Hassan El Masry - Cairo
"I'm fed up with life here, but in Israel I can work as a carpenter assistant or a paint assistant with a good salary." With these words, the young Egyptian explains why he has been looking for work in Israel.
The harsh economic conditions prompted Osama to look for any opportunity to migrate through social networking sites, ending up on a Facebook page called "Wanted Workers in Israel."
During the interaction with the page, Osama discovered that there are other pages with which the Egyptians interact, such as the Association of Egyptians in Israel, the Industrialist in Israel, and the citizens and lovers of Israel, all of which are pages calling for normalization.
"It is not strange to travel to work in Israel. It is a developed country with a high standard of living and gives the worker its right, while in Egypt I work 15 hours a day. However, I find no suitable compensation for the effort I make," Osama said. I can provide basic life requirements during the month. "
"In Israel, I can start a new life, especially as it is the closest available destination," he said. "I do not want to die from hunger and poverty in Egypt." To travel at the lowest possible cost, compared to European countries that need complex and expensive procedures.
Osama is not unique. Thousands of Egyptian youth work in Israel, including Majid Zaghloul, who immigrated to Israel four years ago for the difficulty of obtaining a "visa" for any other country and works in one of the Arab towns occupied by Israel since 1948.
Karim Mohamed, a young man looking for work or immigration in any country, says to Al-Jazeera Net, "Egypt has died for me a long time ago, especially with the state's lack of interest in the hard work," stressing that he decided to immigrate anywhere even to Israel because " Will not benefit him and will not benefit his children, he said.
Thousands of young people
There is no official statistics of the number of Egyptians in Israel, as confirmed by previous statements by former head of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), Major General Abu Bakr al-Jundi, who said that the Egyptians in Israel are "illegal workers." They traveled illegally through neighboring countries.
At the end of 2007, the National Defense and Security Committee of the Egyptian People's Assembly (parliament) held a series of meetings to discuss how to deal with the phenomenon of Egyptian youth emigrating to Israel, who obtained Israeli citizenship as a result of their marriage to Israeli women, estimated at more than 25,000.
But Tariq Fahmi, a professor of political science at the National Center for Middle East Studies at Cairo University, says the number is between 34,000 and 36,000, according to Israeli sources, while the figure is about 10-15,000, according to a press release of members of the Egyptian community in Israel.
Numbered numerology caused parliamentary criticism of the Minister of State for Migration and Affairs of Egyptians abroad Nabila Makram, who announced that she did not have information about the number, and explained in June 2016 that the situation of Egyptians there has a special nature related to political and security dimensions.
Despite the vagueness of the numbers, it is interesting to note that the Egyptian media publish every period of the decisions to drop the nationality of a number of Egyptians to obtain Israeli citizenship, as well as examples of young Egyptians who immigrated to Israel, such as Dina Abdullah, whose family was surprised two years ago to be there and join the Israeli army. The government to drop Egyptian nationality.
Physical motives
As the number of Egyptian youth residing in Israel rises, an important question arises: what makes Israel a destination for Egyptian youth, despite being a hostile state in popular conscience?
"The 30 percent poverty rate in Egypt is a contributing factor toward individual normalization," said Dr. Mohamed Abu Ghadir, head of the Israel department at Al-Azhar University. "Israeli intelligence services encourage migration by creating pages on social media sites that attract Young people, and perhaps recruit them for their own account, by playing on their minds and accusing them of facing Israel as terrorists. "
Despite the difficulty of obtaining an Israeli visa for young people, the journalist specializing in Israeli affairs, Abu Bakr Khallaf, explains that he receives dozens of messages from young Egyptians and Arabs asking for information about the possibility of traveling to Israel and working there.
Al-Jazeera said the Israeli-Arabic-language pages "unfortunately succeeded in penetrating the psychological barrier with the Egyptians, especially from new generations that do not bear the memory of war and conflict." He said that discouraging young people from economic deterioration and the absence of freedoms makes them easy prey for publicity Israeli conflict.
For his part, says tourist expert Islam Fouad, "The financial return announced in various jobs via Facebook attracts Egyptian labor, in light of the low density of population in Israel compared to Egypt, and the consequent need for manpower."
In a statement to Al Jazeera Net, Fuad explained that the most prominent sectors in which Egyptians work are tourism, small professions such as construction, and services such as garbage collection and cleaning of gardens, or work in laundry, noting that the salary of the cleaning worker is about 28 shekels per hour Dollars), equivalent to about one thousand Egyptian pounds per day in the case of work for 7 hours.
He asserts that some Israelis welcome Egyptian employment for lower wages compared to Israeli employment.