(Photo Credit: Brian Hendler)
Israel, once again, is in a state of moral crisis. I am not referring to their current status with Iran, who is threatening Israel with nuclear bombs. Nor am I speaking about those Palestinians living in Gaza who continue to show their anger with Israel by shooting Kassam rockets into the civilian town of Sderot. I am however speaking about a large group of Muslim refugees fleeing dangerous conditions in Egypt and illegally finding their way into Israel, only to be detained in the Israeli prison system.
As of February 20, 2008, however, 600 Sudanese refugees from Darfur were granted temporary residency in Israel. A recently published article by Dina Kraft on www.JTA.org featured a young man named Yassin Musa. Musa is one of the 600 refugees who passed through Egypt on his way to the Jewish state where he believed he would find a helping hand. Where, you may ask, did men like Musa end up after their arrival to this country often deemed by Western democracies as “the only democracy in the Middle East?” Well, they found themselves in kibbutzim, in small towns or working in hotels living under house arrest. But that was only after they spent months in prison for illegally entering Israel. “Now,” Kraft writes, “they are newly free and are official residents of the Jewish state, thanks in large part to intense lobbying by NGOs, Knesset members, figures like Elie Wiesel and even Aliza Olmert.”
Now for this moral dilemma I believe Israel is facing. Yosef Israel Abramowitz states “The issue for Israel: how to handle the refugees when they corss into Israel illegally and their ultimate resettlement.”
Knowing that Israel “was founded as a haven for Jews fleeing persecution and for whom the memory of the Holocaust looms large,” this near 60-year old country finds itself caught between the need to provide humanitarian aide for these refugees who survived the atrocities implemented by the Janjaweed militia and the obligation to evade potential security threats from Muslim Darfurians. As you can imagine, a great deal of this dilemma is caught up in the court system, but still, substantial and tangible efforts have been made so that men like Musa are able to avoid becoming entangled in Israel’s legal system.
Several questions arise from this story. At the top of Kraft’s online news article appears a photograph of Yassin smiling in front of an Israel flag. This image (and the story’s headine “Darfuris get Israeli ID cards and start their news lives”) clearly projects the JTA’s agenda of presenting Israel in a high light, and furthering the idea that Israel is a fair democracy. But don’t we, as Jews, have an obligation to be critical of Israel’s actions? It is our responsibility to look at both sides of this moral dilemma Israel continues to face, and to form an opinion (as individual Jews and as a collective Jewish American body) regarding these current practices of the Israeli government? I commend the efforts of activists like Wiesel and Aliza Olmert and I furthermore applaud the Israeli government for recognizing and acting in accordance with the direct correlation between the disastrous situation Darfurian refugees (regardless of religion) are facing today, and the dire circumstances Jews faced during WWII. My lasting question lies on why I could not find a version of this article on www.nytimes.com. Why is this story that shines a bright light on the positives (and a few dark lights on the not-so-positives) of Israel’s assistance in helping Darfurian refugees only on a Jewish news source? Does this mean that this story is only relevant for Jews, specifically those who read this Jewish press?
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