'Expulsion of refugees has turned into a true obsession for Netanyahu'
Photo: AP
Alma Zohar
Photo: Zohar Ron
Refugees for sale
Op-ed: Selling refugees to African state abhorrent, has nothing to do with demography
The Israeli government is preoccupied with the issue of African refugees. Not with the question of how to help them, heaven forbid, but rather, how to get rid of them. Last week, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
office referred to a mad idea that already came up in the past – the State of Israel
will pay an African state, which in turn will allow us to dump the human waste of Darfur and Eritrea refugees in its territory. The price, as is customary, will be calculated per person.
The expulsion of the refugees is expected to cost taxpayers millions of dollars, which could have been invested in assisting shelter seekers instead of kicking them out. For years now, Israel has been unable to come up with even one shekel to buy medicine for a sick African boy, yet suddenly we find a budget of millions to detain and expel people without a hearing or a trial.
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It appears that the expulsion of refugees has turned into a true obsession for Netanyahu. These days he so much needs an easy, helpless target to zealously incite against. He recently pledged to undertake measures that would “shake up the country,” as he put it: I wish such despicable acts would shake up anybody here.
This entire mess stems from one historic mistake, of course: The 1951 Refugee Convention. Too bad that while signing it, we did not insist that it only be applied to Jewish refugees. Had we seen what the future holds, we would have been spared the current chaos, and all sorts of bleeding hearts and human rights groups would not have any qualms with us.
Not about skin color?
But what do the bleeding hearts want the prime minister to do? After all, we are only dealing with a demographic issue here. And the demographic threat faced by Israel, as everyone knows, does not stem from the presence of two million Palestinians, or the 120,000 foreign workers approved by the Netanyahu government this past year alone. The demographic threat, gentlemen, is the 20,000 African shelter seekers.
But why am I calling them shelter seekers? These are work migrants who infiltrated the country. How do we know? We didn’t even check it! And as we didn’t look into it, not even one official refugee request had been approved, so we can determine with certainty that these are work migrants. And we really don’t want work migrants here. That is, we actually do want work migrants, but not these ones, but rather, ones that come from more distant lands and show higher standards of hygiene. And no, this has nothing to do with skin color!
Besides, what’s more humane than to return Africans to Africa? We’ll find them a nice country, of the type where rulers buy people by weight, and they’ll take care of them. How? We prefer not to know. Our conscience shall remain clear.
On second thought, why stop there? Later on, Netanyahu would be able to sell the Palestinians to the Africans too, and then the leftists, and maybe even the intellectuals and dissidents. Indeed, the possibilities are endless.
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