By H. Applebaum
SAN DIEGO — “We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country.” That was the United State’s response to a recent U.N. compact on global migration. Many countries, including Israel, Hungary and Italy also opted out. Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, explained, “We’re not going to surrender our sovereignty — I’m not going to allow unelected bodies to dictate to us, to the Australian people.”
More than most countries, Israel understands migration. It was founded by refugees from war-torn Europe, and by Jews hounded out of Yemen, Egypt, Iraq and other Arab countries. Yet, even with its’ burden of settling whole populations of displaced Jews, Israel opened its doors to Vietnamese boat people and Africans fleeing the civil war in Darfur.
Darfur, a region of Sudan, underwent a horrific, genocidal war in 2007, and many who fled the country ended up in Israel. Sensitive to their plight, Israel decided, based on personal interviews, to grant refugee status to close to a thousand of the, mostly male, Sudanese. That means access to all the health, education, and social services of the country, rather than the temporary visa status, which only grants the right to work.
Three of these refugees recently visited the Central Synagogue in New York on Yom Kippur, where they praised Israel for giving them haven and supporting them in obtaining college degrees. But there is another type of African migrant in Israel today, and they are almost 40,000 strong. Mostly from Eritrea, a country north of Sudan, they are not desperately fleeing for their lives; if they were, they could have settled in places along the way. They are escaping harsh living conditions and a dictatorship in Eritrea, not genocide.
Most live in the poorest neighborhood of Tel Aviv, which has undergone a crime wave in recent years. In 2017, a televised report showed P.M. Netanyahu visiting a 70 year old woman in that neighborhood and promising he would make the neighborhood safer. Less than a year later, she ended up in the hospital, viciously beaten during a robbery in the neighborhood which sparked large demonstrations on both sides of the issue.
In December, 2018, police statistics for the Sudanese and Eritrean migrants showed 4.3 times the general rate of sex crimes and 3.4 times the rate of other violent offenses, and this was based just on reported crimes. Not surprisingly, a recent poll revealed a majority of Israelis want the migrants sent to a third country.
The Ethiopian Jews, who also came with nothing, but brought with them their identity as Jews, have largely integrated in Israeli society, but these Africans are different. Their loyalty is more likely to be with Muslim Arabs than with Israel. The United Nations, though, would require Israel to accept them in the name of legitimate global migration.
Israel has no obligation, legal or moral, to accept the Sudanese and Eritrean migrants of today who have come for economic reasons. They bypassed Egypt and other countries where they could have settled, to go to the most affluent nearby place, Israel.
There are Jews, too, like Rabbi Hartman of the influential Hartman Institute in Jerusalem who would admit them because “As a Jew, I come from a tradition where you love the stranger.” But, in ancient times, the strangers we had amongst us were Edomites and Moabites, like Ruth, who lived peaceably among us and blended in with our religion. The Passover story tells of how we were invited into Egypt, then enslaved and prohibited from leaving. To compare our experience as strangers in a strange land to the situation today is disingenuous and misleading.
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Applebaum is a freelance writer based in San Diego.
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