Haaretz : The Refugees on Israel's Doorstep

 

 

 

The refugees on Israel's doorstep

The flood of refugees knocking on Europe’s gates hasn’t yet affected Israel directly, but the reactions it has elicited here raise not only fears about Israel’s ability to cope in the future with the humanitarian disaster taking place in the region, but also doubts about its morality and its democratic values.

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog – whose Zionist Union faction opted to shut down the Knesset committee that dealt with the treatment of foreign workers and asylum seekers, claiming the issue wasn’t sufficiently important – said Israel should consider taking in Syrian refugees. But before Herzog volunteers to accept new refugees, he ought to explain why he hasn’t lifted a finger in years for the sake of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers already in Israel, who also fled out of fear of the acts of murder and terror taking place in their strife–riven countries.

And perhaps Herzog could also explain why he isn’t working to provide at least a bit of relief for the distressed residents of the Gaza Strip, which is right next door to Israel? After all, even the United Nations recently said that given the current economic and social conditions in Gaza, in another five years, it will become unfit for human habitation.

But the one who outdid even Herzog was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who explained that Israel can’t absorb refugees, because “it has no geographic or demographic depth.” Just like on Election Day, when Netanyahu warned that “Arabs are going to the polls in droves,” now, too, he is proving that he isn’t the prime minister of all Israeli citizens, as one would expect the person holding this office in a democratic country to be. The “demographic depth” Netanyahu hinted at in his remarks is a euphemistic codename for the racist policy that guides him and his government, under which non-Jews aren’t citizens with equal rights, but excess baggage that must be discarded, or at least prevented from increasing.

The shocked outcry in Israel over pictures of the body of the Syrian boy who drowned off the coast of Turkey shows the depths of the public’s hypocrisy, which draws inspiration from that of the government. In this hypocritical view, it’s permissible and desirable to feel compassion for non-Jews in general, and Arabs in particular, only when they are at a safe distance, and when there’s no need for us to do anything to ease their distress.

Before talking about absorbing refugees from Syria, the Israeli authorities, including the opposition, ought to start taking steps right now to help the groups crying out for humanitarian assistance in our own backyard: the asylum seekers, who are being abused by the government, which is trying to drive them out by any means possible, and residents of Gaza, whose misery is right on Israel’s doorstep.

Haaretz Editorial