Subscribe to RSSRefuge Rethought: Building a South Sudanese Kibbutz
By Shira Poliak
The early kibbutzim transformed the landscape, actualizing the Zionist dream of an independent and viable Jewish homeland. Olive groves and orange blossoms produced luscious crops, and once again the land flowed with milk and honey—not from the fountains of Biblical miracles, but from the cracked hands of men and women who found repose in their passion to develop the land, in a shared sense of purpose. The kibbutz movement continued to grow throughout the early- and mid-twentieth century, both before and after the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948.
Approximately one hundred years since the creation of the first kibbutz in Palestine, the kibbutz movement today is slowly withering. Pockets of kibbutznikim, members of these communities, are making exodus to urban centers. Some kibbutzim are also privatizing, adapting their original collective ethos to conform to contemporary industrial realities. But over 250 kibbutzim continue to dot the map of Israel, from the south of the country to the north. Despite their shrinking numbers and shifting nature, the movement is still a prominent feature of Israeli society and history—bearers of a treasured conception of patriotism that has inspired other young pioneers who yearn to build nations of their own.
Juma Sutralino is one such pioneer. A South Sudanese refugee who fled to Israel years ago, Juma returned to the land of his birth a year and a half ago, prior to his country’s independence this summer. Juma spent his time in Israel scraping a living as a dishwasher on a kibbutz in the southern city of Eilat. Despite living on the margins of Israeli society, he learned Hebrew, befriended native Israelis, and grew to admire the kibbutz model he witnessed firsthand.
As a song writer , Juma has performed in the prominent Tel Aviv Cinematheque venue in Israel. Now, resettled in his homeland, Juma has replaced song and lyric with a desire to actively build his newly-independent country. Juma believes that kibbutzim could play a pivotal part in South Sudan’s future: kibbutzim, he told me, can “help unite people and teach them how to help each other out”.
Following a civil war between the Sudanese central government and Southern rebels that lasted nearly five decades and killed over two and a half million people, South Sudan became the world’s youngest country in July 2011. The war left South Sudan with little infrastructure or institutions with which to tackle its overwhelming poverty, continued sprouts of violence near its border with Sudan, and dysfunctional education and health systems that are some of the most undeveloped in the world. Half of the population does not have access to drinking water. Nearly 80% of women neither read nor write. The new South Sudanese government, international actors, and South Sudanese émigrés who have since returned are now working to modernize the state. Like the early kibbutznikim, the people on the ground are determined to actualize their intense yearning for political stability and economic prosperity, for a more viable home.
Juma was part of a small number of refugees—about 600 men, women, and children—who returned to the new South Sudan from Israel. Representing about 20% of the Israeli population of South Sudanese refugees, they have returned to a country they barely remember and to conditions dissimilar to those of the realities they originally fled. But they are not alone: the returnees from Israel are part of a larger refugee migration to South Sudan. In fact, more than a million refugees, many who fled to neighboring African nations, have resettled in the country since the United Nations ruled that it was safe for them to travel home six years ago. The UN’s decision followed the 2005 peace deal, brokered by the United States, in which the Sudanese government and Southern rebel forces both sanctioned the South’s secession and the creation of an autonomous state.
South Sudan is well-suited for Juma’s dream for kibbutz revolution. Though only a meager 4% of the country’s land area is currently cultivated, a promising 90% of it is arable. The country boasts a vast natural resource base, ideal for the economics of labor-intensive, agrarian production. Some analysts predict that South Sudan could become a major food exporter in the region, a source desperately needed in light of food shortages plaguing sub-Saharan Africa.
The former song writer-turned-activist has not only proposed a development model, but is beginning to take substantive steps toward implementing his Israeli-inspired vision. Juma told me during a conversation this summer that he had met with the nation’s Agriculture and Health ministers to develop an implementation strategy for the project. Speaking comfortably in a mix of English and Hebrew, Juma successfully managed to convey his enthusiasm over the telephone. While politicians, economists and citizens will continue to wrestle with South Sudan’s deep structural and social problems for decades, Juma’s efforts and determination to build a kibbutz exemplify the endeavors of otherwise-ordinary South Sudanese individuals who are using non-traditional means to rebuild their country on a fundamental level.
And yet, Juma’s relatively cheerful disposition belies a refugee experience in Israel marred by hardships. Israel received a dramatic increase in African refugees in 2007, as conditions for Sudanese and Eritrean refugees in Egypt began deteriorating and following an incident in which Egyptian police killed over thirty Sudanese refugees in central Cairo. William Tall, a representative for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Israel, told me that It also became more difficult for African refugees to seek asylum in Europe. In that year alone (2007), some 5,000 refugees crossed the Egyptian border into Israel. The influx of asylum seekers en masse was Israel’s first such surge of non-Jewish Africans in its short history. Since 2007, refugees have continued to stream into Israel by the hundreds of thousands. There are now nearly 35,000 African refugees in Israel, according to the Israeli government. Of these, the UNHCR estimates that about 3,000 – 4,000 are from South Sudan. While Israel has successfully integrated thousands of Jewish immigrants, it lacks an official refugee policy or asylum process directed to non-Jewish, non-Palestinian refugees.
Israel is ill-equipped to provide basic services to the throngs of new immigrants and has a dearth of resources and manpower with which to assess individual asylum claims. African refugees such as Juma receive a conditional release visa that protects them from deportation, but provides little else. The protection does not constitute a work permit, and refugees cannot apply for one. They are not eligible for social benefits, such as health care or education, nor can they file individual asylum claims. Worse still, visa holders must travel to the Ministry of the Interior’s refugee processing center in the central Israeli city of Lod to renew their protection status every 3 months. For Juma, renewing his protective status meant missing a day of work, losing much needed pay by traveling over eight hours to a small, inefficient office. Once there, depending on the mood of the particular officer or the number of cases seen that day, one’s visa may or may not be renewed.
These frustrating technicalities and policy inadequacies prevented Juma from getting an education while in Israel. Juma had “a vision to enter university to feel like a human being and have something to do in the world,” he told me. His inability to obtain funding to enroll in college in Israel also motivated him to return to South Sudan.
“There is a lot of work in Israel,” he said, referring to the relative ease for Sudanese in Eilat to find jobs illegally working in hotels or washing dishes, “but it’s hard because we want to learn. It’s important to advance, not just to work. When you work, you stay in the same place. When you travel outside, you need to get more knowledge to then be able to give support [to] our country. We didn’t get that in Israel.”
And so, motivated by South Sudan’s impending independence, a beleaguered Juma turned from his exile and flew to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, a year and half before this summer’s independence. His trip, however, was beset by its own peculiar challenges. UN officials and Israeli refugee NGOs were concerned that the returning refugees could be killed if the government knew of their connections to Israel. And so, while the Sudanese government was informed about most of the returning refugees and from where they were coming, Juma’s return was kept a secret. Homecoming for Juma thus not only engendered dislocation, but meant gambling his life. His return was coordinated by an international aid organization, Operation Blessing, in consultation with the UNHCR. In keeping with international standards of refugee transfers—in which the host country pays for the refugee’s travel home—the Israeli government partly funded his flight.
Juma joined one of the first groups from Israel to return to South Sudan because he was determined to vote in a January 2011 referendum in which over 98% of South Sudanese voters called for the creation of an independent South Sudan. This was Juma’s first chance to exercise a democratic rite.
Nevertheless, leaving Israel was not easy for Juma. He had to say goodbye to a tight-knit community of South Sudanese refugees in Eilat, the many friends who he said became his makeshift Israeli family, as he did not have any relatives there. Though ecstatic to reunite with his mother, who he had not seen in years, he was returning to a country he barely knew.
But the opportunity to be a part of this historic nation-building process neutralized Juma’s lingering doubt. “If there is a problem at home we have to fix the problem—that’s why we are here,” he told me resolutely, imploring his peers to return home as well.
Other refugees share Juma’s resolute commitment to rebuilding their homeland. They have followed his lead, flying from Tel Aviv to Juba on Operation Blessing-chartered flights, and assuming interesting roles in the narrative of South Sudan’s early development. Prior to returning to South Sudan six months ago from Israel, Asunta Ceasear completed a course in brick making: a poetic, if not utile, step toward literally constructing the nation that she longed to make hers again. She returned to South Sudan with her seven-year-old daughter, who now attends school in Juba.
Renting a room in the young country’s capital and reunited with her sister, Asunta said that South Sudan appears dramatically different from the country she fled six years ago. Back then, “there was no difference between night and day,” she said, referring to the constant barrage of smoke and ash from heavy bombing during the civil war. The sounds of gunshots were a fixture of daily life. But now, the new capital is “peaceful, without shooting or discrimination,” she said. While celebrating independence this past July, Asunta was overwhelmed: the event passed as she cried tears of joy, tears of disbelief. It was a moment she never imagined witnessing.
Despite the excitement of independence, the refugees with whom I spoke are still acutely aware that the road ahead will challenge their optimism. Asunta made the unfamiliar journey home without her husband, who remains in Israel, enrolled in a computer course and making money to support his wife and daughter in Africa. Many families have also chosen to separate temporarily. In some cases, the husband left first to establish a home before bringing his wife and kids. In others, as in Asunta’s, the wife and children undertook the first anxiety-ridden steps toward home.
Though Juma has made money playing at a few weddings in South Sudan, neither he nor Asunta have found a steady job. William, a 29 year old single man who returned to South Sudan in May and dreams of becoming a farmer, also has not found work. William said that many people in Juba are having trouble paying for basic provisions, such as water and gas. He paid 10 pounds for 50 liters of water—the equivalent of $3.74 U.S. dollars—which is “a lot if you are not working,” he told me.
These daily challenges are compounded by continued violence in some regions. Fighting resumed along the border between South Sudan and Sudan soon after the July independence. Since September 2011 and continuing for the following few months, temporary refugee camps in border regions have sustained continuous bombing. The UN Refugee Agency reported that Refugees have testified to cases of abduction and rape of women and girls by armed militias.
I learned about these stories and began researching the history of South Sudan as a reporting intern at the Jerusalem Post this summer. After exploring how South Sudanese in Israel were celebrating independence and how the new state could affect the status of the thousands of South Sudanese refugees who are still living in Israel, I was curious to piece together the stories of the refugees who had chosen to return to Africa.
Juma’s kibbutz initiative addresses the gnawing question about how refugees’ past experiences—living temporarily in a culture that is essentially not their own—prepare them to handle the challenges they confront in a country many have not lived in for decades and in which the problems far outnumber the meager resources to mitigate them. Juma left a country that, though flawed, had become familiar. He has returned to a homeland that is alien to him now and is beset with tremendous obstacles. To cope, Juma has chosen to learn from the only home he really remembers—Israel—in order to rebuild the one he left behind—South Sudan.
Juma’s story, like the stories of the other refugees to whom I spoke—in essence, the story of South Sudan—is a story in motion. It doesn’t have an end and is being played out in real time, a fact evident in the way these individuals are sharing their narratives. Unlike Juma, most of the other returnees related their tales in broken Hebrew and English. The phone connections were very poor. I sat glued to the phone in the Jerusalem Post basement, focused on hearing incredible stories of personal strength, of fear overcome, of commitment to one’s country. Most of the former refugees I spoke to did not have the luxury of setting up formal interview times, and instead spoke to me while shopping at the market, or during short breaks between meetings with friends.
The creation of new states was commonplace at the end of World War I and following the Soviet Union’s collapse, but opportunities to witness the building of nations come rarely today. Juma’s story, like those of his peers, is one of construction “on the margins”—the daily challenges, the yearning and the quest, the profusion of conflicting emotions. He is at once deeply appreciative for the things he learned from the kibbutz and mindful of its inadequacies, with which he must now reckon. The challenges of his past and his longing to transform his estranged homeland into a nation present a situation in which success is uncertain and the stakes are high—exceptionally high.
Suspended in an uncertain position, Juma’s kibbutz does not necessarily promise to be established. What will happen to Juma—and to the rest of his South Sudanese brethren—no one can say. He knows this. But with an unwavering spirit, and like the Israeli kibbutznikim before him, Juma is determined to intrepidly pursue his national birthright.
\\SHIRA POLIAK is a junior in Barnard College and a Contributing Editor of The Current. She can be reached at smp2156@barnard.edu. First photo courtesy of PikiWiki Israel. Second photo courtesy of United National Photo.
