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Israel's right to expel?
Photo: Moti Kimchi

Israel’s right to expel

Op-ed: Despite unpleasant expulsion images, Israel should not be taking in world’s wretched souls

And now, all of us will feel bad about it. We shall all look at the heart-wrenching photos – children, parents, handcuffs, desperate looks, dashed hopes – and say to ourselves: Have we no heart? Haven’t the Sudanese people suffered enough?

 

And then all of us, being oh-so-merciful, would repeat our original sin: We’ll say to them “come here, sons,” and then we’ll say “go away, infiltrators,” and then “we’re all brothers,” and then “criminals, who let you in?”

 

But this must be said: The refugees and infiltrators arrived at Israel’s borders exactly when we were looking the other way, in search of a lost policy. Some 60,000 people who have nothing to lose entered Israel despite the lack of space here, while taking advantage of the fact that in Israel “no boundaries” means precisely that.

 

The basic infrastructure that a sovereign state is supposed to provide its citizens with – viable, secured and closed borders, with a grim guy in uniform who stands at the gate and asks foreigners: “How long are you coming in for?” – has ceased to function here. The refugees and the infiltrators knew that they are heading to the last non-secured promised land.

 

Israel isn’t America

And now, when they reached the 60,000 mark, we’re waking up. We are now recalling that Israel’s statue of liberty never included the famous words: “Give me your tired, your poor…the wretched…the homeless.” No, it’s the American Statue of Liberty that makes this explicit promise.

 

When we asked the Americans this month – and also the Canadians and Australians, by the way – about the possibility of handing over some refugees to them, they claimed that the line is bad and the call was disconnected.

 

So indeed, it’s not too pleasant to see us shutting our doors, but this is better than a neglected country where we allow the humiliation and deterioration of hundreds of foreigners that see Israel as the escape route to nowhere.

 

As usual, our style is needlessly brutal; the minimum we could do is to dedicate the time needed to find out who deserves asylum and who will be forced to realize that they should go elsewhere. Yet still, the headline here is, to quote the Bible, “Your children will return to their own land.” At the end of the day, the images document the moment of “doing the right thing” – a difficult yet necessary moment.

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 06.12.12, 18:09
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