Activities per year
Abstract
In 1954 Israel became the tenth country in the world to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 Refugee Convention). More than five decades later, over 65,000 African asylum seekers – the majority of them from Eritrea and Sudan – have entered Israel, crossing the Israeli border with Egypt. Given that Israel is a Jewish State, Mitzvot1, such as the Mitzvah of Hachnasat Orchim2, along with Israel’s international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, religiously and by convention show Israel to be accommodating towards refugees and asylum seekers. In reality, however, Israel has found its international legal obligations and Judaic values, such as the mitzvah of hospitality, increasingly confronted by the challenge of how best to receive an unprecedented number of African asylum seekers within the country, which has resulted in Israel implementing domestic laws that are in direct contravention with some articles of the 1951 Refugee Convention. This tension between Israel’s international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and religious obligations under the Mitzvah of Hachnasat Orchim, and Israel’s own national interests, is significant, as it has served to jeopardize African asylum seekers’ human rights. Furthermore, this tension has created associated tensions including: ‘ordered disorder’ (Paz 2011), permanent temporariness (Mitchell 2010; Bayraktar 2016; Tize 2020), and rejection acceptance (Putnam 2001; Stark and Bainbridge 1985). This paper will explore the tension between Israel’s obligations at the international level, its Judaic values such as the Mitzvah of Hachnasat Orchim, and its national interests, and its associated tensions, before discussing the role that civil society organizations and grassroots movements have played in aiming to overcome them. This article draws from 23 semi-structured interviews conducted with Eritrean asylum seekers and key informants based in South Tel Aviv and Haifa from November 2018 to July 2019.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 101-111 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | OxMo - Oxford Monitor of Forced Migrations |
Volume | 9 |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Doing or not doing the Mitzvah of hachnasat orchim? Managing tensions between international obligations and the State’s National Interest: the case of Eritrean asylum seekers in Israel'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Activities
- 1 Visiting an external academic institution
-
Fulbright Visiting Researcher | University of California – Santa Barbara (USA)
Tatiana Morais (Visiting researcher)
Sept 2019 → Jan 2020Activity: Visiting an external institution › Visiting an external academic institution