Border imperatives

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has announced (again) that Israel is about to begin building a barrier along its 266-kilometer Sinai border with Egypt. The fence is expected to cost some NIS 1.35 billion and will include a host of hi-tech elements, including radar.

If it is for real this time, this is a very positive development which will curtail the worrying rise in refugees and asylum-seekers infiltrating the border. In recent years Israeli cities - especially Eilat and Arad - have been inundated with waves of arrivals from Eritrea, Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana. Many make their way to Israel via Egypt not because they suffer persecution, but simply because they are looking for a better life for themselves.

In July 2009, there were a total of 17,736 refugees and 4,144 asylum seekers in Israel - over 17,000 just from Eritrea and Sudan. If in 1998 only 106 refugees and asylum-seekers entered, the number jumped to 7,681 in 2008. This presents a demographic threat to a country struggling to maintain a significant Jewish majority while providing equal rights to a large Arab minority, making up some 20% of the population, which identifies religiously and culturally with an overwhelming Arab majority that surrounds Israel.

The unresolved Palestinian refugee issue is another threat to a Jewish majority, as is the presence of about 200,000 foreign workers. Furthermore, Israel faces the challenge of absorbing 8,000 Ethiopian Falash Mura, in addition to immigrants from many other countries.



BUT IN addition to building a barrier, which is likely to take well over a year to complete, it is imperative that our political leaders revamp Israeli policy vis-a-vis refugees and asylum-seekers. As a recent study by the Metzilah Center entitled "Managing Global Migration" noted, Israel is probably the only western democracy without legislation governing their treatment.

Israel, a country created in the wake of the Holocaust to be a national homeland for the Jewish people after nearly two millennia of exile, has a unique moral responsibility to refugees and asylum-seekers. Government leadership must take immediate steps to adopt a transparent, uniform policy that ensures fair and humane treatment.

In light of the extraordinary challenges it has faced since its founding, Israel's record is pretty good in this area. Already in 1954, Israel signed the 1951 International Convention on the Status of Refugees. In addition, Israel upholds the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits returning refugees to their country of origin where they might suffer persecution on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality or political activities. And in July 2009 Israel took over responsibility for determining the status of asylum-seekers and refugees from the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees.

However, while it is a signatory to the Convention on the Status of Refugees, Israel has yet to put in place the necessary legal infrastructure for implementing the convention's principles. As a result, Israel's refugee and asylum-seeker policy lacks any structure. Processing of requests is done in an ad-hoc way by bodies such as the IDF which are not trained for the job.

Nor has Israel set up arbitration bodies with expertise in immigration law. As long as the numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers remained small, these lacunae were not critical. But the status quo has become unbearable. Refugees and asylum-seekers are forced to wait on average 33 months to have their status determined. In the meantime, they are often held in limbo in bad conditions in compounds such as the Saharonim camp on the Egyptian border.



AMID THE concerns over demographic threats to the Jewish majority, Israel's political leadership must take steps to expedite the processing of requests for asylum. Israel should not be expected to absorb the thousands every year who manage to infiltrate its borders.

The new border fence is a long-overdue means of grappling with that problem. At the same time, those who are here, if waiting to be transferred to a third country or returned to their country of origin when safe, should be provided with adequate living conditions.

For nearly 2,000 years the Jewish people were guests, refugees or asylum-seekers in other peoples' countries. They often benefited from their hosts, but were also expelled, discriminated against and persecuted. Now with a sovereign state of its own, the Jewish people has the imperative both to ensure that a strong Jewish majority is maintained in the sovereign Jewish state, and to serve as a moral example of how developed countries should treat refugees and asylum-seekers.

UNESCO and the cradle of Jewish history

UNESCO, the United Nations body in charge of preserving historical sites, went too far this time. There is a lot of chutzpah in this post-modernist era of "deconstruction" and "revision." Warmly cherished religious faiths and customs are reduced to "false consciousness." Nations with their own unique ethnicity and proud traditions become "imagined communities." Foundational histories are reduced to nothing more than subjective "narratives."

But even in this radically relativistic intellectual atmosphere, the latest UNESCO decision stands out. For this was a particularly blatant attempt to erase Jewish ties to the land of Israel.

In its biannual session which ended last week, UNESCO adopted proposals initiated by Arab member states to dub two Jewish historical sites "Palestinian." In a 44-1 vote, with 12 abstentions, the UNESCO board declared the "Haram al-Ibrahm/the Cave of the Patriarchs and Bilal bin Rabah Mosque/Rachel's Tomb" to be "an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories" and asserted "that any unilateral action by the Israeli authorities is to be considered a violation of international law."

The move is seen in some quarters as a response to Israel's decision in February to include the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb on a list of national heritage sites that would receive additional funding for refurbishing and for the development of educational tours.

While February's decision was described by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a way of "reconnecting" Israelis to their history, the UNESCO decision was denounced by the prime minister as an "absurd" attempt to "detach the people of Israel from its heritage."

He asked: "If the places where the fathers and mothers of the Jewish nation are buried, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Leah and Rachel, some 4,000 years ago, are not part of the Jewish heritage then what is?"

Particularly absurd was the decision regarding Rachel's Tomb. As scholars such as Nadav Shragai and Prof. Yehoshua Porath have pointed out, it was only in 2000 that the Palestinians "discovered" its historical importance.

On Yom Kippur of that year, as the second intifada was being launched, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, a Palestinian daily, published an article that blatantly departed from Muslim tradition, which corresponds with Jewish tradition, to claim that "the tomb is false and was originally a Muslim mosque." Until then, all official Palestinian Authority references to the site had recognized it as Rachel's Tomb. (A similar tactic was used after the 1929 Arab riots, to transform the Western Wall into the al-Buraq wall, supposedly the place where Muhammed's winged horse al-Buraq was tied after his night-flight from Mecca.)



ZIONISM IS particularly susceptible to these types of attacks. As a movement, Zionists simultaneously rebelled against tradition - particularly the Jewish religion - and exile, while incorporating concepts from Judaism that emphasized Jews' ties to the land of Israel.

Zionism strove for normalization of the Jewish people as "a nation among the nations." But it also co-opted the idea of "chosenness" by aspiring to create a model nation - hevrat mofet. Bitter disputes in contemporary Israel over settlements and the proper balance between Israel's Jewish and democratic dimensions have their roots in this "split" Jewish identity.

Nonetheless, whether one is for or against Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, or for or against emphasizing Israel's "Jewishness" at the expense of its "democratic" nature, it is an undeniable fact that the geographical area referred to as the West Bank and that includes Hebron and Bethlehem was the cradle of Jewish history. No amount of historical revisionism or UNESCO declarations will erase this fact.

Nor is there a doubt that Israel has done a better job at maintaining equitable access to religious sites for all faiths. In contrast, Jordan denied Israel the "free access to the Holy Places [including the Kotel] and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives" stipulated in the April 1949 Armistice.

The Palestinian Authority's track record is no better. If not for the Israeli security presence, Rachel's Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs, and Joseph's Tomb would be off limits to Jews today. Whatever future territorial agreements are reached with the Palestinians, it would be an intolerable and untenable injustice if Jews were prevented from visiting sites with such profound historical, cultural and religious import.