"Humanity" by MSIH first year blogger Stephanie Sestito



I’m on a quest to maintain my humanity while I study medicine. It’s already proving to be challenging. My first round of finals has begun, and I suddenly feel stretched too thin, distant from my support network, and like I’m rapidly morphing a fact-eating robot. So, my quest isn’t going so well at the moment. But I’m holding on! Tonight, along with about a dozen classmates, I went to a follow-up meeting with a local activist and hu
man rights rock star, Moran Mekamel, from the Negev Refugee Center. And these moments of connection remind me of the fact that even now, as students, we have the ability to affect change.

Let me back up – about two weeks ago, I took a trip to the Holot detention center, located just over an hour from Be’er Sheva. It was a sobering experience, and I’d like to take this opportunity to share some of the things I learned with you.

There are about 40,000 people from Sudan and Eritrea currently living in Israel, including men, women and children. They go by many names; refugees, asylum seekers, and in mainstream Israeli media “infiltrators”. The various titles held by this group is a brief introduction into the divisive nature of their presence here. Very few have been officially recognized as refugees (fewer than 10, to give you a frame of reference). About 15,000 of them have filed the long, complicated and emotionally draining form to request refugee status, and have received no reply from the Israeli government. About 1,500 of them are currently being held at Holot.

Life as an asylum seeker in Israel is far from easy. Bi-monthly trips to a rarely open office are
required to maintain the proper documents, and negative public sentiment creates an environment that is sometimes openly hostile to their presence. While many of them have family members who remain in Sudan and Eritrea, who they would like to help support – this is made nearly impossible by the bureaucracy surrounding the tasks of opening bank accounts and regulations that bar them from using services like Western Union.

On top of all of these factors, men from this group may be arbitrarily sent to Holot detention center at any point. They are given 30 days notice, and then expected to enter the detention center for 12 months. The facility is deemed “open” as the detainees are permitted to leave during the day. However, the nearest town, Be’er Sheva, is a 17 shekel ($4.80 USD) bus ride each way, and this cost is typically prohibitive. Visitors are not allowed inside the detention center, so during our visit we met with about 20 men outside the gate. It was a privilege to be able to hear several of them share their stories, relating the journey to Israel, their experience in Holot, and their hopes for the future.

The narrative driven forward by Israeli media portrays this population as “migrant workers,” who traveled to Israel in search of jobs. It’s a familiar and comfortable story to tell, where xenophobia is disguised as nationalism, and the economy is used to excuse a gross denial of human rights.

Human immigration is a complex phenomenon, but it can be boiled down to two main forces which compel movement: push forces and pull forces. So, what “pushed” these people away from their homelands, and what “pulled” them to Israel? While it may be true that the hope of stable employment and a better life have helped draw these people to Israel, it’s not possible to get the full story without also examining the “push forces” that caused them to leave Sudan and Eritrea in the first place. Authoritarian governments, civil war, and mandatory life-long conscription are among the top reasons1,2,3

As it turns out, this month has been particularly tumultuous for asylum seekers in Israel. The Israeli government has passed a new amendment that will allow the forcible deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, a place that, aside from being on the same continent, has little in common with Sudan or Eritrea4. The Israeli government has also agreed to pay $5,000 USD to Rwanda for each person it accepts5. This order applies not only to the asylum seekers currently being held at Holot, but also to the thousands of others who currently reside in Israel.  

As you can imagine, this has thrown organizations such as the Negev Refugee Center into crisis mode. It’s rumored that these deportations may begin within the next few weeks, although no one knows for sure at this point.

I know that the world is full of many crises, and that it can be difficult to keep track of them, let alone pour yourself into all of them. It’s a depleting and consuming thing, to care about fellow humans. Sometimes, you need numbers to guide you1,2,3. Sometimes it has to become personal6. But whatever it takes for you, as an individual, I’m making the ask. Will you educate yourself about this problem, and share it with your network? Wherever you are, you have the ability to affect this situation. Contact your representatives, support organizations working to intervene7, or volunteer your time.

With gratitude,
Steph

______________________________________________________________________________

1 - https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/eritrea

2- https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/sudan

3- https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/south-sudan

4 - http://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2017/11/5a0f27484/unhcr-concerned-israels-refugee-relocation-proposals.html

5 - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.823734

6- https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/11/i-wanted-lie-down-and-die/trafficking-and-torture-eritreans-sudan-and-egypt

7- https://www.facebook.com/negev.refugees.center/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"A World Outside of MSIH" by rising second year student Chelsea Powell

Image
You may have heard that all medical students do is study.   It certainly seems that way at times.   There are, however, opportunities to fit in some other experiences. Here are a few of the things I have done this year:      I’ve always liked to run, and the endless desert trails in Beer Sheva provide great places to train.   In November my roommate and I decided it would be great fun to run the Tel Aviv Half Marathon , scheduled for February.   What seemed like such a good idea when we registered in November, however, became a source of stress as the February date approached, because we realized that the race fell on the day before a pharmacology quiz.   Fortunately, we were able to come up with a creative solution to our loss of study time.   While other runners wrote split times on their arms, our arms sported names of the drugs we needed to memorize.   I suspect we were the only runners in the race who quizzed each other about COX ...
Read more

"Loving the Alien" by MSIH first year blogger Flear Vaknin

Image
In recent years, the practice of referring to someone as an ‘alien’ has been contested by articles in the New York Times (“Time to Retire the Term ‘Alien ’ ”), Salon (“Stop Calling People Aliens”), and Immigration Impact, to name a few sources.  One of the definitions of the term, from the Oxford English Dictionary includes “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful,” so it is not surprising that many are calling for the abolishment of this term when referencing people. But then there is the pregnant alien of Bialik street in Beer Sheva: cartoonish, endearing, and a little odd, but more inviting than off-putting. Before seeing her for myself, I heard others refer to this pregnant alien and believed her to be a sculpture that was merely reminiscent of what was being described (something more abstract perhaps). When I happened upon her on a walk, I was thrilled to find out that, first, I am living in a city with a sense of humor, and that maybe this is the sort of place where being ...
Read more

"Think" by MSIH first year blogger Ayal Levi

Image
This little statue is called "The Thinking Man."  My (future) mother-in-law bought it in Uganda, then passed it over to me as a present, before I joined the rest of this inimitable group here in the Desert. Now, he sits on my desk, eyes half-shut, staring at me. He never stops staring, this “Thinking Man.”  He certainly is consistent; I’ll give him that. As we spend considerable hours together, trying to find our way through a waterfall of information, he has become a constant reminder to stop and think. To pause, shake my head, and work through the intricacies of acid-base metabolism, the autonomic nervous system drugs, and what feels like a black-hole of microbiology “Slow it down there sparky, and use your head.” Or something to that effect. A classmate of mine, a sort of philosopher-king, quoted me a short line from a letter Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas (complicated relationship). “Education is  the ability to play gracefully with ideas.”  What a grea...
Read more