{"id":21337,"date":"2018-11-06T12:26:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T12:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=21337"},"modified":"2018-11-06T12:26:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-06T12:26:50","slug":"in-israel-african-migrant-families-battle-hunger-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=21337","title":{"rendered":"In Israel, African migrant families battle hunger, trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nTEL AVIV:\u00a0In the concrete bowels of a vast bus station in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, a group of children gathers in the evening to play and dance to songs blaring from a CD player.
Their parents are African migrants who work until late, struggling to earn enough to put food on the table.
While their children have access to state education in Israel, they face hardships, support workers said.
\u201cEveryone in their proximity is in dire stress, and there\u2019s no money for basic necessities,\u201d said Yonit Naftali, vice president of Elifelet, an Israeli charity that supports children born to African migrants.
Over a decade from the mid-2000s, about 64,000 Africans \u2014 mainly from conflict-torn Sudan and Eritrea \u2014 arrived in Israel across the then-porous border with Egypt\u2019s Sinai, which was fenced off several years ago.
Many experienced torture, were enslaved or imprisoned for ransom at the hands of Bedouin smugglers in the Sinai desert.
Today some 36,000 remain in Israel, with 6,000 more children, according to government data.
For many, life has got tougher since a 2017 law directed employers to deduct 20 percent from the wages of workers with temporary visas who entered Israel illegally from Egypt.
As an incentive for them to go elsewhere, the money is deposited in a fund, together with an employer-paid tax of 16 percent, which workers can only access when they leave Israel.
The new system is crippling for migrant families, said Naftali. \u201cThe children were the first to get hurt,\u201d she said.
Parents must now work more \u2014 some clocking up 15 hours a day \u2014 while earning less, leaving them unable to take care of their children properly, she added.
In birthday cards to friends, children of migrants recently wrote messages such as \u201cMay you have food in your refrigerator\u201d and \u201cMay you never go hungry,\u201d Naftali said.
\u201cThen we understood there is something really bad going on,\u201d she said. Her charity had to close down one of its after-school centers in order to finance emergency food donations.
\u201cThere are actually hungry children, which I never believed I would see in Israel to such an extent,\u201d Naftali told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Israeli Ministry of Interior\u2019s Population and Immigration Authority did not respond to requests for comment.
Communitry school<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nMany children of African migrants were born in Israel, speak Hebrew, attend Israeli schools and know Jewish culture and traditions. But they do not have Israeli identity cards and often encounter racist slurs, said Naftali.
Eritrean migrants in Israel, backed by rights groups, say they are asylum seekers fleeing violence, persecution and conscription under a repressive regime back home.
But the Israeli government views them as economic migrants, and has tried to deport them \u2014 although a failure to find a country willing to take them forced it to abandon a plan to expel thousands of mostly Eritrean and Sudanese men in April.
Between 2009 and 2017, Israel granted refugee recognition to less than 0.5 percent of the almost 11,000 asylum applications it decided on, according to the Israeli non-profit Hotline for Refugees and Migrants.
Elifelet was established following a 2012 hate crime attack, when Molotov cocktails were thrown into a Tel Aviv center for refugees where 21 children were sleeping, Naftali said.
For the children of migrant families, developing pride in their heritage is important to equip them to deal with the discrimination they face in everyday life, she added.
An after-hours school set up by the city\u2019s Eritrean migrant community has similar aims, teaching children their own language and culture, and offering them a safe space in the evenings.
\u201cIf our kids go on the streets, they get a lot of discrimination. Here, it\u2019s like a home,\u201d said Kifle Bizen, director of the Abugida Eritrean Community School.
On the top floor of a rundown building in southern Tel Aviv, it is staffed by volunteers who, after finishing day jobs as cleaners or cooks, teach classes for about 120 Eritrean children, aged six to 14, four times a week.
Set up in 2013, it assists children with school work and fosters their Eritrean identity, Bizen explained.
\u201cOur dream is to support our children not only with knowledge but also with their sense of self to help them develop,\u201d he said.
Besides studying maths and science, the children sing, perform plays and recite poems in Tigrinya, one of Eritrea\u2019s main languages.
Learning Tigrinya is key, said Bizen, not least because children and parents often cannot understand one another, sparking arguments.
\u201cHere, 100 percent of the children talk in our language,\u201d he said. The Eritrean community is like \u201can extended family,\u201d working together to overcome shared challenges, he added.
The official monthly fee at Abugida is about 400 shekels ($108), but most Eritreans pay half that or less, said Bizen, while 40 children from single-parent households attend free.
Since the migrant job tax was imposed, about 20 children have dropped out because their parents could no longer afford to pay anything, Bizen added.
MENTAL SCARS
Some students are affected by psychological troubles, making them withdrawn and unwilling to make friends, said Bizen.
Berhe Teame, a volunteer at Abugida and an Eritrean community leader, said a psychologist was brought in last year, but the project collapsed due to a lack of funds.
\u201cThe trauma lives in us,\u201d he said. His own daughter was held in a Libyan prison with her mother before arriving in Israel.
\u201cMy kid saw everything,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen the police beat her mother, she was with her.\u201d
Many parents are also scarred by their ordeal, said Bizen, describing one father who talked of a severed head he saw in the Sinai desert.
Ultimately, many Eritreans in Israel dream of returning home once the situation there improves, said Teame.
\u201cWe hope to have peace in our country, to be able to give our kids our land,\u201d he said. \u201cThere will be a time when things will change. Until then, we need to give them education.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TEL AVIV:\u00a0In the concrete bowels of a vast bus station in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, a group of children gathers in the evening to play and dance to songs blaring from a CD player.Their parents are African migrants who work until late, struggling to earn enough to put food on the table.While their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":21338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}