The Jewish Homeland

Jews represent the quintessential wanderers.  Exiled from their homeland millennia ago, they were nation less without a geography of their own, settling everywhere their wanderings took them.  From the Arab countries of the Middle East, to India, China, Europe and North and Latin America, they made their homes.  Always seen as 'other' than most people, outsiders in society, clinging to their Judaism, their recalled heritage and customs, they were consigned to separateness.

And with that separation came contempt and suspicion, oppression and denials of equality.  There is some strange neurosis, a pathology actually, in human nature that rises with amazing regularity that results in a virus of hatred emanating from a majority population to envelop the community of Jews within their midst with a miasma of detestation and violence.  Jews have experienced the most horrible atrocities expressed against them singly and as a collective, yet they endure.

And now, when the last century visited the most heinous attempts - inconceivable to a sane and decent mind - to destroy the existence of Jews, enough survived to mount a concerted effort to return themselves to their land of origin and with the eventual hesitant and reluctant agreement of a consortium of countries assembled as a league of nations, agreeing to permit it, the State of Israel was declared, to embrace and protect Jews.

A homeland for Jews.  That homeland has also accepted, over time, not only Jews returning from all parts of the globe, to their ancient heritage of existence as a people, a nation and a shared religious trust, but non-Jews as well.  A sizable component of the population is constructed of Arabs, Kurds, Druze, Africans, Europeans worshipping their own religions, harking back to their own original cultures, given equality as citizens.

But the emphasis has always been that this is a national enterprise meant for the in-gathering of Jews, a Jewish state, a country dedicated to the preservation of the world's Jews.  Amid a veritable sea of those who resent its re-establishment to the point of attempting, time and again, to remove it by violent force through a failed succession of wars.  Surrounding countries, majority Arab/Islamic, do not welcome Jews in their midst.

And where, in Israel, the emphasis is on homogeneity resulting in a majority Jewish population, the full force of the law applies equally to Jews and non-Jews.  An influx of wanderers, people from African states fleeing war, and many looking for economic advantage has entered the country illegally, seeking access through the Sinai border with Egypt.  Egypt, it should be remembered, is an African Muslim country.

Egyptians and the Egyptian military have been known to rob, beat, rape and murder these illegal aliens who seek entry not to Egypt, for understandable reasons, but to pass through Egypt on their way to Israel.  The promised land for Jews.  Because Ethiopian Jews were historically and continue to be airlifted into Israel for safe haven, there is an existing black population within Israel. 

But the wish to accept Africans fleeing persecution and war in Sudan, Eritrea and elsewhere on the continent does not exist within the country; it is inimical to its existence as a Jewish state to accept the 60,000 and growing tide of African migrants who have sought refuge in Israel.  Overwhelming areas of the tiny country, and causing financial hardships to the administration of the country that provides them with social welfare assistance.

It is not known quite how many illegal African refugees have come through into Israel, across the border from Egypt.  Egypt will not take them, and Israel has no wish to accept them.  The country is preparing to do as Australia has done and France and England; restrict the migrants to a fenced area, and gradually deport them.  The country is awaiting clearance to do just that from the Israel Supreme Court.

Illegals to be rounded up and moved into the detention centre being built to house them.  And returning them eventually from whence they came.  And a high-tech security barrier is in the process of being built between Egypt's border and Israel.  A pledge was made to offer a generous resettlement sum to those being returned to their native countries in a series of airlifts.

The country whose citizens have always been refugees from their original homes, now re-established, outcasts of other countries, pariahs in some, now see themselves in the position of closing their doors to migrants looking for security elsewhere than in their countries of birth.  For many of them it is a question of survival. 

For Israel also, it is a matter of survival ... of a Jewish homeland.