"African migrants must be jailed, convinced to leave" Yishai

In a speech on Monday Israel's  Interior Minister Eli Yishai succinctly explained his policy toward African migrants: They should all be jailed, so that they will want to leave Israel.
"After we've put them in the detention facilities they'll prefer to leave," Yishai told a conference at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. "There will be a detention facility and they will be returned to their own countries and to other countries, if we are determined and we recognize that the State of Israel is in existential danger because of this problem. Then everything will be different. With God's help, it will be possible to continue this national mission and return every last infiltrator and migrant worker to their own countries," Yishai said.
While Yishai advocates rounding up and detaining all Sudanese migrants in Israel he is losing a legal battle over this plan: The Justice Ministry recently declared in court that the government never adopted such a policy and will not permit its implementation.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai visits the Saharonim prison facility.

"They've painted us as if, heaven forbid, [we were creating] refugee camps," Yishai said yesterday. "The facilities are almost finished and now I'm in a battle with the human rights organizations and the prosecution. I don't agree that it's impossible to return [people] to Eritrea and northern Sudan, and if I did accept this there would be hundreds of thousands more."
Yishai assailed the state's policy of extending blanket protection to all migrants from Eritrea and Sudan, who constitute over 80 percent of all migrants entering the country.
"Just as it's possible to deport to South Sudan, it's possible to deport to northern Sudan," he said. "If there's a war there [in South Sudan], there's also one there [in Sudan], and if there isn't [a war in South Sudan], then there isn't [in Sudan]. Why is Eritrea out, but South Sudan is okay?"
"It would be easier for me if I somehow went with the flow and did what was possible," rather than battling against the concept of group protection, he added. "But Israel's welfare was and still is at the forefront of my mind."
Yishai also attacked his fellow cabinet ministers, who "want to pose as bleeding hearts to look good for the media. I had to choose between [that and] being good for the State of Israel, so I came out bad in the media."
Former Military Advocate General Avishai Mendelblit, who addressed the conference earlier, attacked Israel's policy from a different direction. Because Israel grants group protection to migrants from Eritrea and Sudan, he said, it never examines their individual asylum requests - and that's a problem. "If you don't check the status of these people and just tell them all 'no' in advance, then of course they'll come to you with complaints, and rightly, because you have to check first," he said.
Some of these migrants, he added, almost certainly should be granted individual asylum, and Israel is violating its commitments under international conventions by not doing so.