Over the past year, the immigration police's massive crackdown on foreign workers has transformed this pedestrian mall, which functions as an unofficial gathering place for the country's foreign workers, from a bustling hub of social and commercial activity into a forlorn strip of dwindling businesses.

Striding past fading advertisements for discount phonecards and empty kiosk tables, Aziz Diouf is immediately visible in the thin stream of passersby. At just over two meters, his thin frame towers over the acquaintances he stops to greet with an easy manner and a big smile, alternating between French, Hebrew and English.

Navigating between cultures comes as naturally as walking to this 37-year-old native of Senegal, whose parents were married to seal an act of reconciliation between members of two different ethnic groups. His father, the son of a S rr r dignitary whose people had migrated to the West African coast and built their village in Wollof territory, married the daughter of a local Wollof leader. Diouf, who grew up speaking both Wollof and S rr r, was the only child allowed to move freely between the area's ethnically divided villages, feeling an equal mixture of belonging and non-belonging wherever he went.

At 18, he left Senegal and traveled across Africa and Europe for several years before heading back home. On his first night in Israel, where he arrived on the last leg of his journey, he sat in a Tel Aviv youth hostel and watched Israel's prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, pounding emphatically on a table during the evening news and repeating the Hebrew word "Anahnu, anahnu." Diouf, who noted its similarity to the Arabic word for "us," was immediately taken by the nationalistic pride the prime minister conveyed.

"It made me feel at home, because the S rr r, too, are very proud of their identity," he explains.

Diouf decided to stay. He eventually married Irena, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, thus legalizing his position in Israel. Their son, Lati, is now seven years old.

When Diouf settled here in the early 1990s, the African community consisted of fewer than two dozen people, all of whom he knew personally. By the time he began photographing them more than three years ago, they numbered, at his estimate, approximately 20,000 people.

For Diouf, who had long been an amateur photographer, taking pictures became a way of preserving instants lived within a bubble he was certain would soon burst. Between 2001 and 2003, he created striking, resonant images of ceremonies for newborn children, meetings between Ghanaian tribal representatives attired in ceremonial dress, couples strolling to church in their Sunday best, traditional funeral services and impromptu parties.

"People here were busy with their individual struggles for survival," he says. "Few of them saw the bigger picture. But I had spent years in Europe, and I saw the life of foreign workers in Israel in the context of a global problem. I knew illegal African immigrants from former French colonies who were deported after years of living in France. I knew it was just a matter of time before it started happening here."

Over the years Diouf – one of a handful of Senegalese in Israel – assumed the role of social worker, adviser and facilitator among different groups within the African community.

"I told people here that sooner or later they would be deported, but hardly anybody wanted to listen. As far as the Interior Ministry is concerned, their policy – or rather lack of policy regarding foreign workers – failed from the word go. They let people in and forgot about them until they decided it was time to deport them. Nobody treated the wound until it began festering. Then the immigration police arrived on the scene and simply cut off the limb – and even this amputation was done the wrong way."

On Rehov Lavanda, Diouf pauses outside two nondescript, dilapidated apartment buildings. "This is one place I loved taking photographs," he says, indicating the buildings and the sidewalk before them with a sweeping gesture. A few years ago, there were 20 or so churches in these two buildings.

"Now," he says, pointing to a set of windows where a light goes off as we gaze upwards, "there are two churches left."

Over time, Diouf has become a reference point for African immigrants who turn to him with problems they do not know how to solve on their own.

"There are several organizations here dedicated to assisting foreign workers, but there are still people who don't know how to reach them," he says.

He pauses to greet a Nigerian woman running late for a meeting at a nearby center for foreign workers, where a group of mostly African women are already assembled for a makeup demonstration. It is one of a series of courses the center offers in order to help women here acquire work skills for a future life back home. Diouf and the woman exchange greetings.

"Do you know of any of our brothers and sisters who are in difficulty?" he asks.

"Are you in a position to help?" she inquires. Diouf nods.

In August, the editor of the local Tel Aviv weekly Ha'ir, which has been reporting regularly on the foreign workers' community, offered Diouf a job as a correspondent. He was stunned by the offer, but not too stunned to accept it.

"I didn't believe someone here could conceive of hiring a reporter to write about the community from within," Diouf says. "What this means is that I now have the newspaper's financial and institutional backing to do the work I have been doing all along."

The Nigerian woman remembers she recently heard about someone who was hospitalized when she collapsed while being arrested by the immigration police.

"I will call you with her particulars," she promises before vanishing into the building, her hair a glistening cloud of carefully sculpted curls.

Once Israel's deportation policies began being implemented, according to Diouf, families that had the economic means and organizational skills to leave did so of their own accord.

"At the beginning of 2003, there was a massive exodus, which included the leaders of the Ghanaian and Nigerian communities. Those who remained were the poorest, most vulnerable members of the community, who hadn't been here long enough to save money to depart."

Today, says Diouf, the men and single women who were here illegally have nearly all been deported. The only ones who have so far been spared the current wave of deportations are children under the age of 18 and their mothers, who have been permitted to remain with them.

"It's the same story in all the foreign workers' communities – the husbands have all been deported, with the exclusion of those who were allowed to stay because of medical problems of their own or of their children.

"The immigration police has done a great job," Diouf adds cynically. "Now they spend their days stopping the same people over and over again, sometimes even twice a day. It's time for them to go home."

Today, he estimates as we head down the street, there are perhaps 500 African mothers and children left in the Tel Aviv area.

"The authorities assumed that wives and children would follow the husbands of their own free will. It's a deportation policy drafted without any idea of how this population functions. As a result, they've created an entire population of hungry and tired single mothers whose problem is no longer getting arrested, but struggling to stay alive. They are thinking about food for tomorrow, not about plane tickets. In addition, Israelis are increasingly hesitant to employ foreign workers for fear of being caught, so many of these women are finding themselves out of work."

Back on Levinsky, we come across a young woman from Ghana hurrying down the street with twin girls trailing behind her.

"I want to see if I can help you," Diouf says in English. The woman stops.

"Where is your husband?" he asks.

"In prison. He's been there for three weeks," she answers.

"Have you gotten in touch with any organizations that might be able to help you?" he asks.

The woman shrugs her shoulders, and Diouf takes down her phone number and promises to call the next day.

"Perhaps 80 percent of these women are still in touch with their husbands, but it's not going to stay that way for long," he says. "Time and distance will do the job. They'll talk every week, then every month, every six months, and then not at all.

"Many of these mothers struggle to send their children to French or English-speaking schools in Jaffa, so that they will be prepared to face life elsewhere when they are eventually forced to leave. Some of the older children have to leave school because it's too expensive, and their mothers need them to earn money. Many of them will never see their fathers again."

We circumvent the new central bus station and eventually arrive at the home of a minister whose wife runs a day-care center in her living room for the children of foreign workers. A poster of President Clinton visiting Ghana hangs across from a handwritten Alphabet.

The minister's congregation, he tells us, now numbers five members.

"Among those members of the African community who have been deported, there have been several cases of sudden deaths following their return to Africa," he continues.

"No, they didn't commit suicide. They were simply weak, and desperate. Their bodies were no longer used to the living conditions they encountered upon their return. They could not provide for their families, and had no strength to start over again."

Seventy percent of the mothers whose children are daily in her care, says the minister's wife, are now single mothers. At 8 p.m, one toddler who arrived in the morning is still waiting for his mother to return from work.

There are approximately four such day-care centers run by African women in the neighborhood, with perhaps 100 children under the age of 10 spending all day or after-school hours there. Despite these caretakers' efforts to tend to their charges as best they can, they lack the space and facilities to adequately accommodate the two dozen children who may fill their apartments at any one time. Children crowd hallways and small rooms. Second-hand cribs are pressed together against walls like chicken coops.

The fate of these children and their families is soon to be decided. Headed by Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, the ministerial committee on population registry has formulated a proposal to legalize the status of children of foreign workers aged 10 to 18. According to this proposal, their parents will be allowed to reside legally in Israel until the children complete their military service. But immediately after that service is completed, and despite these children having risked their lives to protect the country, their parents would be deported. If the attorney-general approves this proposal, which is legally problematic because it does not include Palestinian children living in Israel, it is expected to soon go into effect.

According to data released by the Education Ministry, the number of children who will be allowed to remain in the country according to this proposal is 604, with more than 800 younger children slated for deportation.

When asked why the proposal does not cover all children of foreign workers born in Israel, including those aged less than 10, Poraz responds that what concerns him is the well-being of these children. "Passing this proposal is difficult enough. If I ask for too much, I stand the risk of receiving nothing."

Poraz says he does not see why sending children under 10 and their parents back to their parents' countries of origin should constitute a trauma for these children. In fact, he compares their deportation to third-world countries in which they have never lived and to whose culture they have little connection, with his own arrival in Israel.

"I immigrated to Israel as a young child, and it was by no means a traumatic event," he told The Jerusalem Post.

For Poraz, the plight of these children is a humanitarian issue that has nothing to do with a wider reconsideration of the parameters for Israeli identity.

Diouf feels very differently.

"Deportation is never a humanitarian act," Diouf says, "but deporting young children and their families is where I draw the red line. No matter what language they are spoken to at home, Hebrew is these children's first language. They were all born here, and this is their home. You simply can't take someone's homeland away from them."

By 9 p.m., Diouf is depressed enough by the evening's encounters to have to stop for a break. We head to the home of a Nigerian friend of his, where the three of us sit down in a cloud of cigarette smoke to watch the second program in the new season of Eretz Nehederet, the popular satire show that translates into English as "A Wonderful Land."