No Man’s Land

Rebecca Collard Egypt is shooting them. Israel won’t recognize them. What’s a poor refugee to do?

Cairo, June 2007: late one night, Ghebre piled into a car with four other African migrants. They were headed east across the Sinai Peninsula toward Israel. Ghebre had fled his native Eritrea, by way of Sudan, eighteen months earlier. “The plan was … if Egypt is okay, we would stay here,” he tells me. “If not, we go to Israel.”
Ghebre was in Cairo for just four days before traffickers convinced him their $700 US fee was worth passage into the Promised Land. The route, over the Suez Canal and across the 266-kilometre frontier with Israel, has become a thoroughfare for …

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Summer

ISSUE 36 Summer 2010

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