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THE DOORS ARE CLOSED
by Shlomo Avineri
The Jerusalem Post
May 16, 2006, Tuesday
Is Israel treating refugees fleeing murderous regimes the way European
governments treated Jews fleeing the Holocaust? The author is a former
director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
We should be ashamed about those 50 black refugees from the Darfur
region in Sudan fleeing murderous and genocidal Arab militias.
They reached Israel and what did the Jewish state do? It put them in
jail under an antiquated military ordinance without access to lawyers
or recourse to the basic principles of the rule of law. If it hadn't
been for some human rights organizations which brought the case before
the Supreme Court no one would know of their existence and arbitrary
and brutal incarceration.
One must realize what is happening in Sudan - something the police
and military authorities apparently don't know about.
In Darfur the black population is being subjected to ethnic cleansing
murder and rape at the hands of government-backed Arab militias.
Nobody knows the number of people killed - tens of thousands probably
more - but UN sources admit that almost two million people have
become refugees.
The reason given by our security and police authorities for the
Darfurians' arrest is that they are citizens of an enemy country.
This is technically true - but as the Holocaust historian Professor
Yehuda Bauer told the court in his deposition on their behalf -
German Jews fleeing Nazism were sometimes viewed as "enemy citizens"
by the Allies. Indeed many of them were put in detention camps by
the British authorities when they reached the United Kingdom.
To imagine that the Jewish state is as blind to the plight of refugees
fleeing from their own murderous government as European governments
were in the l930s and 1940 should make any one of us deeply ashamed.
THE COURT was also told that the refugees who entered Israel illegally
are being held pending their deportation. But to which country should
they be deported? To which country can they be deported? Back to
Sudan whose government has been murdering them?
It may be that the agreement recently signed in Abuja Nigeria between
the Sudanese government and some of the black insurgents will be
implemented and a modicum of peace achieved. The record though is not
good. As in the past the world community has done little about Darfur
- and not for lack of knowledge. But with the US bogged down in Iraq
there is little support anywhere for a robust threat of the use of
force to stop the Sudanese government continuing its ethnic cleansing.
Israel can do little to help or alleviate the enormous suffering of
the millions of refugees. But it can - it should - grant asylum to
those refugees who have reached our shores.
In the 1970s prime minister Menachem Begin granted asylum to
shipwrecked Vietnamese boat people picked up by an Israeli commercial
vessel; in the 1990s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin granted asylum to
a number of Muslim Bosnian refugees from the wars in the Balkans.
It may not be an accident that in the latest cases of ethnic cleansing
and near-genocide it has been Jewish groups and individuals in the
US and Europe who have spoken out most forcefully for more vigorous
Western intervention on behalf of those threatened and victimized.
In the Balkans the victims were mostly Muslims - Bosniaks Kosovo
Albanians - but true to the universalistic premises of Jewish
ethics this did not stop Jewish people from feeling empathy and a
moral obligation to help. In Darfur everyone is Muslim - the Arab
victimizers as well as the black-African victims - but this does not
matter as the issue is not one of political calculus but of basic
moral responsibility: We are our brothers' keepers.
As a state Israel has over the years had to balance political
calculations with moral precepts. Not always did it emerge from the
equation with flying colors. Our ambivalence about apartheid in South
Africa as well as a reticence regarding the historical reckoning
regarding the Armenian genocide are not exactly shining examples of
ethical behavior in international affairs.
But these complexities are not relevant in the Darfur case where the
way we treat the refugees should be addressed on the only meaningful
plane - that of basic humanitarian compassion.
It is a moral duty for Israel a nation built by refugees to follow
this example. Otherwise all the lofty talk about "Never again" and
"the world's silence" is mere hypocrisy.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have a
chance to make the world a little less cruel for a small number of
people: This is what tikkun olam is about.
GRAPHIC: Photo: SUDANESE CHILDREN. The region has been the scene of
what the UN calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis. (Credit: Ap)
by Shlomo Avineri
The Jerusalem Post
May 16, 2006, Tuesday
Is Israel treating refugees fleeing murderous regimes the way European
governments treated Jews fleeing the Holocaust? The author is a former
director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
We should be ashamed about those 50 black refugees from the Darfur
region in Sudan fleeing murderous and genocidal Arab militias.
They reached Israel and what did the Jewish state do? It put them in
jail under an antiquated military ordinance without access to lawyers
or recourse to the basic principles of the rule of law. If it hadn't
been for some human rights organizations which brought the case before
the Supreme Court no one would know of their existence and arbitrary
and brutal incarceration.
One must realize what is happening in Sudan - something the police
and military authorities apparently don't know about.
In Darfur the black population is being subjected to ethnic cleansing
murder and rape at the hands of government-backed Arab militias.
Nobody knows the number of people killed - tens of thousands probably
more - but UN sources admit that almost two million people have
become refugees.
The reason given by our security and police authorities for the
Darfurians' arrest is that they are citizens of an enemy country.
This is technically true - but as the Holocaust historian Professor
Yehuda Bauer told the court in his deposition on their behalf -
German Jews fleeing Nazism were sometimes viewed as "enemy citizens"
by the Allies. Indeed many of them were put in detention camps by
the British authorities when they reached the United Kingdom.
To imagine that the Jewish state is as blind to the plight of refugees
fleeing from their own murderous government as European governments
were in the l930s and 1940 should make any one of us deeply ashamed.
THE COURT was also told that the refugees who entered Israel illegally
are being held pending their deportation. But to which country should
they be deported? To which country can they be deported? Back to
Sudan whose government has been murdering them?
It may be that the agreement recently signed in Abuja Nigeria between
the Sudanese government and some of the black insurgents will be
implemented and a modicum of peace achieved. The record though is not
good. As in the past the world community has done little about Darfur
- and not for lack of knowledge. But with the US bogged down in Iraq
there is little support anywhere for a robust threat of the use of
force to stop the Sudanese government continuing its ethnic cleansing.
Israel can do little to help or alleviate the enormous suffering of
the millions of refugees. But it can - it should - grant asylum to
those refugees who have reached our shores.
In the 1970s prime minister Menachem Begin granted asylum to
shipwrecked Vietnamese boat people picked up by an Israeli commercial
vessel; in the 1990s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin granted asylum to
a number of Muslim Bosnian refugees from the wars in the Balkans.
It may not be an accident that in the latest cases of ethnic cleansing
and near-genocide it has been Jewish groups and individuals in the
US and Europe who have spoken out most forcefully for more vigorous
Western intervention on behalf of those threatened and victimized.
In the Balkans the victims were mostly Muslims - Bosniaks Kosovo
Albanians - but true to the universalistic premises of Jewish
ethics this did not stop Jewish people from feeling empathy and a
moral obligation to help. In Darfur everyone is Muslim - the Arab
victimizers as well as the black-African victims - but this does not
matter as the issue is not one of political calculus but of basic
moral responsibility: We are our brothers' keepers.
As a state Israel has over the years had to balance political
calculations with moral precepts. Not always did it emerge from the
equation with flying colors. Our ambivalence about apartheid in South
Africa as well as a reticence regarding the historical reckoning
regarding the Armenian genocide are not exactly shining examples of
ethical behavior in international affairs.
But these complexities are not relevant in the Darfur case where the
way we treat the refugees should be addressed on the only meaningful
plane - that of basic humanitarian compassion.
It is a moral duty for Israel a nation built by refugees to follow
this example. Otherwise all the lofty talk about "Never again" and
"the world's silence" is mere hypocrisy.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have a
chance to make the world a little less cruel for a small number of
people: This is what tikkun olam is about.
GRAPHIC: Photo: SUDANESE CHILDREN. The region has been the scene of
what the UN calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis. (Credit: Ap)