Israelis extend mixed welcome to Sudanese

Agnes has jagged lines cut into her legs from the day, less than a week ago, when she climbed over coils of barbed wire that separate Egypt from Israel.

After escaping from Sudan to Egypt, only to find that life in Cairo wasn't much better, she and her husband headed here. She was so desperate that she didn't care if reaching safety meant clambering over metal thorns or risking being shot at by Egyptian border police.

Today, she's in a prison compound recently set up by Israeli authorities for refugees escaping Sudan. Women and children are in one section; male prisoners – including her husband – are held in separate cells. Tomorrow, she could well be deported, since she came in illegally and has no official refugee status. An additional strike against her is that she does not come from Darfur, but from southern Sudan.

That puts her among the majority of the approximately 1,700 African refugees who have streamed into Israel since the beginning of the year, less than a third of them from Darfur. While southern Sudan is recovering from the horrors of a decades-long civil war that ended with a tenuous peace in 2005, its refugees are not accorded the same priority as those directly fleeing what the US has termed genocide in Darfur. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said this summer that it would accept up to 500 Darfurian refugees, and that the rest would have to return.

Such distinctions are lost on Agnes, whose full name, Agnes Samson Nagune Isharo, reflects a mix of Christian and animist roots typical in southern Sudan.

"If I ever go back to Sudan, I know they will kill me. Life in Egypt is no good because they don't like this color," she says, pinching the skin on her forearm. "I just want to stay here."

So do many of the dozens of refugees arriving from Africa each day – primarily but not exclusively Sudan. But Israel has yet to create a comprehensive policy, addressing the streams of refugees filling its prisons, communities, and workplaces on an ad-hoc basis.

As it struggles with a response, the government is faced with the concerns of many Israelis who say that their nation, created to offer haven for Jewish refugees, should be particularly sensitive to those today in need of refuge. At the same time, Israel's proximity to Africa raises concerns about opening the door to unlimited numbers of refugees as well as economic migrants, especially given its ongoing demographic struggle to maintain an identity as a tiny state that is both Jewish and democratic.

Some refugees, like Agnes, are being jailed here at Ketziot Prison – the women and children in colorful, air-conditioned facilities that are more like shelters, the men in regular cells. Others are finding housing and work on farming communities known as kibbutzim and with individual families willing to take them in, thanks to a coalition of advocacy groups that has argued for "alternative custodies."

"The rationale we convinced the judges of is that, on the one hand, there's no place to put them or absorb them, and yet there's no way to deport them [given current policy]," says Romm Lewkowicz, spokesman of the Hotline for Migrant Workers.

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