The date was July 3, 2012. Over the previous few months, a series of violent attacks had been launched against certain refugees, most of them from Sudan and in particular from Darfur, with its terribly repressive regime, and Eritrea, where the authorities’ death squads had unleashed a reign of terror. In Israel, voices were increasingly being raised against the presence of undocumented aliens, which they called “infiltrators.
” The choice of name is no accident. In the 1950s, “infiltrators” is what Palestinians expelled between 1947 and 1950 were called when they tried to come back to see what had happened to their village and their possessions. “Infiltrator” was the equivalent of “terrorist.
” On that day in 2012, the Netanyahu government’s interior minister, Eli Yishai of Shas (ultra-Orthodox Sephardic), gave an interview to the newspaper . “Most of those people coming here are Muslims who think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man,” he said. “I will continue the struggle until the end of my term, with no compromises.
” He said he would use “all the tools to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains.” * Yishai’s statements are interesting for several reasons. First, because they were made in a supposedly democratic country by an interior minister who had earlier sided with the racist rioters against the victims.
Second, because they reveal his ignorance: Eritreans (about 72 percent of the undocumented Africans in Isr.