Yonatan Jakubowicz on Israel’s African Immigrants

Last Saturday, supporters and opponents of Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, confronted one another in violent clashes. Yet rather than in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital city, this confrontation took place in the streets of south Tel Aviv. In the second half of the 2000s, East African migration to Israel began to accelerate. Since then, in part due to changes in labor policies and law enforcement and in part to a barrier wall erected along the Egypt-Israel border, the number of new East African migrants has fallen precipitously. Nevertheless, although statistics are hard to come by with great precision, there are probably around 40,000 non-Jewish African migrants living in Israel today.