I admire how Israel protects itself despite world pressure to diminish its Jewish state.
All nations should protect themselves from the importation of people who are not a good fit.
No country has a moral obligation to destroy itself (aka import the world’s trash).
Newsweek: Usumain Baraka was 9 when Arab Janjaweed militants destroyed his village in Darfur in 2004, killing his father and brother. After four years in a Sudanese refugee camp, Baraka says, he wanted a better future.
At the time, he says, he thought “Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East…. I really related to the Jewish people because of the Holocaust and thought they would identify with me because of the genocide in Darfur.”
At the age of 13, Baraka trekked from Sudan into Egypt, and then over the Egyptian border into Israel. Instead of a safe haven, he found himself in a country that wanted nothing to do with him. “They don’t even check our refugee requests,” says Baraka, who is now 20 and lives and volunteers in a youth village in northern Israel.
He is one of the nearly 65,000 Africans who, according to Israeli government figures, crossed into Israel illegally between 2006 and 2013. Approximately 45,000 remain. More than 33,000 of the asylum seekers in Israel are from Eritrea, while 8,500 are from Sudan—countries the UNHCR says are, respectively, the 10th and fourth largest sources of refugees in the world. Israel has granted refugee status to just four Eritrean refugees and not a single one from Sudan.
As European governments grapple with how to handle hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, mostly from Syria but also from Sudan, Eritrea, Afghanistan and other troubled countries, some in Europe are now looking to Israel for lessons in how to keep out asylum seekers.
The irony here is that it was the international failure to assist Jews during the Holocaust that led to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, the first international agreement addressing the rights of refugees and states’ obligations to them. Today, 148 nations are signatories to this legal document, vowing to never again turn their backs on those fleeing persecution and genocide.
That tragic period also led to the establishment of Israel, a safe haven for oppressed Jews around the world. The Jewish state was among the first countries to sign the U.N. Refugee Convention, as its people, perhaps more than anyone, knew what it was like to be unwelcome.
While Israel remains a haven for Jewish refugees, Israeli officials and the media routinely disparage non-Jewish African asylum seekers. In August, Israeli Interior Minister Silvan Shalom declared, “I will not relent until we reach a framework that will allow the removal of the infiltrators from Israel.”
