The Daily Oy

One of the most frustrating parts of being a Jew and a Zionist is watching the state of Israel try to navigate those two values, which are admittedly sometimes tough to reconcile, and completely muck it up.

I’m talking about Israel’s recent decision to expel approximately 1,000 Sudanese refugees back to Egypt, and in the meantime, to house them in a prison in the Negev Desert. (Pics from protest at right.)

What’s even worse, Israel stated this was only a temporary solution until Israel creates ‘camps’ to house them until they can properly process the refugees for deportation.

"Avi Dichter, the minister of public security, and his director general last week announced their intention to create a 'campsite' to hold the refugees until their deportation. One of the main purposes of the new site was to allow families to remain together. It will take several days before water, electricity and plumbing can be arranged for the site."- Haaretz English, July 15

I mean, are you kidding me? Camps, prisons and forced deportations? I’m not trying to allude to the Jewish experience of the Sho’ah, but there’s just no way to avoid the obvious comparison. Israel has claimed they are only protecting themselves; that infiltrators from Muslim states are potential terrorists. Be that as it may, any idiot can see that people don’t walk, unarmed, across three countries, with family in tow, to commit terrorist attacks when there are perfectly good (and by ‘good’, I mean reprehensibly, unequivocably evil) terrorists in immediately adjacent territories.

I will point out that Israel intends to exclude 200 refugees from Darfur who fled the genocide currently going on there. Of course, they are also being held in jails until Israel can figure out what to do with them. The other non-Darfuri refugees are mostly fleeing the horribly wretched poverty and famine than engulfs Sudan, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world despite have huge oil reserves.

Once upon a time, in the 70’s and 80’s, Israel took in tens of thousands of Southeast Asian boat people. Granted, Israel did a lot of that to deprive Palestinians of low-level jobs in the Israeli economy, but it was still an act of kindness to a people on the brink of catastrophe.

The Torah teaches us no less than 36 times ‘Do not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ I always hoped that the state of Israel, while not necessarily becoming a theocracy, could live up to the morals and ethics that pervade the Torah and give Israel its core morality.

Someday, I hope and pray, the words ‘Never again’, will be a rallying cry for us to defend all oppressed peoples, and not just the self-absorbed right-wing rallying cry of Benny Begin or the JDL.