From a BBC piece on “Israel’s unwanted African migrants” (hat tip: AmRen):
Israel… has approved fewer than 1% of asylum applications since it signed the UN Refugee Convention six decades ago – has not offered asylum to a single person from Sudan.
Less than 1%.
Imagine that.
The Israeli government has deals with two countries in Africa to host its unwanted migrants.
It promises that people who take the option of “voluntary departure to third countries” will receive papers on arrival that give them legal status in the country.
As an extra incentive, they’re given $3,500 (£2,435) in cash, handed over in the departure lounge of the airport in Tel Aviv.
Israel refuses to name the two African countries but the BBC has spoken to migrants who say they were sent to Rwanda and Uganda.
Secret cash deals with a couple of African despotisms to make Israel’s asylum problem ‘go away’.
There is a wrinkle, though:
In October, Israeli immigration authorities said 3,000 asylum seekers had left Israel for a third country. But the BBC has learned that only seven have registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Rwanda, all of them Eritreans, and only eight, mostly from Sudan, in Uganda.
Meanwhile, there are about 45,000 Eritreans and Sudanese in Israel. The government won’t deport them – that would be a clear breach of the UN Refugee Convention, which it signed in 1954. Under the Convention, no-one can be forcibly returned to a country where they have a justified fear of persecution.
But if Israel treats them as refugees at least in this respect, why does it then refuse them asylum?
Ah, yes, the million dollar question.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon says the migrants threaten the security, and the identity, of the Jewish state.
“It’s obvious that we live here in a situation which is rather complex and complicated. And if you add this element of migrants who come here and who want to stay here – undoubtedly because this is a rich and prosperous country – then it could become also a challenge to our identity here in Israel.
The double standard rears it’s ugly head yet again.
With obligatory Holocaust™ guilt-tripping, Jews continuously harangue Christian nations in the West, telling them it’s their moral obligation, the very spirit of ‘Christian humanism’, to welcome ‘refugees’ and Celebrate Diversity™, but for Israel there’s a completely different set of rules.