After a week-long strike and days of protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem the African migrant community has vowed to continue pushing, saying that they don’t believe the end of the protests is in sight.
Eritrean Kidane Isaac, who has long taken part protests and activism in the migrant community, said that while they don’t know what the next step will be, they plan to keep striking indefinitely.
He said that people aren’t worried that they won’t have jobs waiting for them to come back to when the strike is over, saying “we aren’t thinking about this at the moment. We believe that so far the protests have been a success and we expect things to change on the ground.”
On Thursday morning, thousands of African migrants again gathered in south Tel Aviv’s Lewinsky Park to discuss what the next step in the protests is.
Isaac said he still doesn’t know what they’ll do next, but said there are plans to hold a march of women and children from the migrant community outside of Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s house in Tel Aviv on Saturday night.
Orit Marom of Assaf, an NGO that assists African migrants and has helped support the protests, said she too doesn’t know what next week will hold for the protests, saying she’s just waiting to hear from the activists from the migrant community.
She said that personally she’ll be going to the Knesset on Tuesday where her organization and others have been invited to testify to the Interior Committee about the source of funding for the protests.
“We have nothing to hide, its fine. We can barely pay our own salaries anyway.”
When asked if the protests have been a success, she said “of course, these protests reached every household in Israel. The big problem with this issue was that people weren’t familiar with it, now, no one can say that.”
The protesters have focused on two main demands – that the state stop jailing migrants based on the anti-infiltration amendment, and that they begin comprehensively examining their asylum requests.