South TA activists who oppose deportations rail against migrant deal flip-flop

South Tel Aviv residents who oppose the deportation of African asylum seekers held a press conference Tuesday in which they lambasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s flip-flop on a resettlement deal with the UN.

They also accused the government of using migrants — many of whom reside in the city’s south — as scapegoats for the neighborhoods’ deep-seated problems.

Sitting alongside migrants from Eritrea and Sudan, Israeli activist Shula Keshet accused the government of using residents’ difficulties to justify deportations.

“Our neighborhoods have been neglected for decades,” she said. “Benjamin Netanyahu and other ministers cynically come here and talk about worrying about us and our problems — they themselves created the problems here.”

She said ministers did not truly understand the state of things in south Tel Aviv. “There’s a contest there…who will find favor with those who call ‘Deport, deport, deport.’ It’s mania.”

Keshet said the southern neighborhoods required government attention for their poverty, crime, prostitution, and rampant drug problem, not their migrants.

She added that Netanyahu’s meeting with south Tel Aviv residents Tuesday morning, after which he announced that he was cancelling the deal, had not included opponents of the deportation.

“We were shut out from a meeting the prime minister had with wheeler-dealers, people with political interests, that have nothing to do with what we want,” she said.

Activist Sapir Slotzker-Amran said Netanyahu was “awarding racists who do not care about south Tel Aviv.”

She stressed that south Tel Aviv needed an extensive rehabilitation plan, not one focused on asylum seekers. “We’ve presented solutions. The government knows very well what needs to be done and chooses not to do it.”

Also speaking at the press conference was 33-year-old Bisrat Agbaria, an asylum seeker from Eritrea.

Agbaria called on the Israeli government to cease exploiting asylum seekers.”We are human beings… Do not make us part of a game… Do not use our name to achieve your goals.

“I want to say to all the Jews and Israelis and to all south Tel Aviv Israelis: thank you for everything… This interruption will not break our spirit… together we will make south Tel Aviv a very peaceful place for everyone,” she added.

Earlier Tuesday, opposition lawmakers blasted Netanyahu for his cancellation of a resettlement deal for African migrants that had been inked with the UN refugee agency a day earlier, branding him a “coward” who was unfit to lead.

In a dramatic about-face late Monday evening, Netanyahu announced he was canceling a new agreement with the UN refugee agency that would have seen thousands of African migrants resettled in Western nations and thousands more given temporary status in Israel. Netanyahu had frozen the deal on Monday evening, mere hours after announcing the plan.

“Every year I make thousands of decisions benefiting the State of Israel and Israeli citizens. Occasionally a decision is reached that has to be reconsidered,” he said at a meeting with anti-migrant activists from south Tel Aviv.

Opposition lawmakers blasted the prime minister for his cancellation, branding him a “coward” who was unfit to lead.

Labor party leader Avi Gabbay posted on Facebook that Netanyahu had exhibited “a lack of leadership, cowardice, evasion of responsibility, incitement against communities, empty slogans, an inability to make decisions, and zero ability to perform.”

Meanwhile right-wing leaders such as Education Minister Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home party praised the prime minister’s decision.

“I congratulate the prime minister on the wise decision to cancel the agreement to absorb the infiltrators,” he tweeted. “Now we must act to remove the illegal infiltrators.”

On Monday afternoon, at a press conference alongside Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, Netanyahu had praised the plan, saying that it would see some 16,250 African migrants in Israel resettled in “developed” Western countries, while a similar number would be given temporary residency.

“This agreement will allow for the departure from Israel of 16,250 migrants to developed countries like Canada or Germany or Italy,” Netanyahu declared, without elaborating. Other reports said the United States and Sweden would take in some of the number.

Netanyahu’s televised address followed a government announcement that it had scrapped an earlier controversial plan to deport the migrants and replaced it with a new one, quietly negotiated with the UN, that would see thousands sent to Western countries.

Under the nixed agreement, which Netanyahu earlier on Monday called “the best possible,” the asylum seekers who remained in Israel would be dispersed in areas across the country outside of south Tel Aviv, where they are currently concentrated. Netanyahu vowed to prioritize rehabilitating the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv, alongside implementing the international agreement.

Netanyahu said an earlier plan to deport migrants to Rwanda was no longer feasible. He stressed that “legal constraints as well as political difficulties on the part of [Rwanda]” led to the cancellation of previous deportation policies.

Israeli’s previous policy, which offered each migrant $3,500 and a plane ticket, had been condemned by Israeli activists and the United Nations as chaotic, poorly executed, and unsafe. Asylum seekers previously deported to Uganda and Rwanda have told The Times of Israel they faced serious danger and even imprisonment after arriving in Africa without proper documents.

The Supreme Court froze the deportations in mid-March in response to a petition.

The Prime Minister’s Office, in its statement announcing the deal, had said that most of the migrants who would stay under the agreement would have been eligible to remain in Israel even without it.