Before Davide and I went to interview the refugees from Darfur, we were told that we must neither photograph them nor publish their surnames. If we violated those ground rules, we would  “…be responsible for endangering the lives of their relatives in Sudan,” warned a UN refugee representative who looks after the interests of the refugees from Darfur in Israel.

Israel and Sudan are officially “enemies,” which makes the status of the 300 or so Darfur refugees in Israel very complex, because Israeli law does not permit the granting of asylum to citizens of enemy states.  So when those refugees surrendered themselves to the Israeli authorities after crossing the border from Egypt, they were detained and jailed under the Law to Prevent Infiltration [from enemy states].  The stories of those jailed refugees, who had seen their families murdered and / or experienced horrible torture at the hands of the Janjaweed, were widely and sympathetically covered by the Israeli media, and many Israelis responded with horror: Given the all-too-fresh memory of what happened to the Jewish people during the Second World War, how could Israel fail to grant asylum to refugees fleeing genocide?  

Several Israeli NGO’s, under the umbrella of the Committee for Advancement of Refugees from Darfur (CARD), are calling on the Israeli government to find a humane solution.  Last year the Immigrant Workers’ Hotline and the Refugee Rights Legal Clinic at Tel Aviv University successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for a temporary review mechanism; as a result, the courts can now grant permission, on an individual basis and with the agreement of the Ministry of Defence, for Darfur refugees to be temporarily settled on host kibbutzim. We went to visit five of those recently released men at Kibbutz Maagan Michael, near Haifa.

Their names are Ali, Hussein, Hassan, Guzuli and Jama, and their ages range from 26 to 32. They share two Spartan rooms furnished with single beds and a table. There is a modest kitchenette outside each of the rooms, and a bathroom. Everything was spotlessly clean, but there were none of the little luxuries that most of we spoiled westerners consider near-necessities – no books, no portable stereo, no CD’s. The men work in the kibbutz factories and they are proscribed by law from leaving the kibbutz without written permission. But they have no complaints about kibbutz life, given what they went through over the previous few years. All spoke warmly of the reception they had received at the kibbutz. They had been assigned adoptive families that hosted them for coffee and cake on Friday afternoons, before the Sabbath meal in the dining hall; the families made sure their needs were taken care of and offered what one of the men called “psychological comfort.”

We sat on the beds and started the interview, but Hassan interrupted politely. What would we like to drink? They served us mineral water and Sprite, and insisted we accept pieces of homemade strawberry shortcake, baked by one of the adoptive families. Then they told us their stories.

Ali (32) used to be a farmer. He last saw his wife and newborn baby the day after a Janjaweed militia attacked his village three-and-a-half years ago. They killed 40 of his family members in one day. He, his wife and baby managed to escape to another village, but when Ali went out to collect some thatch to build them a shelter he was ambushed by some Janjaweed and taken to one of their camps. There he was kept in a 2 metre by 2 metre container for three days, without food. Every few minutes, his captors put a cobra in the container and then removed it, in a primitive game of Russian roulette. Released on condition that he become an informant, Ali managed to escape and make his way to Egypt. That dangerous journey took nearly two months, and it took another six months to receive UN refugee status in Egypt. Not that it helped much. According to Egyptian law he was forbidden to work, and the local UN office told him that only families were eligible for food aid.

But he had to eat, so Ali worked illegally, was caught and jailed for one week. When he was released, the police warned him that he would be deported to Sudan if caught working again. Meanwhile, his only two friends had received refuge in the USA and Australia. “I was starving, I was totally alone and I felt helpless,” said Ali. He had never heard of Israel, but someone told him that it was a democracy and he should try his luck there. So he did. He spent a total of 17 months in various Israeli jails before a judge agreed to his release. He does not know whether his wife and child are alive or dead.

Hussein (29) explained that he first heard of Israel during the two years he worked (illegally) in the Sinai. He met many Israeli tourists there, he said, and formed a positive impression of the country through those interactions. He smiled and spoke smoothly when he spoke of the time he spent in the Sinai, but as soon as he started telling us about what happened to him in Darfur, Hussein developed a pronounced stutter. And the second he finished recounting his ordeal, he quietly left the room and went outside to smoke a cigarette.

Like Ali, Hussein was a subsistence farmer. He was captured by the Janjaweed during a shootout with rebel fighters, accused of being a rebel and jailed for two weeks. His captors fed him only bread. “It did something to my stomach,” said Hussein. After Hussein was released, his uncle took him for the surgery necessary to unblock his digestive system, then smuggled him to Egypt “because we have tribesmen there.” But the tribesmen were nowhere to be found, and Hussein, too, found himself a refugee denied UN aid and forbidden to work. He stayed in Egypt for four years, but realized that he would never be granted permanent status and would always have to work illegally for a bare living. The Egyptians, he said, regularly humiliated him in everyday interactions.

So in May of 2005 he paid a Bedouin to smuggle him into Israel, where he was promptly detained by a patrol of border police. “How did they treat you?” we asked. “Great!” answered Hussein. “They took care me – gave me food, clothes and blankets. One of the officers spoke to me in Arabic. I wish I could have stayed longer with the army.”

All the men experienced different types of trauma, torture and loss in Sudan, but their stories about Egypt are remarkably similar: the Catch-22 of being simultaneously forbidden to work and denied refugee aid; humiliation at the hands of the Egyptians; the realization that they could not stay there indefinitely. I asked if they were worried about being perceived by the Arab world as traitors for saying positive things about Israel to journalists. “We don’t have any confidence in the Arab world after the way the Egyptians treated us,” one responded, as the others nodded in agreement. “And the Arab world didn’t do anything to stop the Janjaweed from perpetrating genocide on our people.”

Davide asked if they were learning to speak Hebrew. A little, they answered, bashfully demonstrating their small vocabulary. Then Hussein told us that a 76 year-old kibbutz woman named Jeanine volunteered to teach them Hebrew for two hours a week.

Of course we wanted to meet her. So I took Jeanine’s number from Hussein and called her, offering to come to her home because I assumed that a 76 year-old woman would be rather frail. “I’ll come to you,” she said, decisively.

Five minutes later a human energizer bunny with fluffy, short white hair and twinkling blue eyes, wearing jeans and a fleece jacket, came bounding into the room. She greeted us all, plonked herself on one of the beds, waved away the proffered slice of strawberry short cake (“I ate too much today”) and looked at me and Davide expectantly.

I asked if she would like to speak in English or Hebrew, with me translating. “I speak only French and Hebrew,” she said, “So you will have to translate.”

It turned out that Jeanine had immigrated to Israel in 1949 from Tunisia, and that she had been a schoolteacher for 35 years. She referred to the men from Darfur as “the boys.”

“Language,” she said emphatically, “Is crucial. If the boys want to buy a ticket for the train, how will they manage without Hebrew? The person who sells the ticket doesn’t speak English. When I heard that the boys were working full time in the factories, I knew they wouldn’t have time for ulpan classes. So I volunteered to teach them. And together we are discovering that there are many similarities between Arabic and Hebrew. Isn’t that right, boys?”

The five men looked at her affectionately and nodded as they responded in unison, like obedient schoolboys, “That’s right, Jeanine.”

“But if you’re from Tunisia, don’t you know Arabic?” I asked.

“Ah,” she said, with a mischievous smile, “You don’t know what a French colonial education is like. I was raised to speak only pure, proper French. My parents spoke Arabic to one another when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying. So no, I don’t speak Arabic.”

Then she turned to Davide and said, in halting Italian, “My father’s family came to Tunisia from Livorno, about 300 years ago.”

We asked why the kibbutz had decided to accept refugees from Darfur.

Jeanine looked at me sternly. “Do you know what happened at the Evian Conference in 1938?” she asked. “When all the countries gathered to try to find a solution for the Jews of Germany and Austria but no-one was willing to give them refuge?”

Yes, I answered, of course.

“So that’s why,” answered Jeanine. “We knew that we had a moral obligation, after what happened to us.”

Did people mention that at the meeting? I asked.

“No,” said Jeanine. “They didn’t have to. It was understood.”

As we were driving away from the kibbutz, I asked Davide if he planned to use Jeanine’s quote about the Evian Conference in his article. “Of course,” he said.

“Because the paper will probably get letters from the knee-jerk anti-Israel crowd, you know,” I said, “Accusing you of being biased toward Israel for writing about the Darfur refugees while the Palestinian refugee issue is still unresolved.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t think they can really say that, because I already wrote about the gay Palestinians who come to Israel for refuge, and what a hard time they have.” (more on that subject here).

Later I wrote an email about Jeanine to Jill, who’s living in London now. In her response she wrote: “Oh, that's what I miss about Israel:  the stories, the people, that unique and pure goodness of eccentric old ladies that sometimes shines out through all the crap."