African migrants from Eritrea hold an Israeli flag during a protest near the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv October 18, 2012. REUTERS/Nir Elias

By Allyn Fisher-Ilan

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has launched a forced repatriation of Eritrean migrants that amounts to a grave violation of their human rights because of the risk of persecution in their reclusive homeland, an advocacy group said on Monday.

Israeli authorities have been trying to curb an influx of Africans that has ignited resentment in the poorer neighbourhoods in which they dwell and compounded the fears of many Israelis about eventually being outnumbered in the Jewish state. But humanitarian groups say that forcibly returning African migrants home often exposes them to rights abuses including torture.

Some 60,000 Africans, including 35,000 Eritreans, have walked over a long porous desert border with Egypt into Israel since 2006, Israeli government figures show, and many live in gritty districts of Tel Aviv.

Israel regards most as illegal job-seekers but rights agencies say many should be considered for political asylum because of poor human rights records of their home governments.

Hotline for Migrant Workers (HMW), an Israeli human rights group, said an initial group of 14 Eritrean men were flown to Asmara, the Eritrean capital, on Sunday, after receiving $1,500 each from Israeli authorities.

They were driven to the airport from one of two desert detention centres that Israel has expanded. A law passed a year ago, and now being contested in its high court, allows the country to jail migrants it says arrived illegally.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry declined to comment on the HMW report, other than to say that some "people are returning home". She did not give their nationalities.

The men who left on Sunday were the first sent back to Eritrea, which was accused last year by the U.N. human rights chief of practicing torture and summary executions.

Israel had said in the past that it was seeking third-country destinations for Eritreans.

"GRAVE VIOLATION"

Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator for HMW, a group that objects to most deportations of migrants, told Reuters the latest repatriations were "a grave human rights violation".

Rozen said those repatriated had signed consent forms but she argued their agreement could not be seen as voluntary because Israeli authorities made clear the only way they would be freed from detention was by returning home.

She said at least one of the Eritreans had said he was a military deserter, and could face punishment at home.

A Tel Aviv-based representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees monitoring migrants' treatment in Israel had no immediate comment. She said she was seeking confirmation from Israel of the Eritreans' repatriation.

New York-based Human Rights Watch also condemned the new repatriations. In a statement emailed to news media, Gerry Simpson, a senior HRW refugee researcher, accused Israel of "using the threat of prolonged detention to force Eritrean and Sudanese nationals to give up their asylum claims".

Worldwide, HRW said, around 80 percent of Eritrean asylum seekers are granted some form of protection because of credible fears of persecution relating to punishment for evading indefinite military service in Eritrea and other widespread rights abuses in the small Horn of Africa state.

Last month, an Israeli government lawyer said at a Supreme Court hearing on the legality of detaining asylum-seekers who entered surreptitiously that a deal to resettle "infiltrators from Eritrea" had been reached with a country she did not name.

At least one group of Africans was flown out of Israel to South Sudan in the past year and other migrants have been offered cash to leave voluntarily. Some 2,000 Africans are being held in the southern detention centres.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that a fence which Israel completed along most of the Egyptian border earlier this year has significantly reduced the flow of migration from Africa, which hit a peak of 2,000 a month in 2011.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel condemned new guidelines by the European Union on Tuesday which ban EU funding and cooperation with Israeli institutions situated in territory captured by the Jewish state in the 1967 Mideast war.

In order to obtain EU funding from 2014, Israeli projects will be required to sign on to a clause stipulating they operate within the country's pre-1967 borders and not in east Jerusalem, the West Bank or Golan Heights.

The clause is a powerful endorsement by the EU of the Palestinian demand that its future borders be based on the pre-1967 lines. The Palestinians are demanding that Israel stop building Jewish settlements in the West Bank as a condition for the resumption of peace talks which collapsed in 2008.

Israel says talks should restart without preconditions and that all core issues should be resolved through dialogue. It has frequently called on the Palestinians to resume peace talks.

Israel's deputy foreign minister Zeev Elkin called the EU decision a "very significant and worrying move."

"It certainly doesn't add to the atmosphere of peace talks. On the contrary, it fuels the Palestinian refusal to return to the negotiation table," he said Tuesday.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is back in the region this week for consultations on his attempts to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. He is not scheduled to visit Israel or the Palestinian territories but is set to meet with Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan Tuesday evening.

A spokesman for the European delegation in Tel Aviv said a "territorial applicability clause" will feature in agreements between Israel and the EU from 2014. "Israeli entities situated in the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem will not be eligible for EU funding," he said.

He emphasized that the guidelines would not affect Israel's private sector or companies but rather bodies like research centers or NGOs.

Many Israelis object to withdrawing from the West Bank or parts of east Jerusalem because the areas carry deep religious significance for devout Jews who consider it their biblical homeland.

Another concern is that violent groups could fill the vacuum if Israel withdraws from areas under its control, as was the case in the Gaza Strip where the Islamic militant group Hamas took over after Israel pulled out in 2005.

"The purpose of these guidelines is to make a distinction between the state of Israel and the occupied territories when it comes to EU support," the European Union said in a statement.

Israel's minister for intelligence and strategic affairs, Yuval Steinitz, accused the EU of singling out Israel. "These are worrying steps which we view as double standards because we don't see the EU take similar steps in other territorial disputes," he said.

Senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi welcomed the move. "This is the beginning of new era. Israel should listen carefully and should understand that this occupation cannot continue without any kind of accountability," she said.

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Richard Cohen Shows Why Racism Makes You Do Dumb Things

Richard Cohen's column in Tuesday's Washington Post— arguing that George Zimmerman was right to assume Trayvon Martin was a criminal, because he was a black male—is racist and wrong. More important, it's wrong because it's racist. That is, it's not that Cohen is "wrong" in the oh-that's-so-politically-incorrect sense. It's that he's wrong because the assumptions he makes about race and crime are not based on facts.

RELATED: Florida's Problems with Racial Politics Go Far Beyond Trayvon Martin

Cohen appears to believe all black men are the same, and that they are violent. Cohen says he's "tired" of politicians and activists "who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist." He justifies Zimmerman's assumption that Martin was a criminal by citing statistics about crime in New York. "In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects—almost all of them young men," Cohen writes. "We know them from the nightly news." While New York's stop-and-frisk program has been criticized for disproportionately targeting minorities, Cohen says, "if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk." If police "ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work."

RELATED: In Defense of the Media's Coverage of Trayvon Martin

"Urban crime" is shorthand for young black people committing crimes in big cities on the verge of collapse. But Martin wasn't killed in Cabrini-Green. He was killed in Sanford, Florida (population 53,570), inside a gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which has about 260 townhouses. The alleged crime was a suburban crime. And, just for the record, it was not the black kid who was just acquitted of it.

RELATED: Rick Perry, Your Trayvon Martin Tweet Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

Cohen is trying to conjure images of urban blight in the 1980s—back when, as Matt Yglesias points out, Cohen argued that it was OK for jewelry store owners to refuse to let black people in because they were afraid of crime. Today, Cohen writes that even the black male president should be scared of black males:

In his acclaimed Philadelphia speech on race, [President Obama] cited his grandmother as “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street.”

How about the former Barry Obama? When he was a Columbia University student living on the lip of then-dangerous Harlem, did he never have the same fear?

The thing is, a lot has changed since the 1980s. Reading Cohen's column, you'd get the impression that there was an epidemic of crime committed by black people. Too bad he didn't read Jamelle Bouie's article in The Daily Beast a day earlier, about "the Myth of Black-on-Black Crime." Crime rates have been dropping for 20 years. (Just for the record, New York's murder rate in 2012 was the lowest since the 1960s.) If black people were predisposed to committing crimes, Bouie points out, "you would still see high rates of crime among blacks, even as the nation sees a historic decline in criminal offenses. Instead, crime rates among African-Americans, and black youth in particular, have taken a sharp drop." Fewer than 10 percent of black kids in Washington, D.C., the home of Cohen's employer, "are in a gang, have sold drugs, have carried a gun, or have stolen more than $100 in goods."

RELATED: Why John Derbyshire Hasn't Been Fired (Yet)

Cohen is upset that no one is talking about the epidemic of black violence that isn't real. "Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?" he asks. "Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment... It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life."

RELATED: John Derbyshire Has (Finally) Been Fired

It is unacceptable to complain that "nobody is talking about X" when you have an Internet connection. You can find people talking about anything. Email me, and I can point you to the top 10 '90s nostalgia GIF tumblrs. But you wouldn't need to dig for people saying we should be afraid of black violence—warning, say, that black people would riot if Zimmerman were acquitted. You could just flip on Rush Limbaugh.

Studies have shown poverty has more to do with crime than race does. More unexpectedly, research published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001 found that people are more likely to think their neighborhood has a higher crime rate if more young black men live there. The Retreat at Twin Lakes is a multi-ethnic neighborhood—about half white, 20 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent black, The Daily Beast's Amy Green reports. George Zimmerman had called police 46 times. He organized the neighborhood watch. Cohen writes, "There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy—the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason." With his column, Cohen is perpetuating the attitude that made that tragedy possible.

Attorney General Eric Holder told the NAACP convention in Orlando, Fla., Tuesday that the Justice Department is still investigating whether to bring federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman, who was declared not guilty only three days ago by a Florida jury. Holder also condemned "stand your ground" self defense laws that have passed in dozens of states, saying they "sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods."

The conference was held just a 30-minute drive from where Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012. Zimmerman was acquitted on self-defense grounds.

Holder blasted the laws that remove the duty to retreat before using deadly force when attacked in public, saying they allow and perhaps encourage "violent situations to escalate in public" and "undermine public safety." The conference applauded when Holder told them to "stand our ground" and change the laws.

Holder got personal in his speech, saying that Martin's death prompted him to have a "conversation" with his 15-year-old son about how to act if he is ever stopped by police.

The NAACP has organized a petition urging Holder to charge Zimmerman with a hate crime that has garnered more than a million signatures.

“I am concerned about this case and as we confirmed last spring, the Justice Department has an open investigation into it,” Holder said. “While that inquiry is ongoing, I can promise that the Department of Justice will consider all available information before determining what action to take.”

Holder recalled how his father talked to him years ago "about how as a young black man I should interact with the police, what to say, and how to conduct myself if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way I thought was unwarranted." Holder thought he wouldn't have to have the same conversation with his own son, but did, after Martin's death, he said.

"Trayvon’s death last spring caused me to sit down to have a conversation with my own 15-year-old son, like my dad did with me," he said. "This was a father-son tradition I hoped would not need to be handed down. But as a father who loves his son and who is more knowing in the ways of the world, I had to do this to protect my boy."

Holder also recounted the times he had been stopped by police and had his vehicle searched, even though he was sure he wasn't speeding. One time, "I was stopped by a police officer while simply running to a catch a movie, at night in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C," Holder said. "I was at the time of that last incident a federal prosecutor."

McClatchy reported that the FBI – which interviewed nearly three dozen people in the case – found no evidence that racial bias motivated Zimmerman to shoot Martin. Zimmerman is half Hispanic, Martin was black.

Holder also expressed disappointment in the recent Supreme Court decision striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act. He announced that the Justice Department would allocate more resources to enforcing the parts of the law that remain intact.