THE AFRICAN COURIER. Reporting Africa and its Diaspora! The African Courier is an international magazine published in Germany to report on Africa and the Diaspora African experience. The first issue of the bimonthly magazine appeared on the newsstands on 15 February 1998. The African Courier is a communication forum for European-African political, economic and cultural exchanges, and a voice for Africa in Europe.
African migrants pose a greater threat to Israel than Islamist terrorism, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader made the remarks as he complimented the country’s border ‘wall’ with Egypt.
Speaking at the Negev Conference in the Israeli city of Dimona, Netanyahu said the fence along the Israel-Egypt border is all that stands between Israel’s Jewishness and it turning into a country overrun by “infiltrators”.
Without the fence, the country would be at its “wits’ end” with “attacks by terrorist groups in the Sinai, and the worst thing – a flood of illegal infiltrators from Africa,” Netanyahu said, as cited by the Times of Israel.
“We’re talking about a Jewish and democratic state. How could we have guaranteed a Jewish-democratic state with 50,000 then 100,000, then 150,000 infiltrators each year?” Netanyahu remarked. “After a million, 1.5 million, we might as well shut up shop,” he added. “We did not close down, we built a fence.”
Israel completed the 242-kilometer fence along its border with Egypt in late 2013, three years after commencing the project. Running from the edge of the Gaza Strip to the resort of Eilat, it is equipped with cameras as well as radar and motion detectors. In 2017, Israel increased the height of the fence from five meters to eight, along a 17 kilometer stretch of the barrier.
Netanyahu’s comments echo his original explanation for erecting the border fence, which, he said in 2010, was a “strategic decision to secure Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.”
READ ALSO Israel: Court suspends plan to deport African migrants
Netanyahu’s latest comments on the border barrier follow his government’s plan to remove 40,000 African migrants from the country, although efforts to deport all unmarried male migrants were temporarily blocked by the High Court last week. Many of the African migrants, largely Sudanese and Eritrean, came to the country between 2006 and 2012 and the government has ordered that thousands of them must leave or face indefinite imprisonment.
RT
