Rav Menachem Brod, a senior Chabad Rav in Israel, published an article on Monday about the debate in Israel about accepting non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees, a debate that has grown so heated that Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked caved in to the pressure on Sunday night and expanded the original quota of 25,000.
“On Purim, we’re aware of the fact that people disguise themselves as other figures and that the ‘police officer’ or ‘fireman’ you see is not actually that role in real life,” Rav Brod wrote. “But in everyday life, we tend to accept the figures that appear to us as reality and we don’t suspect that they’re actually in costume.”
“But it turns out that the costume parties take place all year round and not only on Purim, especially regarding worldviews. People make seemingly beautiful arguments while hiding the true intentions behind them. This situation makes it difficult to have true public debate because you find yourself arguing with people in disguise.”
“Take, for example, the recent campaign regarding Ukrainian refugees. We’ve heard a variety of arguments that pull at the heartstrings in an attempt to pressure the government to open the gates to unlimited absorption of non-Jews. Even the Holocaust was mobilized for the campaign, comparing refugees of war to Jews who tried to escape Hitler’s extermination plot.”
“One can of course counter these arguments and prove that they have no basis in reality. The refugees who choose to fly to Israel do not do so in order to be saved from death. After all, flights to Israel don’t take off from Ukraine, but from European countries to which the refugees fled. At that moment they are no longer in danger.”
“The comparison to the Holocaust is particularly unfounded and outrageous. The Jews fled from a satanic extermination machine and almost no country agreed to open its gates to them. In contrast, Ukrainian refugees are being welcomed in Europe with open arms. They even receive conditions there that are several times better than those provided by the State of Israel. If so, their choice to fly to Israel is not related to escaping the horrors of war but to immigration considerations.”
“But as mentioned, all this debate is actually taking place ‘in disguise’ because the real motive is completely different. There is a struggle here over the very Jewish identity of the state in the face of elements who strive to dilute the Jewish component as much as possible in order to create a state of all its citizens.”
“A common thread runs through the campaign for the unlimited absorption of non-Jewish Ukrainians with the support for the retention of illegal migrants from Africa, and with the opposition to the Citizenship Law – designed to prevent the naturalization of Arabs from the Palestinian Authority and Gaza Strip.”
“Everything is aimed at one goal – to reduce the Jewish majority and increase the proportion of non-Jews.”
“The elements waging this struggle enjoy almost unlimited resources from foreign funds, to whom the very existence of a state defined as ‘Jewish’ is like a bone stuck in their throats.”
“A senior Amnesty official even declared this week that ‘Israel should not exist as a Jewish state.’ So at least remove your disguises and admit that that’s your position and that way everyone will know what the argument is really about.”
“In light of this background, it’s difficult not to laugh bitterly at the call from government officials that the ‘conversion law’ should be expedited, so that the refugee masses can be converted. The problem is that the joke is at our expense!”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)