Israel, Zionists and Darfur - what gives?

As you probably know, there is a horrible and bloody conflict going on in the Darfur area of Sudan. The causes and actors are many and complex – ethnic and tribal tensions along with herders versus farmers, socio-economic factors, political rivalries, international pressures, internal African pressures and various other factors. Practically all the participants are Muslim. It's been going on for over 3 years now (and happened right after a protracted and monstrous civil war along with a deadly drought) resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of gang rapes, a completely devastated economy, famine, plagues and much gnashing of teeth. In other words, an utter bloody mess.



The bit relevant to this particular article, however, is that over two million people from Darfur became refugees. And this is not orderly refugees like the hundreds of thousands of Israelis that moved south during the Hizballah-Israel war last summer – this is a flood of desperate, destitute and traumatized people. Children who have seen Mommy being gang-raped and then clubbed to death with rifle butts. Mothers who have seen their children hunted down and hacked to pieces with machetes. People who have seen everyone they ever knew tortured to death, people who have seen everything they knew burned and destroyed.



Some are lucky – or unlucky – enough to end up in refugee camps in Sudan itself and neighboring countries. The conditions in these camps are appalling, and Janjaweed gangs – the government-backed main perpetrators of the slaughter – continue to attack people even there. Truly a desperate situation.

What that has got to do with Israel, Zionism, and Jews, one might ask. After all, Israel is a few thousand kilometers away from Darfur, has no involvement whatsoever with Sudan, and no reason to get involved in any way in a Muslim-vs-Muslim conflict.

Well, in our day and age everything is interconnected. Let's start with Sudan's ruling tyrant, errr, sorry, President Al-Bashir. This particular nice man (directly responsible for the horror going on in Darfur) puts the blame for it on Israel. Why? Why not, apparently. "Blame the Jooooz" is a common and acceptable solution to any problem in the Muslim/Arab world, according to the editor-in-chief of Al-Jazeera. So if you happen to be a Muslim and are busy killing off a few hundred thousands of other Muslims, you know how to get away clean. Just ask Jimmy Carter or Baker and Hamilton – it's always and forever Israel's fault, no matter what "it" might be.

But this is not an article about blame. This is an article about a thorny and bizarre problem. You see, some of these more than two million refugees made their way across the desert to Egypt, where they are not treated very well. And a few of them have actually got so desperate they risked crossing the border into Mordor, the heart of all evil, the HQ of the dark and sinister Elders of Zion, the place where Evil Zionists™ live, feeding solely on Muslim babies – Israel, AKA the Land of Milk and Honey.

These refugees are not exactly expert infiltrators into enemy states (and Sudan is officially at war with Israel), so they are easily caught by the evil Storm Troopers of Zionism – IDF:




And this is where Israel's dilemma begins.
On one hand, these people are citizens of an enemy state. They have infiltrated Israel illegally. They usually have no documentation. They have no money and no useful skills. There is very little indeed they can contribute to Israel. No matter what Israel does, the PR fallout will be negative – take them in, and soon you'll have stories running in the Arabic press about how Evil Zionists™ are eating Sudanese babies, and speculating that the whole Darfur disaster was instigated by the Evil Zionist Entity™ to increase food supply in Israel. Turn them out, and Israel is a heartless bunch of Evil Zionists™ who instigated the Darfur disaster to make poor innocent Muslims walk thousands of kilometers in the desert just to be cruelly humiliated by the said Evil Zionists™. Accepting the refugees might open the floodgate, with millions of displaced hunams baying to be accepted into the Land of Milk and Honey. And it's not as if Israel doesn't already have an internal problem with Muslims.

On the other hand, these are people. They are refugees from the single worst atrocity going on in the world at this time. They have been royally screwed over, and have nowhere to go to. They are traumatized, terrified, and lost. They have been through what can be described as genocide, and Israelis know damn well what that means. They are too few to cause any problems. There are kibbutzim and moshavim willing to take them in – a sure way to assimilate these people into the Israeli society. And, at the bottom line, not helping them would be horribly immoral, against the Jewish tradition and religion (yes, helping them is a religious obligation - din ger, yetom ve-almana) and just plain evil.

In the meanwhile, they are being processed through the system. Like all illegal aliens, they are taken to detention centers and their individual cases are reviewed. Since this is Israel, the red tape takes a long, long while. And since these people are citizens of an enemy state, it takes even longer. They are not particularly unhappy to be in the detention centers… but it's boring, wastes a lot of time, and keeps them effectively isolated from the outside world. The ones lucky enough to be cleared security-wise and to have their refugee status accepted quietly and anonymously move to various kibbutzim and moshavim.

So here's the big question… what should Israel do with them? Are these wretched victims a danger to Israel? Could they be a boon? Or is it just another storm in a teacup?

A big fat thank you to Drima and this conversation on his blog.

UPDATE:

Apparently, the Israeli chapter of the American Jewish Committee has donated 10,000 NIS(about 2400$ US) to the 300 or so Darfurian 'fugees in Israel, to be used for clothing and such. It's not much at all (enough for, say one pair of pants and a few shirts for each 'fugee if you're buying in bulk), but it's a statement.