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One country that won't be taking Syrian refugees: Israel


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday rejected a call to host refugees from Syria and elsewhere, saying that while Israel is "not indifferent to the human tragedy of the refugees," it is not in a position to take them in.

Netanyahu was responding to Israeli liberals led by opposition leader Isaac Herzog, who said Jewish history demands that the nation show compassion. Having themselves felt the “world’s silence,” Herzog said, “Jews cannot remain indifferent” to the carnage in Syria and the refugees’ plight.

Herzog’s comments met with support from other liberal lawmakers such as Zehava Galon, who called for opening Israel’s gates to a token number of refugees from its violence-stricken northern neighbor.

In responding to such statements, Netanyahu stressed Israel’s medical care for over 1,000 injured Syrians, as well as efforts to aid African nations and thus stem the flow of migrants. However, he said that Israel’s “lack of demographic and geographic depth” requires controlling its borders against both “illegal migrants and terrorism.”

His reference to demographics referred to oft-expressed concerns in Israel about the country's Jewish population being overwhelmed by non-Jews.

Israel's 6.2 million Jews make up nearly 75% of the country's population, with its Arab citizens comprising more than 20%. In addition, an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians live in occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
For many Israeli Jews, even the smallest number of additional non-Jews is a potential threat, and the Syrian refugee crisis and the debate about Israel’s role has reawakened the country’s most deep-seated fear -- that of losing the Jewish majority and subsequently the character of the Jewish state.

Even those in support of opening the gates to refugees say they mean 10,000 at the most, with some calling for a token action such as that taken by former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who in 1977 took in about 70 refugees from Vietnam.....http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syrian-refugees-israel-20150906-story.html

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Non-Jewish Refugees Get a Cold Shoulder in Israel

By Yardena Schwartz   / October 13, 2015 10:54 AM EDT

Gorgio, an Eritrean refugee, rests in the shade on David Ben Gurion Street in an upscale Tel Aviv neighborhood after his day's work as a hotel cleaner, before going back to his home in the suburbs of the city, on July 27. Israel is divided over how to deal with non-Jewish African asylum seekers.  Sarah Caron

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.”

In 2012, parliament member Miri Regev, now the culture minister, called African asylum seekers “a cancer in the body” of the nation.  A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 52 percent of Jewish Israelis agreed with her.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that these newcomers represent a threat to Israel’s Jewish identity. “If we don't stop the problem,” he said in 2012, “60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and cause the negation of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/10/23/what-europe-can-learn-israels-refugee-crisis-382523.html

Quoted from Box A Rox

Are you mistaken, or do you just make up your own FACTS?