TEL AVIV - Ismail Abdul-Rasul and his family escaped war in Darfur, languished in squalid conditions in Egypt for five years and nearly suffocated in a harrowing journey across the Sinai desert before they were finally smuggled into Israel.

"I was dancing with joy when I arrived," said the 47-year-old father or four, who reached Israel in July 2007. "It was one of the happiest days of my life."

In recent years, tens of thousands of Africans have entered the country through its long desert border with Egypt, turning Israel, like parts of Europe, into a magnet for asylum seekers, and even more, for migrants desperate for jobs in the industrialised world.

The arrivals are hardly being welcomed. Facing a public furore, the government is scrambling to erect a fence along the 220km Egyptian border and a massive detention centre in the remote southern desert.

With Israel, however, come some complications: Founded six decades ago in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust genocide, its society is torn between a sense of duty toward the persecuted and fears that the influx might make the country less Jewish.

In a speech to parliament last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of a "flood" of illegal migrants. "It is threatening the jobs of Israelis, and it is threatening the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel," he said.

The government says that all but a select few are economic migrants and not eligible for refugee status.

But critics charge the government is turning away bona fide refugees fleeing persecution.

"The state is lying, it knows it is lying and it purposely refuses to check the refugees' status because that will prove that it is lying," said Sigal Rozen of the Hotline for Migrant Workers advocacy group.

Israel would seem to be an unlikely destination for African migrants, who have few ties to the Jewish state.

Egypt, however, has a large population of migrants - and after Egypt violently quashed a 2005 protest by a group of Sudanese refugees, they began trickling north into Israel.

'Little Africa'

About 35000 have entered Israel since, with the number surging to 1500 arrivals every month, according to government figures.

Some cities have been transformed. Some 10percent of the population of the Red Sea resort town of Eilat are African migrants, and an entire neighborhood in south Tel Aviv is known as "Little Africa," where ethnic food shops and phone card stalls line the streets.

The majority hail from Eritrea, where men are often forced into a military service with slavery-like conditions, and Sudan, which was torn by a 22-year-civil war and continues to see a separate conflict in Darfur that some have labelled a genocide, with some 300000 killed and 2,7million displaced since 2003, according to the UN.

Rozen said 88percent of Eritrean asylum seekers worldwide were granted refugee status last year, while in Israel not one was processed.

Initially, Israel took in many of the early arrivals, providing shelter and even arranging jobs in hotels and on kibbutz collective farms. Nearly 3000 people received temporary residence or work permits. But with no overarching policy, most migrants are simply released onto the streets after brief detentions.

Haifa University geography professor Arnon Soffer estimates that if the current pace persists there will be approximately 500000 illegal migrants in Israel within 15 years.

He called the influx an "existential threat" to a country of just 7,6million people.

To be sure, Israel is not alone in confronting the issue. Greece, which accounts for 90percent of the European Union's detected illegal border crossings, has asked for emergency help from the EU in patrolling its border with Turkey.

The Africans have found pockets of sympathy in Israel. Human rights groups and high-profile figures like Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel have urged the government to offer a home to Darfurians escaping genocide.

Abdul-Rasul, the Darfurian who arrived in 2007, is one of the few who has earned legal status in Israel.