorbed as many Sudanese as it can take, and - now that women with small children are arriving, not only single men - owners are reluctant to have staff dormitories crowded with young families. In Tel Aviv two shelters for homeless young Sudanese have opened; one is in a former nightclub near the central bus station, a cavernous, dilapidated space with peeling dark-blue paintwork, where dozens of young men sleep in rows on the concrete floor and share a single shower.
Israel's vigorous public debate includes talk of sending all the Sudanese back to prison, and of opening a new tented wing in one of the detention facilities in the desert. On 1 July, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert are said to have sealed a plan with an informal handshake: Darfurians may be offered asylum in Israel, but other Sudanese - young men like Akoon from the south - will be returned to Egypt, and that steps will be taken to seal the border to stem the flow of new arrivals.
Such a deal may not be easy to enforce in face of humane and public-spirited opposition. As in Australia, where harsh anti-refugee measures by the John Howard government provoked many citizens to join forces in support of the Afghans and others arriving in leaky boats from Indonesia, so Israelis are gathering to offer help, hospitality and even a hiding-place for the Sudanese arrivals. Again like Australia, another nation born of people seeking new lives as well as refuge, the experience is leading Israelis to examine their own identities and question official policy.
A middle-aged woman bringing food to an encampment of Sudanese women and children near the Knesset (parliament) in early July said that the whole experience was about her own past too. "I was a refugee", she said, "my parents were refugees, we know here what it means to be a refugee. We have to treat these people properly."
What happens next is not clear. The fate of the Sudanese hovers in the balance. As it does so, the debate in Israel between those who wish to act humanely and those who fear that Israel will be "swamped", grows more heated. It is a controversy that the west has spent a generation and more trying, and failing, to solve.
