Asylum City Read Free

end, he decided to take it in stride. Let them talk. As for the two Africans, he’d get back to them after the date or tomorrow morning. There was nothing he could do on a Saturday night at this hour anyway.
    The one person he was hoping to hear from hadn’t called. He was disappointed not to see a message from Gabriel. He’d bought watercolors and brushes for him yesterday and was curious to know whether he’d used them. Although he tried to treat all the asylum seekers the same, he felt closer to some than to others. Gabriel’s shyness and modesty drew him in. And it didn’t hurt that he spoke very good English. It was easier to forge a connection with someone when you didn’t have to go through an interpreter to talk to them. He didn’t discover Gabriel’s artistic abilities until the young man began to trust him and open up to him. He was extraordinarily talented and sensitive. “I guess we know what our grandkids are going to look like one day, Dov,” his mother said under her breath to his father when he told his parents about the African’s drawings at one of their family dinners.
    HIS phone rang as he was turning right into Sheinkin Street from Rothschild Boulevard. Michal. He breathed a deep sigh. He liked her, even though she was what his mother would call a “difficult lady.” Michal was the ultimate volunteer. She didn’t miss a day. She was a hard worker who gave her all for the asylum seekers who came to them for help, one of what Ronny called his “suicide bomber types.” But they’d been butting heads lately. She wanted them to take a more aggressive approach, to take action against the cause of the disease and not just the symptoms. He disagreed. In his opinion, it was better to concentrate their efforts in one area and not go off in all directions. A small group like OMA couldn’t fight the big battles. Their job was to help people with problems that were critical to them, no matter how small and mundane they might seem. He could barely raise enough money to keep the organization going, and now that MK Ehud Regev had started accusing agencies like OMA of being traitors to their country, it was even harder to find donors. The politician’s words were beginning to have an impact. It’s easy to scare people, especially when there was no obvious solution, when the reality of the situation was so complex and had so many implications. Mounting big campaigns, filing lawsuits, or appealing to the High Court of Justice would eat up all of their resources and leave them with nothing to offer the asylum seekers who needed their help so badly.
    They argued about it again yesterday. Michal told him that despite his objections, she’d filed a complaint against Yariv Ninio with the Bar Association, accusing him of being a racist who was responsible for the murder of Hagos and others, and demanding his disbarment. She maintained that the Foreign Ministry had determined that deporting migrants to Ethiopia on the grounds that they were illegal aliens from Ethiopia, and not refugees from Eritrea as they claimed, put their lives at risk, and that Ninio was aware of that opinion and had not only concealed it, but had argued repeatedly in court that the deportees were in no imminent danger.
    Itai was livid when he heard what she’d done. Despite his contempt for people like Ninio and everything they represented, and despite the fact that, like Michal, he’d been very fond of Hagos and was deeply affected by his death, he didn’t believe OMA should go to war against the State Attorney. Especially not when Michal didn’t even have any proof that the ministry’s legal opinion really existed. And they definitely shouldn’t make accusations of a personal nature. During the hearing on the appeal against Hagos’s deportation order, he’d been very much aware of the tension between Michal and Ninio, and he didn’t