Killed in a war that wasn't his
Op-ed: Imagine the mother of the poor Eritrean, who underwent an exhausting journey to reach Israel and was shot and brutally assaulted by an angry mob after the Be'er Sheva shooting attack, receiving the news that her son has died in a bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
I am trying not to think about the anxious mob which brutally beat him up till he started to bleed, for no reason actually. I don’t want to imagine what he was thinking during those moments.
The foreign workers, the infiltrators from Eritrea and Sudan, suffer twice: First by the fact that everyone suspects them because of their foreignness, and now because the terrorists can't distinguish between them and Israeli citizens.
We must remember that they came here to work, that they left behind families who are waiting for them and for the money they send home.
This isn't their war. Like most of us, they live in fear of the Israeli reality. Almost every one of them suffered in some way before ending their travails and reaching a state of tranquility in Israel.
Now imagine the mother of the Eritrean, who underwent an exhausting journey to reach Israel, receiving the news that her son has been killed in a bloody conflict between Israel and Palestine. How does one explain that to a mother who hardly knows where Israel is?
The young Eritrean is clear evidence of foreignness. Killed in a war that wasn't his own. All alone.
There are 33,000 Eritreans and some 9,000 Sudanese living in Israel, including the young man who died Sunday, who apparently worked in Moshav Ein Habesor. Like his friends, he arrived in Israel to get a job and provide for his family.
A lot can be said about the foreign workers, the infiltrators. The Israeli society has a lot of anger towards the Sudanese and Eritreans. But the fact is that this is the second infiltrator to pay a bloody price in the battle between Israel and the Palestinians. It happened the first time in Ra'anana, when a foreign national was stabbed by a Palestinian terrorist. Now another foreign national has fallen victim to panic and suspicions.
When a person is hurt in a terror attack, his family members arrive at the hospital and help him heal. Had he remained alive, the poor Eritrean who was shot and brutally attacked by passersby may have received a hug from his friends, but would have returned to his loneliness the next day. After all, his friends have also come here in search of livelihood.
