MK Yaakov “Ketzaleh” Katz responded Monday to what he termed an “anti-Semitic terrorist attack” in central Tel Aviv. The attack in question took place on Saturday night in the Neve Sha'anan neighborhood.
In the incident, three Sudanese men who entered Israel illegally and have since sought refugee status violently attacked an elderly Jewish man who asked them not to urinate on a synagogue. The three knocked their victim, a 78-year-old resident of Tel Aviv, to the ground and kicked him repeatedly while shouting, “Dirty Jew! All the Jews should be killed!”
Police officers on patrol spotted the three as they continued to beat their victim, and gave chase. One attacker was apprehended.
Ketzaleh, who heads the Knesset's Committee on Foreign Workers, called on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to take emergency action to stop the flow of African migrants into Israel. While the government has announced plans to build a fence along the Egyptian border, it must take more immediate action as well, he said.
"In another three or four years there will be 100,000 Africans in Tel Aviv,” he said. “We must prevent Tel Aviv from becoming an Eritrean Muslim city.
“If we don't take dramatic action, cases of anti-Semitism, crime and vandalism will only become more frequent,” he warned.
A captain with the Tel Aviv police quoted in Maariv this week said that migrants from Eritrea and Sudan are responsible for approximately 40 percent of the crimes committed in the region. “This is a population with a lot of people involved in violent crime. There have been four murders involving African migrants since the beginning of the year... We're seeing cases of rape and murder on levels that are unprecedented here in Israel,” he said.
One month before Saturday's attack, a Sudanese migrant murdered an Israeli woman in southern Tel Aviv. The attacker, Yaakub el-Fadoul, beat 68-year-old Esther Galili and left her to die because he thought she deliberately knocked a garbage can in his direction.
In a meeting held several days after the murder, Ketzaleh floated a plan for dealing with the influx of illegal migrants from Africa by creating a single city in which migrants could live and work legally. Migrants would not be allowed to live or work elsewhere.
The creation of a special migrant city would help ensure that migrants have job opportunities and that their needs are cared for without flooding the Israeli job market with cheap labor or increasing crime in Israel's cities, Ketzaleh said. In addition, it could reduce the motivation to infiltrate into Israel, he noted.