Where can you find George Clooney, Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie joining forces? No, not in a new movie, but rather, a much less sexy and much more burning campaign.
An international day of solidarity with Darfur was marked across the world Sunday, an event that draws millions to rallies and protests. The crisis in Darfur is one of the most popular political-social matters in the United States, one of those rare issues that are able to unite all ends of the spectrum, republicans and democrats, Brad Pitt and Eli Wiesel.
For three years now, genocide has been raging in Darfur on a scale that hasn't been seen since the genocide in Rwanda. Sudan's Muslim government, with the assistance of Muslim-Arab militias (called Janjaweed) are engaged in an all-out war against rebels in the south of the country who are charging the central government is discriminating against them.
These areas are populated by black-African tribes and the war of religion and culture boiled over awhile ago from a clash between armed forces to a genuine Holocaust: Government forces and their allies maliciously murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Sudanese, methodically raped women and children, burned whole regions, and turned about two million people into refugees. And this is still going on.
António Guterres, the UN's high commissioner on refugees, characterized the Sudan situation as the world's biggest and most complex humanitarian crisis. The ceaseless attempts to end fighting between the sides were only partly successful. The decision taken by the UN Security Council in recent weeks, regarding the deployment of UN forces to the region, is meeting Sudanese government resistance at this time.
This story also has a Jewish angle. Clooney and Jolie added their name to the struggle (and won, why deny this, favorable media coverage,) but those doing the real work behind the scenes are various organizations – a large part of them US Jewish groups.
Aid organizations contribute to the humanitarian side, political organizations lobby regarding the need to intervene, and various religious organizations use community power as a means to exert pressure on the Sudanese government. Jewish student groups also placed the issue at the top of their agenda and are feverishly working on organizing protests and solidarity rallies, petitions, and fundraising.
This is no coincidence: Jewish organizations in the United States always viewed themselves as the protectors of human and civil rights, in light of the Jewish people's bitter history as a victim of racism and bias.
The essence of Jewish identity – at least according to American Jews – is the constant aspiration for absolute social justice or "tikkum olam" as they like to call it. And if this world reform required intervention in genocide taking place on the other side of the globe, then the Jewish world in the US drops everything and joins the battle.
And here? Here nobody cares, of course. We have more burning issues to deal with, and besides, what does this have to do with us? Well, it turns out it has to do with us, in the most direct manner:
The Sudanese problem reached us too, in the form of about 200 refugees who somehow crossed their country, and then Egypt, in an attempt to reach a safe haven. These miserable people even managed to cross our southern border, but instead of the Jewish state hugging them and automatically granting them shelter, most are today behind bars at various prison facilities.
A draconian law allows us to imprison people from enemy countries until we can expel them – as long as there's someone willing to accept them. Some of them have been in jail for more than a year now, but when it comes to the legal principle, they can stay there forever.
A few righteous elements offered their help: The UN's refugee agency in Israel is attempting to find a third country for the Sudanese. Until that time, a hotline for foreign workers along with the refugee rights clinic at Tel Aviv University came up with a temporary solution – host them at kibbutzim and moshavim.
Meanwhile, a few lucky ones have been released from prison, while the others are still waiting – mostly for bureaucratic reasons, behind walls of hope. With a little good will, they too will be able to leave prison – but the question of what will happen to them overtime is still unclear.
Optimally, Israel would have been willing to grant shelter to those 200 miserable souls, even though they're the citizens of an enemy country. But the State of Israel has stopped aspiring for optimality a long time ago.
And before the readers argue that no country allows refugees from an enemy state to enter its territory, here's one historic example that proves the opposite: During World War II, Britain agreed to absorb refugees even though they were citizens of its archenemy, Germany.
Well, conditions were completely different then: Those German refugees happened to be, and not by coincidence, Jewish.
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