22.05.24, Ran Shimoni, Haaretz
Tal Ayalon has lived in the prettiest house in Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighborhood for the past 15 years. It’s a handsome private property on the corner of a quiet street, with a gate into the parking lot. Precisely for this reason, he says, in recent years his home has been targeted by youngsters from the neighborhood, mostly kids from the “foreign community” – code words meaning migrant workers and asylum seekers.
“They throw things inside, ask me about the house and what I have there,” he says. “In the past, they would ring the doorbell 20 times a night and my daughter would wake up crying. You know, it sounds like nothing, but you feel like they’re invading your home. They really make life miserable.”
As Ayalon can attest, life has never been tranquil in the underprivileged neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv. Thefts, burglaries and violent incidents are a matter of routine. In recent months, though, the sense is that “violence for the sake of violence” has erupted among the youngsters, especially the offspring of asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan.
Residents talk of stones being thrown at the windows of homes and cars, youngsters beating one another up and even harming passersby. In one incident, says local resident Sasi Ben Menahem, a group of youngsters piled into the car of an elderly man while he was still in it and going wild inside.
“It’s living with this sense of helplessness,” says Ben Menahem, who had a home window smashed recently. “It’s just that you’re dealing with children here – I’m not going to start running after a kid of 10. But the police and city officials just look at you and say there’s nothing to be done because they’re minors.”
At the beginning of March, shortly after a Sabbath ended, some neighbors in the Hatikva neighborhood met in the local park to try to devise a plan to address the issue. Usually, Hatikva residents do and demand little, even though the lack of personal security is a chronic problem impacting their lives. More than anything else, then, this rare gathering showed the height of the issue from their perspective.
Oshrit Molay, who organized the event, notes that the choice of Hatikva Park as the venue is intentional. It is supposed to symbolize that the park, “which has become a place no one dares enter anymore, doesn’t just belong to the foreigners,” as he puts it.
According to these residents, the violent incidents are endless. Two mothers report that their daughters were violently assaulted not long ago by a gang of girls from the foreign community – though in one of the cases, the police and municipality both deny that the attackers were from that community.
One of the attacks was earlier this year, outside the school that one of the girls attends. According to the mother, her daughter has hardly left home since the attack, and they are planning to move out of Tel Aviv soon. In the other incident, a girl of 12 was attacked in the Shapira neighborhood.
Elsewhere in the city, a 15-year-old girl was the victim of an attack by a gang of foreign girls in the Azrieli Towers plaza at the end of February. And on March 9, a foreign girl of 11 was detained for questioning after she and others attacked a girl her own age in the middle of the street. Most of the attacks were documented and did the rounds on social media.
“I saw the video of the attack on my daughter maybe 100 times, and I couldn’t sleep the whole night,” the girl’s mother recalls. “Seeing your daughter like that, getting beaten up the way they were hitting her, is terrible.” According to another of the mothers, the attack on her daughter made her realize that the problem is bigger than she had thought.
Toward the end of the meeting, another Hatikva resident states: “The first generation [of foreigners], really, are normal people who are trying to acclimatize, and I wanted them to have a solution. But I didn’t know what was going to happen here with the next generation.”
In the adjacent Shapira neighborhood, a group of residents has also arisen, including Ayalon, and they’re trying to act together against a similar phenomenon. As well as repeated complaints and meetings with municipal workers and the police, the Shapira parents also boycotted an annual neighborhood event, the Spring Festival, in April.
Aid organizations have been warning for years about such developments, on the grounds that refusal to grant status to foreigners – or even consider their applications – would ultimately manifest itself in an increase in the number of at-risk youth.
According to the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority, there are currently 7,900 children in Israel whose parents are asylum seekers from Eritrea or Sudan – with about 3,370 of them living in Tel Aviv. These youngsters have no official status but are “non-deportable” – i.e., they have temporary protection that prevents their deportation. The vast majority were born in Israel, but stay here without official status or an ID card. At age 16, they lose their protected status as children and are uprooted from any Israeli trajectory. They are forbidden to enlist in the army, register for university or even apply for a driver’s license.
“We’re seeing children who could be outstanding students, but something changes in them at the age of 14 or 15,” says a source involved with the community. “They realize that they aren’t going to be anything they want to be.”
According to police figures, 21 cases were opened against adolescents from the foreign community in Tel Aviv last year. Station chief Avital says this is low compared to youth crime in other cities – but it is concentrated mostly in a small geographical radius. As the result of conclusions drawn from previous instances of disorderly behavior, at the communal garden on Arye De Modena Street, on the eastern side of the Shapira neighborhood, about 20 police officers and municipal wardens are posted to ensure that the kids there do no cross any lines again.
“The parents work hard, until late at night, and the apartments are crowded. This makes children go outside,” says Kibrom Tewelde, a prominent activist in Israel’s Eritrean community. He has been in Israel since December 2008 and speaks Hebrew fluently and eloquently. For years he has been trying to mediate between his community and Israelis, to explain each to the other, but not always successfully. “In Eritrea,” he explains, “parents’ involvement in children’s education is nearly zero. The parents here are looking for a quiet environment, so they let their children run around outside and they’re exposed to violence, barbarism and danger.”
The most painful breaking point in the foreign community is between the parents and children. When a child has to translate for his parents, the parents’ authority is broken for the first time. When a parent is not able to help their child with their homework, it is broken again. When a mother and daughter each prefer to communicate in a different language, the closeness between them also changes. As a result, moment by moment, year by year, the generation gap widens and the youngsters become cut off from their own community.
Like many Shapira residents, Itamar Shimshoni moved to the neighborhood totally accepting the migrant workers and asylum seekers. The fact that his son attends the neighborhood school, where 30 percent of the children are from these communities, is a source of pride for him. “That’s life, and it’s cool – that’s Shapira,” he says.
He is among the residents who place most of the blame on Tel Aviv municipality and the city’s mayor, Ron Huldai. According to Shimshoni, the opposition over many years to integrating the asylum seekers’ children into schools outside of south Tel Aviv – a decision that has been revised following a petition to the High Court of Justice, resulting in a pilot study now underway in the city – is for sure one of the factors driving the situation. This charge is also heard at the aid organizations.
“I know these kids, and they’re amazing. But life is not good to them, and I said this day would come,” says Shimshoni. “There’s no one in charge here, no one taking responsibility – and it doesn’t interest Huldai. It’s clear that if there were someone here who took on this project, with all the resources the municipality has, it would be different.”
According to sources at city hall, the feeling is that even huge budgets directed at the issue would not change the main source of the distress.
“We’ve given free municipal services, many school hours, informal frameworks, but the primal sin remains,” says a highly placed official. “It’s always possible to do more, because we have known what the dangers are, but from our perspective we’ve done a lot. The time has come for someone in the government to wake up.”
Another top official at the municipality complains that over the years, insufficient steps have been taken to deal with the developing crisis among the youngsters. “The municipality has a glass ceiling, but it could have been possible to do other things,” he says. “We knew we would get hit hard by the next generation.”
In the meantime, back in the Shapira neighborhood, Ayalon’s patience has worn thin. He says residents form their opinions in accordance with the political camp to which they belong, instead of basing them on the facts. “It’s necessary to look the reality in the eye and understand that they’re different from us. They really are problematic, but you won’t be able to write that in the Haaretz newspaper,” he says. “These are people who have gone through terrible things and had to overcome many problems in their life. But I am not seeing them with us in this matter. Our children aren’t able to grow up in a normal way.”
In the Shapira and Hatikva neighborhoods, the organizational efforts by the residents are happening in parallel – with no coordination between the groups – and look like mirror images. While one calls for change that will benefit both the foreign community and the Israeli residents, the other has already lost patience.
Sheffi Paz, who has been trying for years to get migrant workers and asylum seekers deported, is among those present at the Hatikva Park meeting, along with extremist rapper Yoav “The Shadow” Eliassi, mayoral candidate Yuval Zellner and Deputy Mayor Chaim Goren.
Paz feels like she is carrying a kind of banner of historical justice. “There was huge denial,” she tells a group of parents conversing with her. “I was a ‘persecutor of children,’ and now on WhatsApp you’re seeing people taking pictures of those children and calling the police about every single thing like crazy. Those children have an identity crisis, that’s true. So they can go live somewhere else.”
Tewelde, who works at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants and runs the organization Eritrean New Hope, is also trying to combat the phenomenon with his meager resources. Together with other community members, and in cooperation with the municipality and the police, he organizes debates, screens explanatory videos and holds instructional meetings for parents. It’s not enough, he says, but that’s all he can do right now.
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