One cold, sunny morning in early January, a group of five drug addicts in tatty clothes lounged on the eastern sidewalk of Chlenov Street in Tel Aviv – directly opposite a new housing project that was populated a year ago. A municipal inspector, who had already seen everything, stopped next to them and urged them to move on. This is no longer their place. While all this was happening, a small group of Eritrean children walked past on their way to school. They were preoccupied with their own issues and no one had yet told them that they would soon no longer be residents of this neighborhood, with cranes towering over constructions sites on every corner and with new businesses springing up in the hope of catering to the supposedly sophisticated tastes of the new residents. Whether they succeed or not, the neighborhood cycle paths are already full of mustachioed young men and tattooed young women with colorful streaks in their hair.

When discussing the process of gentrification, it’s normal to talk about the veteran residents of the area undergoing change. The arrival of a new population brings with it an increase in prices, which does not allow the traditional residents to remain and the neighborhood quickly changes its character. This is what happened in Harlem, in East Berlin, and in Neveh Tzedek – and it is now happening in and around the central bus station in Tel Aviv – which was, until very recently, Israel’s ultimate backyard. But money talks. The weak leave. The wealthy arrive. That’s the way of the world. Unlike in many other places, however, in Israel and overseas, where the vulnerable population ejected from the gentrified area is indeed poor, but at least locals. In south Tel Aviv, another factor must be brought into the equation: the population being pushed out is comprised of foreigners with no legal standing in the country; they are especially poor, have no connections in Israeli society and no political ability to shape their own reality.

The cost of living is, of course, the first explanation of why African asylum seekers are being forced to evacuate their neighborhoods and relocate like any other group of people faced with market forces. Petah Tikvah, Holon, and Bat Yam are significantly cheaper than even the most affordable neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, and asylum seekers are delighted to discover that the price of a one-and-half-room- apartment in Tel Aviv will get them a three- or even four-room apartment in one of those satellite cities.

But the cost of living and the noise from the ubiquitous construction sites are not the only reason for the departure of families who have been living in south Tel Aviv for many years, along with the community of their fellow Africans, which has been formed there and which acted as a support system in very many ways. From conversations with asylum seekers who have left Tel Aviv in the past year or two, the question of education has been raised more often than anything else. Or, more accurately, the poor level of the specialized schools that were opened for the children of foreign workers and asylum seekers is the reason most often cited for the decision to leave the big city.

It is hard to gauge the extent of the phenomenon accurately. On the one hand, while the number of stateless minors living in Israel has experienced a slight drop – 8,252 in 2022 compared to 8,202 this year – the number of Eritreans registered in Tel Aviv dropped even more dramatically: 3,666 a year ago compared to 3,519 now. It is essential to point out that, as reported in October 2022, there has been a slow but steady outflux of Eritrean asylum seekers from Israel to other countries, especially Canada. So, the fact that there has been a drop in the number of Eritrean children in Tel Aviv schools is not a sufficient indicator in and of itself.

Data that does help to shed some light on the phenomenon and highlights a clearer trend is that which shows an increase in the number of Eritrean children studying in schools outside of Tel Aviv. Comparing the figures from the Immigration and Population Authority from January 2022 and January of this year shows that there are 421 Eritrean children registered in Netanya, up from 402 last year; in Bnei Brak schools, there are currently 391 registered, compared to 377 a year ago; in Ashdod, the figure currently stands on 287, compared to 269 last year; and in Ashkelon, the number has increased from 177 in 2022 to 189. And parents who have made the move say there are many more like them.

‘The Children Must be Integrated!’

One such mother is 27-year-old Louane Kahabaj, who arrived in Israel in November 2011. Seven years ago, she, her husband and her two children settled in Tel Aviv’s Tikvah Quarter. She says that she was exposed to the segregation between Israeli children and the children of asylum seekers in the city’s education system on the first day when her daughter went to kindergarten. “I looked around and saw that all of the children were from asylum-seeker families and I didn’t understand why that was happening. The children must be integrated! Three years later, when my daughter went into first grade in 2019, the municipality put her in the Keshet elementary school, where 99 percent of students are the children of asylum seekers. I demanded that they move her to a different school, and I refused to send her to school for two whole months.”

Why were you so opposed?

“Because I understood that if our children study alone, it won’t do them any good. I remember thinking once that my child speaks good Hebrew, but when she met up with Israeli children whose parents I know, they were very different: the Israeli kids spoke a lot quicker and used many more words. Suddenly, I understood that my daughter didn’t understand many of the words. Obviously, that would happen because she was surrounded by the children of other asylum seekers whose parents hardly speak Hebrew, so they can’t speak it either. An Israeli child learns the alphabet in kindergarten, even before they get to first grade. The kids in the asylum seekers’ schools sometimes can’t even write their own names.”

After countless requests and even a letter from a lawyer, Tel Aviv municipality agreed to transfer Kahabaj’s daughter to another school in the same neighborhood – where 93 percent of the children were from asylum-seeking families – but Kahabaj was not convinced that there were any significant differences between the two schools. “That was also a school for asylum seekers’ children only and I saw how the teachers didn’t really insist that the kids learned. They let them sit there and paint for entire lessons. It was very important to me that my children study, but I was worried about my daughter. I sat at the school for a whole week with a seven-day-old infant in my arms because I was so worried about my daughter that no one would pay any attention to her. That she wouldn’t get the attention she needed.

“In the end, they transferred her to another school, also in the Tikvah Quarter, but the level was very poor there, too. There were kids in second and third grade who couldn’t write. At that stage, I told myself that I had to move to another city where there were people with the power to challenge the system and the teachers cooperated with the parents.

“I consulted a few of my Israeli friends, and I looked for an apartment for a year and a half because outside of Tel Aviv, it’s a lot harder for Eritreans to find someone who will agree to rent to them. In the end, we found somewhere in Hod Hasharon. There are only two Eritrean families here, and I find it hard because I don’t have friends and there isn’t a church nearby, but it was the right decision. The school is excellent and my daughter’s teacher is wonderful. I feel like she is my mother. My daughter even calls her grandma. She cares. She wants to be in touch with the parents and to help.

“In Tel Aviv, that didn’t exist. I felt that we were totally invisible. Now I feel like I have gained two things: my children are studying properly and they are also meeting Israeli kids and seeing that there is a different life, and I explain to them that there’s a connection between their studies and the things that they can accomplish in life.”

"I understood that if our children study alone, it won’t do them any good. I remember thinking once that my child speaks good Hebrew, but when she met up with Israeli children whose parents I know, they were very different: the Israeli kids spoke a lot quicker and used many more words. Suddenly, I understood that my daughter didn’t understand many of the words".

City Hall: Distributing the Kids Was a Terrible Mistake

Shirley Ramon-Bracha, the head of Tel Aviv's education administration, is enraged by the use of the word ‘segregation’ to describe the fact that almost all of the children of asylum seekers in the city are registered in schools where they make up the vast majority of students.

Before returning to Ramon-Bracha, however, let’s look at the figures published by the municipality itself, which were referred to above and describe a reality of almost total segregation between the populations. According to the data, in January 2022, there were 2,940 statusless children in the city. Of them, 2,221 are elementary school students who attend one of the schools the municipality has defined as those serving the geographical area in which they are registered. Of the rest, 380 are in special education, and 399 elementary-school-age children were dispersed in various schools across the city.

As a result, in the three schools which serve the Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood – Gvanim, Keshet, and Bialik – 99 percent of the students are statusless; in the Galil and Yarden schools, which serve the children of asylum seekers who live in the Tikvah Quarter, 93 percent of the students are statusless. In the two schools which serve the adjacent Shapira neighborhood – Shapira and Rogozin – statusless children make up 60 percent of the students.

In July 2022, the Tel Aviv District Court rejected a petition filed by hundreds of asylum seeker parents who demanded that their children be dispersed equitably in schools across the city. As Kahabaj also explains, one of the petitioners' main arguments is that the school’s total hegemony inevitably leads to a poor academic level. In its ruling, the court wrote that the petitioners “failed to prove that the municipality’s policy is tainted by illegality since it is acting in accordance with the law, which stipulates a clear principle by which students are to be registered in education institutions: namely, proximity to the place of residence.” Two months ago, the petitioners took their case to the Supreme Court to appeal the ruling.

Ramon-Bracha, like the two other principals with whom Shomrim met for this investigation (Yael Fisher-Avitan from Keshet and Sveta Podoksik from nearby Gvanim), is utterly convinced that dispersing the children would be a terrible mistake that would do them much harm. In this context, it is important to remember that while it is easy to categorize the municipality’s insistence on a policy of segregation as ‘racist,’ it is patently clear that each of the three principals approaches the issue with many years of experience and with a genuine commitment to the success of the children. All three state that parents’ requests to relocate their children to other schools in the city are, for the most part, approved. They also say that some parents have left Tel Aviv because of the high cost of living but insist on sending their children to the city’s schools.

When Fisher-Avitan, for example, is asked what she thinks about those Eritrean parents who leave Tel Aviv in order to get their children out of the city’s education system, she argues that the real and only reason is the cost of living in the city. She adds, “When an Eritrean father tells me that he doesn’t want his children to study with other Eritreans, that’s a racist comment.”

A reminder of the problems that can arise when the city tries to integrate statusless children in ‘regular’ schools was provided last summer when parents whose children attend the Kfir school in southeast Tel Aviv demonstrated against the placement of eight Eritrean children in the school. They even threatened to disrupt the start of the school year.

In the three schools which serve the Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood – Gvanim, Keshet, and Bialik – 99 percent of the students are statusless; in the Galil and Yarden schools, which serve the children of asylum seekers who live in the Tikvah Quarter, 93 percent of the students are statusless. In the two schools which serve the adjacent Shapira neighborhood – Shapira and Rogozin – statusless children make up 60 percent of the students.

‘By the End of First Grade, They Couldn’t Read or Write’

Like Kahabaj, Barha Taama – a father of two and an activist in the Eritrean community in Tel Aviv – believes that the poor academic level in the schools serving the children of asylum seekers is the main reason that more and more families have decided to leave the city. “Our children are segregated,” he explains. “They never encounter Israeli children in school, which means they only talk to themselves, and they simply don’t understand the Hebrew that Israeli kids speak. Moreover, the staff at these schools do not communicate with the parents, many of whom barely know Hebrew and are incapable of helping their children with their studies.”

How do they communicate despite this?

“I help many of the parents by acting as an interpreter when they talk to their children’s teachers, and I have encountered many instances when the children's reading, writing and arithmetic skills are far below the level expected for the grade they are in. They ‘move up,’ so to speak, and go on to the next grade, but they never make up the material they should have learned, and, over the years, a massive gap grows in what they should know. Just recently, I was on a conference call – they put me on speakerphone so I could translate – with the parents of a 10-year-old boy in fourth grade. The school told his parents that the boy could barely read and write at a second-grade level.”

At the same time, Taama says parents complain about poor communication with the school staff and are not permitted to set up parent-teacher associations. Moreover, the school needs to update them about the progress that their children are or are not making. “A lot of the parents can’t speak Hebrew, and because there’s no three-way communication – teacher-parent-student – the outcome is terrible, and the students aren’t learning what they should. Beyond this, because the children see that the school doesn’t interact with their parents, they also stop listening to them. That’s the message they get. Once the family moves from Tel Aviv to another city, the parents suddenly see that the academic level can be higher. Why? Because segregation harms the children and, in the end, it harms the State of Israel.”

Sayeet Taspit, a 32-year-old mother of a 10-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter, moved some 18 months ago from Tel Aviv to Holon. She arrived in Israel in 2012, lived in Tel Aviv for nine years, and was pleased that she lived close to her place of work and that there was a large Eritrean community nearby. But when her older son started first grade, she also decided that it was time to leave the big city.

“The two main reasons I wanted to leave the city were the terrible education that I knew my children would get here and the high cost of living in Tel Aviv,” she says. “My son started attending a school where all the students were refugees, and I saw that he and the rest of the children simply were not learning anything. By the end of first grade, he couldn’t read or write, and I realized that I needed to find a new apartment outside of Tel Aviv so that I could register him for a different school. We spent about a year and a half looking for an apartment, which was extremely difficult. It’s hugely expensive in Tel Aviv, but at least people know who we are and are willing to rent an apartment to us. The people in Holon are nice enough but don’t know us, so they are reticent about renting to us. In the end, some Israeli friends helped us, and the truth is that our landlady has also been very good to us.”

"Just recently, I was on a conference call – they put me on speakerphone so I could translate – with the parents of a 10-year-old boy in fourth grade. The school told his parents that the boy could barely read and write at a second-grade level.”

Bat Yam: ‘In the Past Year, We’re Absorbed a Lot of Kids from Ukraine and Russia’

As Taspit describes it, life in Holon is almost a mirror image of life in the Tikvah Quarter. “The school where I registered my children treats them both very well and helps them a lot. I can see how they are making progress in their studies. And our neighbors in the building are very nice and help out a lot. There are a lot of good Israelis,” she smiles.

She says there has been a major change in the standard of living. “Before we moved here, we were paying 4,500 shekels ($1,330) a month to rent a small, one-a-half-room apartment in the Tikvah Quarter. Here we pay 3,500 shekels ($1,000) for a three-and-a-half-room apartment. That’s a big difference. It’s a 25-minute commute to my job at Kuchinate (an arts-based economic and psychosocial collective for African asylum-seeking women in Tel Aviv), but it’s worth it.”

What about the distance from the Eritrean community in Tel Aviv?

“It was hard for the children at first, but they got used to it. It’s good for them to be with other children.”

Simon Tesfey left Tel Aviv for similar reasons. He had spent all of the 11 years since his arrival here in 2010 living in the city. He was surrounded by members of the Eritrean community, met and married an Eritrean woman, and had two children with her. For him, too, it was convenient living in Tel Aviv. It took him less than 10 minutes to get from his apartment in the Tikvah Neighborhood to the convenience store where he worked on Har Tzion Boulevard in south Tel Aviv on his electric bike.

Last September, however, Tesfey and his wife decided to give up on that convenience for the sake of their children. They had heard from other Eritrean parents that the academic level at Hamasger school where their son had been registered was very poor – and they decided to act quickly by moving to Bat Yam. Their son started studying at the Gordon school in Bat Yam, and Simon is convinced that the decision is worth the 25-minute journey he now has to make to work every day.

“We all fled Eritrea so our children could live better lives. My wife and I live for our children, so there wasn’t even a question of whether we should move somewhere that they would get a better education. It was totally a joint decision. Friends whose children attend Hamasger tell me that it’s not a good school and that no one cares about the students. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but my child, for example, didn’t attend classes for a whole month because we were moving to Bat Yam, and no one called from the school to ask what was up with him. In Bat Yam, if your child misses a single day of school, they call straight away to ask if he’s okay.”

Tesfey is very happy with the education his son, who is now in second grade, is getting and he’s also pleased that his son is no longer mixing exclusively with other Eritrean children. “It was a little hard for the kids at first because of leaving their friends in Tel Aviv and because there are not many Eritrean kids in their school, but, over time, they have gotten used to things and the school, and everything’s good. My son goes to school happily, the teachers are excellent and he’s a good student.”

Anat Maman, who runs the Gordon school in Bat Yam, where Simon’s son studies, says that there has been no rise in the number of Eritrean children registered at her school in recent years. “We currently have two or three Eritrean children in each year group. There are 12 in the whole school, and they have been very nicely integrated. For 90 percent of the students at the school, Hebrew is their second language. Most of the people who live close to the school are immigrants or second-generation immigrants. Over the past year, we have also absorbed a lot of children from Ukraine and Russia, so we have a lot of experience with children like this. The teachers here aren’t phased by getting a child who doesn’t speak Hebrew.”

How do they handle it?

“We work differentially and divide the children into groups according to their level of knowledge, and we make sure that each child gets an educational program tailored to their needs. Moreover, we have four teachers who have training in remedial education, whose job it is to give extra tuition, but more importantly – our teachers worked very hard to ensure that the children didn’t close themselves off with other Eritrean kids, and that they mixed with all the other children. At the start of the year, we saw that the new kids would mainly mix with children who come from the same country as them – and that’s not good.

“Just like we make sure that the children who came here from Russia and Ukraine mix with children who come from other places, we do the same with the Eritrean children. We put a lot of emphasis on that. This is an arts school, so we opened a lot of clubs – theater, dance, physical education – where the children mix with each other. It’s good for everyone.”