Joshua Bloom
Jerusalem Post
September 10, 2013
Last week, the Israeli Government celebrated the completion of a momentous operation to absorb some of the last remaining Jews of Ethiopia into Israel. On the very same day, it announced another historic campaign to rid the country of non-Jewish asylum seekers who fled atrocities in Sudan and Eritrea, allegedly bartering them to Uganda for arms and agricultural technology.
While Israel has been a country of refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, the government is turning its back on non- Jews seeking refuge from persecution.
Celebrating the triumphant accomplishment of the completion of the third and final government operations that airlifted a total of 30,000 Jews from Ethiopia to Israel over the past 30 years, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday, “I am proud that as prime minister, beginning in my first term, I upheld the Zionist and Jewish imperative of bringing to Israel our brothers and sisters from Ethiopia. I see this as a moral obligation.”
But earlier in the day, Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar struck a very different tone as he laid out the government’s plans to pressure tens of thousands of migrants from Sudan and Eritrea to voluntarily leave the country. He outlined how the government will continue to confine migrants in internment camps in the Negev desert and impose financial constraints on all Sudanese and Eritrean migrants to embitter their lives until they go.
“The government stopped the influx of the infiltrators who have been coming in droves to Israel, and now we must move forward with the deportation of these illegal infiltrators from the state of Israel – and we are doing so.”