Tens of thousands of asylum seekers from Africa, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, suffer institutional abandonment by Israel. Exiled by violence in their countries, the Israeli state leaves them in a legal limbo, which pushes them into poor living and working conditions. Faced with this, the subsidiary of the Argentine club Estudiantes de La Plata is one of the entities that provides assistance and helps them with their integration, always through football.
Football can be a tool for social transformation. Although it is a long repeated precept, it is still true. Sport, in general, is. But due to its global nature, football is at the forefront as an instrument of cohesion, of breaking down barriers. Behind the tree of its hypercommodification, there is a forest, that of football as a service, which should not be covered.
“It’s a way of living life,” says Musa Abulgasim. For him, the ball has been present throughout his 27 years: in Sudan, while dreaming of escaping violence; and in Israel, where he arrived in 2015 as an asylum seeker, only to find an institutional vacuum that tested his perseverance.
Facing a State that considered him an “infiltrator”, Musa built his path thanks to people and institutions that helped him. In its integration, a soccer team with a Latin American accent was key: Estudiantes Tel Aviv, the Israeli affiliate of the Argentine club Estudiantes de La Plata, which, apart from sports, is dedicated to assisting asylum seekers from Africa.
The exclusion in which asylum seekers live in Israel
As she tells her story, Musa speaks calmly to piece together all the details. He fled from Sudan just enough and embarked on a 16-day journey through the Sinai desert to cross Egypt and arrive in Israel on January 11, 2015. “We suffered a lot,” he confesses, and recalls that they practically had nothing to eat or to drink.
The trip was undertaken by 28 people. Two were killed in Sinai shootings and two others suffered serious injuries and were hospitalized while crossing the border on foot. The rest were transferred to Saharonim prison, a prison for African asylum seekers in the Negev desert, which Musa recalls as a “closed place”, where he barely had enough food and water and were subjected to interrogations to find out. how and why they came to the Hebrew State.
After six months, Musa was transferred to the Holot open-air detention center, a “kind of ghetto (closed in 2018) to which people from all over the world arrive”, where he was held for a year, before being released to their fate, without housing, nor knowing Hebrew nor having a permit to work or study.
“When I left there, I wondered where the human rights are,” says Musa, who stresses that he did not suffer physical violence from the officers, but he did suffer “the uncertainty of not knowing if they are going to send you back to your country. Or they’ll let you in.” “They mistrust you, so all the help you ask for and need to receive, they don’t give you,” she adds.
That reality is that of more than 30,000 asylum seekers in Israel, the majority from Sudan and Eritrea. They live in a legal limbo, fed by the Israeli State, which recognizes the danger of returning to their countries (thus fulfilling the principle of non-refoulement of the Refugee Convention), but avoids legalizing them. Temporary protection leaves them at the mercy of worse working and living conditions, as well as discrimination.
Less than 1% of African asylum seekers have received refugee status in Israel and, for a few weeks now, Musa has been part of that privileged group. To get there, she went through temporary jobs – at the Tel Aviv City Hall and in a restaurant – and overcame barriers to learning Hebrew.
On that path, football was a support: he first joined a team of Sudanese, before joining Estudiantes Tel Aviv, a team he met in a 6-2 defeat. The win against them was an anecdote for Musa, who observed how that formation combined African refugees with Israelis and Latin American immigrants. For him, it was an opportunity to “meet more people, open up” and take another step in his integration.
Tel Aviv students, more than football, “a social framework”
When two groups of fans of Estudiantes de La Plata in Israel created the affiliate ‘Ruso Prátola’ (former ‘Pincha’ player who died in 2002, at the age of 32, due to colon cancer), few imagined the dimension it would reach. “I would lie to you if I told you that it was the vision we had,” admits Eliel Nehmad, founder and president of the entity.
However, in little more than five years, what used to be a team of friends became a multicultural group that collaborates with two NGOs to provide support and assistance to African refugees and asylum seekers, as well as Latin American immigrants.
The authorities of the Argentine club proposed to them to found the subsidiary, in order to carry out a community mission at least once a year. But the work became permanent for Estudiantes Tel Aviv, whose members manage to help all the players financially and morally, including, sometimes, their families.
Of course, asylum seekers from Africa are the most vulnerable, lacking legal status or money for medical care, with very expensive tests.
Eliel explains that “they don’t have social security or the possibility of studying anywhere like an immigrant or an Israeli might.” “We are there to help them get ahead, to find jobs, to get into certain places to study so they can progress,” she adds.
In this task, Students Tel Aviv formed two alliances. The first, a long-standing one, with Elifelet, which focuses on the needs of child asylum seekers in Israel; the second, sealed in 2021, is with the BINA Foundation, which offers exiles weekly classes on various topics.
On the field, under the orders of coach Udy Grimberg, the heterogeneous squad, which brings together Argentines, Colombians, Israelis, Sudanese and more, trains every Thursday to compete on weekends in the IFLI Regional League, of an amateur nature.
In the dialogues Spanish, Hebrew or Arabic are mixed, but on the field “soccer is the language”, as Matías Nahuel Pomeranz, an Argentine player who emigrated to Israel 8 years ago, values. “Once you get here on the pitch, you come in to play, it doesn’t matter if you speak one language or another, football is like a separate language and that barrier is broken,” he remarks.
For its founders, creating “a social framework around a soccer team” is a way of “following the Students’ school”, as Alberto Kraselsky, one of the pioneers who became a fan of the affiliate, explains. “The idea is to bring together all kinds of people, regardless of religion, regardless of where they come from, and try to help them as much as possible, to meet their needs. The framework is a football team that has a common goal, in which that we all push forward with the same ideas,” he says.
At his side, Silvio, another of the pioneers, adds that the goal is for the members of the branch to have a “sense of belonging” and considers that Estudiantes de La Plata “is a family.”
The biggest prize for Estudiantes Tel Aviv, beyond titles such as the Summer Cup it won last June, is the progress of those who pass through its ranks. This is the case of Muhammad Mo Daoud, the first African to join the team and who less than a year ago managed to emigrate to the United States, where he is studying and playing at a university soccer academy.
Following in the footsteps of Musa and Muhammad, and thanks to word of mouth, more asylum seekers continue to approach to join the project and, above all, achieve containment against the abandonment and neglect of the Israeli State.
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