There are currently around 30,000 asylum seekers in Israel. Most have fled severe repression, including religious persecution, under a government responsible for decades of widespread crimes against humanity in Eritrea, or come from Sudan, where a gruelling 18-month conflict between the Rapid Support Forces and Sudan Armed Forces is the latest in a series of calamities to cause a severe humanitarian crisis.
Most will have travelled through Egypt before arriving there, typically with the help of people smugglers, and at great risk of assault, extortion, gender-based violence, or arrest and possible refoulement. The majority of those who complete this journey are young men, together with some young women who have likely endured unimaginable atrocities en route.
Upon their arrival, these asylum seekers find themselves in legal limbo; according to the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, Israel’s leading refugee advocacy organisation, Israel approves less than 1% of the asylum claims it receives, with many cases pending for over five or even ten years.
In the meantime, asylum seekers are given ‘conditional release permits’ which allow them to stay in the country and protect them from deportation, but do not grant them access to medical or other crucial services. These permits must be renewed regularly, at offices often in remote locations and with restrictive opening hours and posters on the walls offering them money to leave the country.
Most work in low-paying jobs, hoping to give back to a country that has at least given them something – regardless of how begrudgingly that something may have been given.
These are people who have endured extreme hardship, eager to find a sense of safety and belonging after having been denied or robbed of this by the leaders of their own countries. Many volunteered for civilian tasks following the 7 October Hamas terror attacks, and in this the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) may have seen an opportunity.
Settling asylum claims by sending them to die?
The IDF’s offensive in Gaza in the aftermath of the terror attacks which claimed the lives of 1,195 people, including 815 civilians, has been, without question, the most dominant news story of the past year. Over 41,500 people have been killed, with the majority of identified victims being women and children; approximately 1.9 million people – nine in ten Gazans – have been displaced at least once since the offensive began, and 101 Israelis remain in captivity in the area.
In March this year, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories published a report which concluded there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.’
More recently, the IDF has expanded its operations into Lebanon to address the bombing since 7 October of Israel’s northern territory by the military wing of Hezbollah. A ground invasion and heavy airstrikes have killed at least 1,400 people and displaced 1.2 million, while conflict and tensions with Iran, Iraq and Yemen have continued to escalate, threatening a wider war.
However, the IDF has also been losing soldiers – over 700 in Gaza and at least 10 in Lebanon – and it is need of additional manpower to sustain this increasingly multi-fronted conflict. In June the Supreme Court revoked the exemption from conscription of men of ultra-Orthodox community. Now, those seeking asylum in the country are also being asked to fill this gap.
Last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the IDF was offering asylum seekers the opportunity to obtain permanent residency in Israel in exchange for signing up to serve in Gaza. Speaking off the record, defence officials confirmed that Israel’s Interior Ministry had even explored the possibility of drafting the children of asylum seekers into the IDF, and acknowledged that the ethical considerations of the policy had not been addressed.
Seeking asylum is a human right. Granting it as part of a deal contravenes Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which states that ‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’. Moreover, while Israel is yet to adopt any national refugee legislation, it is party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, and therefore should be affording asylum seekers basic rights and protections. In addition, many of those the IDF is trying to recruit have fled conflict or forced conscription in their own countries, and what may appear to be a choice or an offer is rarely much of a choice to those facing challenging economic, social and legal circumstances.
Damningly, Haaretz also reported that no asylum seekers who had contributed to military operations in Gaza have been granted permanent residency to date.1
Consequently, human rights defenders, and even some asylum seekers, have expressed concerns that the authorities have no genuine intentions of helping these people to reside permanently in Israel, and may instead be settling their claims by sending them to die: ‘There is no guarantee that these individuals will return from these conflicts alive to enjoy the residency they have been denied for over a decade.’2
‘Recruitment’ under duress
In Myanmar/Burma, the military junta – known as the Tatmadaw – is also using the promise of citizenship to recruit desperate people, not with asylum seekers in this case, but those displaced into poverty and precarity by its campaign of genocidal violence.
According to the latest report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Tatmadaw has killed at least 5,350 civilians since it seized power in a coup in February 2021, indiscriminately bombing homes and infrastructure as it fights a bloody civil war against dozens of ethnic armed organisations on multiple fronts. The conflict has resulted in a crisis of mass displacement, not least in Arakan (Rakhine) State in the west of the country where over 327,000 people have been displaced since fighting between the military and the Arakan Army resumed in November 2023 – taking the total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in this state alone to well over half a million.
Like the IDF, the Tatmadaw desperately needs greater numbers to sustain its operations. In February this year, it enacted the 2010 People’s Military Service Law, enabling the conscription of men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 for up to five years during the current state of emergency.3 While the junta announced that conscription would start in April, the military set about forcibly recruiting citizens in Arakan State immediately.
The law only applies to Myanmar citizens, but chief among the targets of the recruitment drive have been men and boys from the predominantly Muslim Rohingya ethnic group – a community which has been denied citizenship since 1982. In April, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that over 1,000 Rohingyas had been forcibly recruited already, with boys as young as 15 among them.
Both the HRW report and a May report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights detailed how junta officials had promised to grant citizenship to Rohingya recruits who completed two weeks of military training, only to renege on this promise once the training was completed. HRW added that others who refused to sign up after witnessing this were subsequently abducted from their villages at gunpoint, often under the threat of being beaten to death or having their families punished if they fled.
A rock and a hard place
It is particularly jarring and unjust that many of those the Tatmadaw is now forcing to fight on its behalf are in such dire and vulnerable circumstances as a result of its actions.
The Rohingya have been denied citizenship despite having existed in the country for several centuries. They have no right to vote, to move freely, or to access basic services, and have endured decades of severe persecution.
Most notoriously, in August 2017 the Tatmadaw launched pre-planned ‘clearance operations’ targeting Rohingya civilians and villages in Arakan State. The campaign resulted in the displacement of over 700,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh, with thousands more killed and hundreds of villages burned to the ground. Reports of the atrocities perpetrated during this period include the burning of homes, schools and mosques, mass rape, torture, execution without trial, and the blocking of aid.
A year later, a UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission recommended that the Tatmadaw’s top generals, including Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, be investigated and prosecuted for genocide, and the case is currently before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which imposed provisional measures on the government of Myanmar to protect the Rohingya from genocide in 2022.
As of August 2024 there were close to one million refugees being hosted in Bangladesh. Tens of thousands have also fled to India4 and Thailand, neither of whom are parties to the UN Refugee Convention, and therefore treat Rohingyas as illegal immigrants.
Meanwhile, those that remain in Myanmar not only face threats and pressures from the Tatmadaw but also from the Arakan Army which has been forcing members of the Rohingya population to receive mandatory training to enforce security around the state. This places many between a rock and a hard place: if they serve in the military they will be targeted by the Arakan Army, and if they are known to have received training from the Arakan Army they will be arrested by the military – all while contending with extreme, widespread poverty and the deprivation of their fundamental human rights.
A framework under threat
The preamble of the UDHR states that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’ However, the treatment of asylum seekers in Israel and of the Rohingya in Myanmar does not illustrate a consideration or recognition of this inherent dignity.
Both military forces are accused by credible international bodies of committing the very gravest of international crimes. Now one is asking desperate people to put themselves in harm’s way in order to ‘earn’ the belonging and protection which should instead be afforded to them as a fundamental right, while the other is compelling them to do so.
There are, of course, key differences – most significantly, that the IDF serves an elected government that launched an offensive in the wake of a terror attack, whereas the Tatmadaw seized power and has ruled by force ever since.
Nevertheless, excesses by both parties essentially continue unchecked, as efforts to address them effectively at the international level are hindered by the political exigencies of key actors. Consequently, they remain among many factors currently contributing towards the steady undermining of the international human rights framework, and the credibility of institutions created to uphold it.
By CSW’s Press and Public Affairs Officer Ellis Heasley
- Haaretz also noted that a number of asylum seekers had volunteered willingly before the IDF began its recruitment drive. None of these had been granted permanent residency either. ↩︎
- Human Rights Concern-Eritrea, ‘Immediate Call for Action Against the Israeli Government’s Plan to Exploit African Asylum Seekers for Military Recruitment’, 19 September 2024 https://hrc-eritrea.org/immediate-call-for-action-against-the-israeli-governments-plan-to-exploit-african-asylum-seekers-for-military-recruitment/ ↩︎
- Section 2(f) and 22(a) of this law exempts religious leaders from conscription, though notably this does not apply to Muslims. ↩︎
- India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 categorically excludes Muslims from claiming asylum in the country. ↩︎