After claiming asylum due to civil unrest in his home country, Yemani Tesma was given a 2(a)5 visa, the renewable permit that lets asylum seekers stay while their claims are pending. He settled in Jerusalem, married a fellow Ethiopian asylum seeker and started a family.<\/p>\n
His children have grown up in Israeli schools and, by every measure that matters to them, as Israelis. Although they are not Jewish, their first language is Hebrew, and they learned Israeli history alongside Jewish traditions and holidays.<\/p>\n
Yemani Tesma works at a hummus restaurant in Jerusalem, the kind of job he described as paying the bills and supporting his six children, but nothing beyond that. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir<\/a> ate there once, Yemani Tesma recounted, \u201cAnd he didn\u2019t even try to deport me.\u201d<\/p>\n But Yemani Tesma and his family are still in danger. A High Court decision last December allowed their group protection to be revoked. After years of feeling that they had found an oasis of safety, the family now faces the possibility of deportation. To prevent that from happening, a Jewish organization originally founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms is taking the Israeli government to court.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s asylum approval rate is roughly 0.1%, or about five people a year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.<\/p>\n It\u2019s so low that Sigal Rozen, the public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli NGO she helped found in 1998, can name those whose applications have been approved by first and last name. In the European Union, by comparison, 39% of asylum decisions in 2025 were approvals.<\/p>\n She claimed that the bureaucracy, and the deferral of decisions on some files for years, is deliberate. \u201cThey want to make life as difficult as possible, so that people give up and leave,\u201d she asserted.<\/p>\n According to Israel\u2019s Population and Immigration Authority, 1,334 asylum applications from Ethiopian citizens are currently pending. And Ethiopians are just a sliver of the asylum-seeking population. Roughly 30,000 asylum seekers live in Israel, a country of just over 10 million people. Most of those asylum seekers are Eritrean and Sudanese who crossed the Sinai before Israel completed its border fence with Egypt in 2013.<\/p>\n Eritreans still hold group protection that shields them from deportation, because Israel accepts that conditions in the country are too dangerous for them to return, and most Sudanese have obtained status through the courts, as Israel does not have official diplomatic relations with Khartoum and cannot deport them there. Ethiopians have no such shield.<\/p>\n Israel had granted group protection to Ethiopian nationals in light of the civil war between the Ethiopian armed forces and the Tigray People\u2019s Liberation Front back in November of 2021. In January 2024, Israel\u2019s then-Interior Minister Moshe Arbel withdrew it, citing advice that the security situation in Ethiopia was sufficiently stable for nationals to return. Arbel declined to be interviewed for this story.<\/p>\n In December 2025, the High Court upheld that decision, rejecting an appeal by the Hotline, HIAS Israel and the Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The three-judge panel gave them four months to prepare to leave.<\/p>\n The Population and Immigration Authority has since begun pulling individual case files, some untouched for years, to the front of the queue in order to reject them, telling asylum seekers to leave the country or risk deportation.<\/p>\n Ethiopians whose claims have been rejected can now be detained if they come to a government office for any reason, Shahar Mandil, policy advocate at the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations in Israel, said. Some do not know they have been rejected, as notices were sent to email addresses they no longer use or to lawyers who no longer represent them.<\/p>\n \u201cA decision on an asylum application is delivered through the contact channels provided by the asylum seeker,\u201d the Population and Immigration Authority told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. \u201cIt is the asylum seeker\u2019s responsibility to keep those contact details updated,\u201d adding that every asylum seeker whose application is rejected is asked to leave the country.<\/p>\n The Population and Immigration Authority\u2019s position is that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justify group protection, and that asylum seekers can return to the country\u2019s capital of Addis Ababa even if other areas remain unstable.<\/p>\n Under international refugee law, a state can reject a claim of asylum by arguing that the applicant could move somewhere safer within their own country (known as an internal flight alternative). But that argument carries a requirement, said Nimrod Avigal, director of legal aid at HIAS Israel: \u201cYou need to show that this specific person can actually move within the country.\u201d<\/p>\n Yordanos, who declined to give her last name for fear of deportation, said it was not possible to go elsewhere in Ethiopia. \u201cWe can\u2019t move from one place to another,\u201d she explained. \u201cAny police checkpoint can stop you, depending on who you are and where you\u2019re from.\u201d When it comes to Addis Ababa, she continued, \u201cEven if it were safe, it\u2019s not possible. You can\u2019t bring 130 million people to live in Addis,\u201d referring to the entire population of Ethiopia<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yordanos reached Israel in 2022 after securing a visa for a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, another route that many Ethiopian asylum seekers described taking to JTA. She and her husband hold advanced degrees and once ran a business that took them to more than 11 countries. In Israel, she cleans houses.<\/p>\n Israel historically backed refugee rights<\/p>\n On Sept. 22, the district court in Tel Aviv will hear a case seeking a new way to prevent the deportation of non-Jewish Ethiopians currently in Israel. A petition from HIAS Israel argues that the government has never created a mechanism for asylum seekers to claim protection from deportation under the principle of non-refoulement, which bars states from returning people to countries where they face danger.<\/p>\n HIAS was founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to help Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. It spent the following century assisting Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust.<\/p>\n As Jewish migration slowed in the 2000s, the organization expanded its work to non-Jewish refugees, including Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians and Somalis, dropping \u201cHebrew\u201d from its name in 2014. Its Israel branch now represents non-Jewish asylum seekers, with the government of the Jewish state as the defendant.<\/p>\n Israel was among the first countries to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, and Israeli jurists helped write it, including Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian-born legal adviser to Israel\u2019s UN delegation who was a central figure in its drafting. The treaty\u2019s cardinal principle is non-refoulement, that no state may return a person to a country where they face serious danger.<\/p>\n Israeli courts operate on what Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical instructor at Tel Aviv University\u2019s Refugee Rights Clinic who is currently handling several Ethiopian cases, called an interpretive presumption: \u201cUnless there is clear contradictory legislation, the government should be assumed to abide by international law.\u201d<\/p>\n James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, who studies the Jewish role in building the postwar human rights system, said the people who wrote those rules would not recognize what Israel is doing now. Robinson and his contemporaries \u201cwere committed to non-refoulement.<\/p>\n They would have seen that as the cardinal principle above all and would be gravely disappointed by a situation in which Israel is sending thousands of people back to a country where they still face serious peril,\u201d Loeffler said.<\/p>\n Not everyone sees the low asylum recognition rate as a failure, however. Yonatan Jakubowicz, founder and executive director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, which advocates for tighter immigration controls, argues that Israel has struck a deliberate balance between \u201cmaximum compliance with the principle of non-refoulement\u201d and restricting long-term settlement and the \u201cpull factor\u201d it creates for mass migration.<\/p>\n Israel, he notes, is the only developed country with a land and sea border with Africa, apart from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, into which roughly 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in a matter of days last month, prompting an emergency EU meeting.<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s granting permanent residence to Ethiopians, Eritreans and Sudanese \u201ccould collapse its immigration policies, triggering a massive influx of illegal and mixed migration\u201d over the Egyptian fence or by sea, \u201cfollowed by a wave of family reunification requests.\u201d<\/p>\n The route he described has been effectively closed for more than a decade; crossings from the Sinai all but stopped after the border fence went up. Most Ethiopians reached Israel by other means, on tourist or work visas or, like Yordanos, on visas for religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and applied for asylum after arriving.<\/p>\n Jakubowicz\u2019s arguments are echoed elsewhere in the Western world. Earlier this month, a US district judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, after the Department of Homeland Security<\/a> announced in December that conditions in Ethiopia \u201cno longer pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Ethiopian nationals.\u201d The language is nearly identical to the advice Israel\u2019s former interior minister, Arbel, cited in Jerusalem two years earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mola, who asked to be identified by his first name only as he still has family in Ethiopia and also fears deportation, worries that Israel will follow the US lead and step up deportations of Ethiopian asylum seekers ahead of the national elections scheduled for Oct. 27 as a campaign victory for the right-wing coalition now in power.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time there\u2019s an election, asylum seekers suddenly become a target,\u201d said Mandil of the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations. \u201cBecause there are many groups, in many parts of the Israeli public, and it\u2019s both the coalition and the opposition that make promises, trying to convince people to vote for them if only they can take care of this situation.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to repeating common tropes in the developed world tying migrants to theft and violence, Israelis who support cracking down on immigration often invoke another argument: demography. They worry that letting asylum seekers stay permanently in Israel would erode the Jewish majority of the Jewish state.<\/p>\n \u201cThe logic is, if we allow groups of non-Jewish people to stay here, they could, God forbid, marry Israelis, and that threatens Jewishness, the Jewish majority,\u201d Mandil said. Loeffler traces the same anxiety to Israel\u2019s unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Non-Palestinian refugees, he said, have \u201cabsolutely gotten caught up in that struggle,\u201d because Israeli leaders resist any move they fear \u201cmight open up more opportunities for Palestinians to make legal claims.\u201d<\/p>\n Sivan Carmel, country director of HIAS Israel, calls the numbers argument a non-starter. \u201cIsrael has a population of about 10 million, this is 50,000, 60,000 people. It doesn\u2019t make a dent in the demography of the country,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The children of asylum seekers have long been a focus of civil society organizations working on their behalf. They argue that the state should treat them as cases separate from their parents and that even if Israel tries to deport the parents, the children are a different question. Mandil has spent years making that case in the Knesset.<\/p>\n \u201cHow can they be asylum seekers when 94% of them were born in Israel?\u201d she said. Asked whether they speak Hebrew, she answered: \u201cCompletely. Better than I do.\u201d Yet they are classified, she noted, not as asylum seekers but as infiltrators. \u201cHow can you be an infiltrator when you were born in Israel?\u201d<\/p>\n Ethiopian asylum-seeking parents who spoke with JTA described a particular kind of parenting, shielding their children from what their lack of status would eventually cost them, while preparing them for the moment they turned 18 and found out.<\/p>\n Yemani Tesma likened it to a \u201ca clock that keeps ticking. I know the alarm will ring, and I have to decide what to do by the time it does.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, the time came.<\/p>\n When his son turned 16, his classmates began preparing for the military draft. His son, however, was left out. No call-up notice, no aptitude test, none of the photographs with families at the recruitment office. So he asked his father why.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is because you are not Israeli, and cannot become Israeli,\u201d his father told him. His son shut his bedroom door, Yemani Tesma said, and did not open it for a day.<\/p>\n Israel, like most countries outside the Americas, does not grant citizenship on the basis of birth alone. A child\u2019s status is derivative of a parent\u2019s, said Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic. Courts will occasionally make exceptions, for a child with a disability, or one whose integration into Israeli society is exceptional, say, but the government, she said, is wary of any principle suggesting that being born in Israel could confer legal status.<\/p>\n Ben-Dor is representing two Tigrayan mothers of children with special needs whose humanitarian applications cannot be considered at all because the Interior Ministry demands Ethiopian passports the women do not have in order to process their claims.<\/p>\n In early 2012, then-interior minister Eli Yishai lifted collective protection for South Sudanese nationals, clearing the way to deport 1,500 people. The first flight left Tel Aviv for Juba on June 17 of that year, in an operation the government called \u201cReturning Home.\u201d Civil war broke out the following year.<\/p>\n \u201cChildren who had studied in Israeli schools found themselves drawing water from wells in South Sudan,\u201d HIAS Israel\u2019s Avigal said. \u201cThese are Hebrew-speaking children.\u201d<\/p>\n Why did we come here?<\/p>\n Most asylum seekers in Israel hold a 2(a)5 visa. \u201cIt\u2019s a specific visa whose only function is to say you can\u2019t be deported,\u201d said Mandil. The visa is stamped \u201cThis permit is not a work permit.\u201d Asylum seekers are able to work, however, because the state promised the High Court it would not fine their employers.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery right, every basic right, every social service, we have to fight for,\u201d Mandil said. \u201cThey aren\u2019t eligible for anything, not a driver\u2019s license, not the ability to leave the country and come back, not health insurance, not higher education. Certain professions are closed to them because they have no status.\u201d<\/p>\n That has left many Ethiopian asylum seekers in a cycle of poverty in the country where they sought refuge. Now, with a deportation deadline already behind them, 18 years after Yemani Tesma arrived and raised a family here, some are asking why they came at all.<\/p>\n Mola is a community leader and translator and spends his unpaid hours helping asylum seekers file petitions with the Interior Ministry.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I am not doing my backbreaking work,\u201d he told JTA, \u201cI do all I can to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork.\u201d He once worked as a project coordinator and Amharic translator at the Canadian Embassy in Israel.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyone who has had the option or ability to leave Israel for a third country has done so. Everyone who is left here has nowhere else to go,\u201d he said.<\/p>\nYordanos, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of deportation, looks out toward the walls of Jerusalem\u2019s Old City, Aug. 14. (credit: Theia Chatelle)Few given refugee status\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yordanos speaks with her child on a video call during an interview in Jerusalem, Aug. 14. She worries about the cost of child care after her ex-husband left her to provide for their children alone. (credit: Theia Chatelle)A clock that keeps ticking<\/p>\n