"Please Let Me Stay"
How to fail to be moved by that plea? Whoever mouths those pleading words should be met with sympathy and assurances. All the more so when to deny that request would be to toss the already tempest-tossed lives back into the maelstrom of black adversity, homelessness, starvation, death. A delicate diplomatic situation? Well, you bet.The world is awash with a vast migration of people who have been displaced from their homes, their countries, living dangerously tentative lives approximating normal conditions, but rife with opportunities for the spread of disease, the lack of medical attention, education for the young, safety for women, attacks from angered residents of the country where they've been forced to take up temporary residence in squalid refugee camps.
Nowhere is the plight of refugees more heart-rending than that of the black Sudanese population who have been forced out of their homes by the millions, who have suffered rape and deaths in the hundreds of thousands, who even while in refugee camps in Sudan or neighbouring Chad are subjected to deadly raids, rapes, killings and food and water shortages.
It seems amazing, quite extraordinary, that some of these homeless, hopeless refugees have found their way inside the borders of Israel, via Egypt. Why Israel, a Jewish State that seeks to be a refuge for world-wide Jewry, a country that already is compromised in its Jewish-only identity by the presence of a one-fifth non-Jewish community of citizens of Israel...?
But come they did, and they are pleading to be accepted, to be enabled to become a part of the country, to be given succour, a place to live, to raise their children, to hope for the future; the most vulnerable people on earth. "The Jews were victims of the Holocaust, I am a victim of the Darfur genocide. Please let me stay," pleaded one refugee. How to refuse?
And then there's a higher dimension here, a debate whether a Jewish State can dilute itself any further, and yet there is the imperative to meet the moral need to give sustenance and support to a horribly victimized black Muslim community. Is this manifest irony or is it not? But human beings are more like one another in their needs, than the differences that set them apart.
Sudan, yet another Muslim country hostile to Israel and who will admit to no ties of diplomacy, visiting the most unbelievable atrocities on a segment of its population and they flee to safety through Egypt to access Israel. "I chose Israel because I thought Israel was a country which was once in a situation like Darfur and they would understand me. I am asking the Israeli government to accept us, the people of Darfur."
As unsettling as it is to accede to such a request, it is not quite possible to refuse the plea. The government of Israel says some 2,800 people have crossed illegally from Egypt into Israel through the past year and a half; mostly African, one thousand Sudanese, 300 Darfurians. There are temporary "detention centres" set up to house the refugees.
The government hesitates to commit itself to welcoming the unwelcome visitors. It is from the worldwide diaspora of Jewry that Israel seeks to swell her modest numbers, not from an African country, to be inundated by non-Jews, by Muslims. Will the acceptance of these needy people unleash a flood of like-minded refugees desperate for a harbour?
This is a moral conundrum that only the wisest of minds can solve. But when the need is so excruciatingly great, and when other sources of potential assistance have been exhausted, found utterly wanting to conclude the tragedy playing out in Sudan, what other alternative but to accept these tortured people could there possibly be?
Labels: Middle East, Viewpoint, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, July 25, 2007
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