Note: The following is a blog posted today on the Times of Israel site. Rabbi Donniel Hartman is the Director of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His integrity is beyond reproach and never takes partisan positions. Rather, he speaks from the heart of Jewish tradition and always with thoughtfulness and a moral sensibility. Rabbi Hartman’s letter is written in the spirit of the Biblical prophet who criticizes power when leaders of our people’s morality goes awry.

April 9, 2018, 3:19 pm

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

It’s not easy to be both proud and ashamed at the same time. As a politician, it is particularly difficult, as protecting yourself from constant criticism is a prerequisite of the job.

As prime minister, you have much to be proud of, both personally and nationally. You have navigated our country through perilous times and circumstances. As we approach our 70^th birthday, we do so with confidence and joy, for Israel is strong and secure, prosperous and successful. The source of your political success and longevity is that so many Israelis feel indebted to you and feel secure because of your leadership.

However, together with your well-deserved pride, you should also feel a measure of shame. It seems like a lifetime, but it was less than a week ago, that you forged a new low. Instead of embracing the moral high ground on the issue of the African refugees in Israel and following through on what was your negotiated agreement with the United Nations, you chose the path of moral obtuseness, while making sure to lay the blame on others. Such actions, although common in our world, are not worthy of Israel and the Jewish people.

Shame on you for turning human rights discourse in Israel into a political football, dividing the Left and the Right. Shame on you for peddling fear to buttress your political standing. Shame on you for singling out false enemies for vilification to galvanize national loyalty and self-righteousness.

Your morally bankrupt rhetoric, branding all asylum seekers as “infiltrators,” instead of allowing that, at the very least, some are refugees, and supporting the false claims that they pose a danger to the Jewishness of Israel and the well-being of southern Tel Aviv, caught up with you. Or more correctly, infected us all.

When you propagate fear and hatred of so many different “others,” and employ fake enemies to encourage phony nationalist sentiments, it is indeed difficult to turn around and admit that the strong and vibrant Israel you helped to produce has nothing to fear from 16,000, 26,000, or even 36,000 refugees. It is difficult, even during Pesach last week, to speak of our people’s responsibility to remember that we were slaves in the land of Egypt.

Fear and hatred are cancerous, and once introduced into the national discourse, have a destructive life of their own. While you have mastered their political use, as we saw last week, they have become your masters.

For the sake of a short-term high as the proclaimed “protector of Israel,” “lover of Jews,” and “the one who cares about the disadvantaged neighborhoods,” you were willing to throw the lives of tens of thousands of human beings into chaos and turmoil and yet again divide the Jewish people. You know that the Supreme Court will challenge any policy of forced expulsion, further weakening it, and will also lead to extensive divisiveness, both within Israel and among the Jewish people.

Tomorrow’s problems, however, are not allowed by you to outweigh a bump in the polls, today. This is doubly true, when tomorrow you, or your coalition partners, can transform the Supreme Court itself into the enemy du jour of Israel and Zionism, and blame all of poor Government of Israel’s problems on all-powerful foreign conspirators, such as the New Israel Fund.

The Bibi of just a few years ago would be ashamed. It was you who in your previous terms served as the ultimate protector of the Supreme Court, the rule of law, and the unity of the Jewish people. In the past, these were values that you held as central to Israel. Today, outside of national security and preserving your coalition, it is difficult to identify anything that you hold as holy.

When you withdrew your support for your resolution, you knew that Friday was but a few days away, and that you could count on Hamas and Gaza to change the focus of our national discourse. You knew that the next car-ramming in Europe or gas attack on innocent civilians in Syria were but a few news cycles away. Who could reasonably criticize you for deporting a few Africans, when our country and soldiers are facing a new threat from Gaza? Who can criticize you as morally wanting, when such moral depravity surrounds us? Only an anti-Semite or an anti-Zionist, of course.

As Israelis we live in a macabre reality. Together with our well-deserved sense of strength, prosperity, and success, we know that danger and instability constantly threaten us. Be it Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranians in Syria, or lone wolf Palestinian terrorists, we live with the ever-present sense that somebody wants to kill us. Someone sees our destruction as their principal mission. I don’t know of any other Western democracy whose citizens have to live with this consciousness, daily. Most Israelis trust you, Mr. Prime Minister, above all others, to help navigate us through this treacherous reality. In truth, much of that trust has been earned and well-deserved.

Israel, however, does not merely have to learn how to survive in the Middle East, but also survive the Middle East itself. Remaining a liberal democracy and a Jewish and democratic state and upholding our commitments to human rights and the Jewish values of peace, justice, freedom, and equality, as outlined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, is a challenging task in today’s Middle East. It is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to continue to care. However, after survival, doing precisely that is Israel’s greatest challenge and responsibility.

Israel needs a leader and not merely a politician. A leader provides vision and challenges the people to expend resources for the sake of their values. A leader inspires sacrifice for a greater cause. A leader also experiences shame when they fail in their responsibilities.

There are voices in Israel and in the Jewish world who, after your debacle last week, expressed shame in Israel. I am not ashamed of Israel. Israel and Zionism transcend our political leaders and are not defined even by the current will of the majority. Israel embodies the mission to build a safe and secure homeland for the Jewish people which is committed to the noblest of Jewish, moral, and democratic principles. I am not ashamed of Israel, because we are in the middle of Zionism’s journey, a journey undertaken under the most challenging of circumstances.

Mr. Prime Minister, I am not ashamed of Israel. I am ashamed of you.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mr-prime-minister-i-am-ashamed-of-you/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=cea6605211-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-cea6605211-55741261

The following was written by Mattityahu Sperber, a leader in Israel’s Reform movement, and a resident at Kibbutz Yahel. He writes with passion and urgency.

A mitzvah repeated more times in the Torah than any other is “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” [Exodus 22:20]

Today there are 38,000 refugee seekers from Eritrea and Sudan and another 7,000 of their children still in Israel. In what can only described as a Purimesque absurdity, the government has decided that even though the flow of refugee seekers into Israel has been reduced to zero, these foreigners must be expelled out of fear that the “Jewish State” will be destroyed if we were to accept an additional half a percent of non-Jewish blacks to our population. (Once they have been deported, we will bring in foreign workers from other countries to take their place in the workforce.)  So, in a secret agreement with two African countries, Israel has begun to expel these refugee seekers.

Stage one of the process is to issue deportation notices to all men who have no children and who do not have an unanswered request to be recognized as refugees made before 31/12/17. Out of the 15,000 requests for refugee status that have been made to date, only 12 were granted. The government seems determined to ignore who these people are and what they have been through. The government position is that these people, who escaped from brutal dictatorships, and many from an unending army service that can only be described as a form of slavery, are only people seeking employment and a higher standard of living. The government says they are to leave “voluntarily” or to be imprisoned until they agree to volunteer. The fact that virtually none of the thousands who have so far “volunteered” to go to these “safe” African countries have found there a home that was open to absorb them and to provide them with the minimum of a legal opportunity to work and to support themselves and their families does not affect the government’s position. So what if virtually all continued on to country number two or three and from there tried to make it somehow to Europe, where refugees are still being accepted? Israel will continue to pay the secret countries to temporarily accept these deportees and to pretend that it has found a humane solution for their very real and personal problem.

Today, I met Yamane on the line to his deportation interview. He came to Israel from Eritrea, through Sudan and Egypt, in 2009. Yamane had received assistance from the Hotline for Refugees and Emigrants in preparing a document which presented his case for receiving an exemption from his slated deportation. As a representative of HIAS, I was allowed to accompany him in his deportation interview. Unfortunately, all of his arguments were rejected as not reaching the accepted criteria for such an exemption.

1. Yamane had made his refugee status request on 5/2/2018 after months of being unable to get into the office in southern Tel Aviv where hundreds of people waited on line daily. Too late – not before 31/12/2017.
2. Yamane married in Israel five years ago and his wife was with him today. They have no children and his wife is today unable to work and to support herself after having been hospitalized and operated on. No children – no exemption. Having to support an ill and recovering wife – not relevant.
3. Yamane himself has been ill with tuberculosis and is required to see the doctor for care at least every 6 months. Israeli medical care vs. African – not relevant.
4. Yamane has made a request for refugee status in Canada. His wife has family there and they are waiting for a response from them. No official Canadian document acknowledging that they are being processed for possible Refugee status there – not relevant.

Two weeks ago, Judge Elad Azar, sitting as the head of an immigration panel court, ruled against blanket denials of refugee status for Eritreans whose asylum requests were based on army desertion and their fears that the Eritrean authorities would persecute them if they returned. Yamane served in the Eritrean army for 7 years, until he was tortured and imprisoned after requesting the opportunity to visit his family. After 6 months in prison he managed to escape. Over a course of months, he managed to make his way to Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt on his trek to Israel. It is difficult for me to imagine how his case might not be seen as that of a legitimate refugee.

When asked whether he accepted the government’s demand that he volunteer to be deported to a friendly African nation, Yamane said no. He explained that all of the information that he has received from friends and acquaintances who had gone to this country made clear to him that this would not be safe for him or for his ill wife. He would rather go to jail permanently in Israel.

Today’s interview ended with my making a plea to see that the above arguments, even if each individually does not answer the government’s defined criteria, when taken together, form a strong case for making an exception. I requested that Yamane’s deportation be delayed, at least until he has received a response to his refugee asylum request. The interviewer asked to consult with his supervisor. When he returned, he presented himself as generously deciding to make no decision today. The decision will only be made on the 8/4/2018, when Yamane returns to renew his temporary visa. Perhaps by then Yamane will have a refugee asylum request interview or even receive an answer to his request. Perhaps by then, he will have an answer from Canada which can demonstrate that he is officially in their refugee asylum process. Or perhaps, as I heard from Laura that her “client” had received the exact same non-answer, they will use that opportunity to arrest him and send him to prison or to forcibly deport him.

I am known by friends and family as the eternal optimist. I think that tonight I will have to drink much wine to maintain that optimism and to believe there will be a solution for Yamane that is worthy of the Jewish State that I hope I live in.”