Unthinkable choices

Editorial

Israel has accepted 500 refugees from the devastated Darfur region of Sudan, where 200,000 people are estimated to have died and two million have been displaced during four years of brutal violence by Sudanese militias.

But this week, Israel began turning back Darfurian refugees who have been making their way through Egypt to the only democratic, pluralistic refuge in the region.

"The policy of returning back anyone who enters Israel illegally will pertain to everyone, including those from Darfur," an Israeli government representative said on Sunday.

Moral responsibility for the world's downtrodden seems to be increasingly shouldered by the few societies willing to exercise it, giving amnesty to countries that, by reason of proximity, kinship or culpability, would seem to deserve the burden. But letting people persist in misery simply because they really should be someone else's problem is not a satisfactory moral conclusion.

As a country birthed in part to serve as a life-giving refuge to Jews whose lives have been made unbearable in their places of origin, Israel's moral responsibility to victims of genocide is something that is very close to the heart of the national conscience. Over the years, Israel has served as a haven for millions of Jews, and many others as well – boat people from Vietnam, gays and lesbians from across the Arab world and now hundreds of refugees fleeing genocide in Sudan.

It is not a coincidence that Jews have been among the most active advocates for the Darfurian people. Does it need restating that the silence that greeted the first months of the Sudanese crisis (and the extremely inadequate global response that continues to the present) bears an ugly similarity to the abdication of responsibility demonstrated by the world community to the Jews in Europe? Never again, we promised, and we have stood up, again and again, for the threatened and dispossessed.

Now, Israel has promised to stop the flow of refugees who, seeing the only oasis of freedom and economic potential in the area as their best hope for the future, seek sanctuary in the Jewish state.

It is a crass oversimplification to depict the Sudanese conflict as strictly an Arab government-backed military versus the forces of indigenous tribal peoples, because it is more complex than this racial dichotomy suggests. Nonetheless, Sudan is an Arab League member-state whose allies in that organization have been unwilling or unable to influence a peaceful resolution to the tragedy. Barring influence toward peace, Arab states have taken an approach to Darfurian refugees that mirrors their historic and contemporary approach to Palestinian refugees: warehouse them in inhuman makeshift camps and let someone else take care of them.

It is a pitiless irony that, at the very moment when Israel feels forced to put a stop to a stream of desperate African refugees, Israeli citizens who survived the Holocaust feel pressed to demonstrate publicly for humanitarian treatment by their own government. Some survivors receive pensions from restitution funds set up over the years, but others do not meet the specific criteria for these funds and so rely on limited support from the Israeli government. In the face of never-ending military expenditures to fight the incessant threats by Palestinian terrorists and Syrian- and Iranian-backed marauding murderers, Israel's domestic budgets suffer.

It is a brutal choice to face: care for the citizens of one's own country who survived unspeakable atrocities in the past or take responsibility for those facing analogous horrors today. Israelis must – and, apparently, have – made this difficult moral choice for themselves. As Canadian Jews, we should pressure our own government to alleviate as much of the pressure as possible from the neighboring countries of this conflict. We should also continue, for what good it will do, to pressure Arab states to both press for peace in Sudan and to take responsibility for the tangible outcome of their failure to do so. Finally, though it is not the responsibility of Canadian or other Diaspora Jews to fund the day-to-day operations of the Israeli government, we must come through when needed with the support the state of Israel requires to meet the financial burdens that force it into unconscionable moral alternatives.

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