I have a new article up at the Hadassah Magazine site on African refugees in Israel:

When he was 13, Akon told us, the government-backed militia came to his village in southern Sudan.

“They started killing people and burning their houses,” Akon said, speaking so quietly that I had to lean over our coffee cups to hear his voice amid the music in the Jerusalem café. “They killed my mother. My sister, they raped her, and she died.” The militiamen took Akon to northern Sudan, where they sold him as a slave.

So began the nine-year odyssey that brought him to Jerusalem.

Looking across the table, I saw lines in a dark face. He looked much older than 22 years. The family that bought him, he said, put him to work taking care of their cattle and camels. He was the first to rise each day, the last to sleep. He was beaten and insulted. Because he would not convert from Christianity to Islam, he said, “I was a devil in their eyes.”

Slavery was something I had read about in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and history textbooks. Now a former slave sat across from me. I thought of inviting him to my Pesah Seder, then wondered what he would think of the words. My son, who had come with me, is almost Akon’s age. Afterward he said he felt as if he had listened to testimony from the Holocaust, without the distance of decades to soften it.

Eventually Akon was bought and freed by a Christian aid group. He tried returning to his village in the south, but it was cut off by civil war. So he traveled to Khartoum, then fled onward to Egypt, where he joined the refugee community in Cairo. Telling his story, he mentions his activism among the south Sudanese. Repeatedly he was arrested. In prison, the Egyptian authorities let Sudanese intelligence agents question and torture him.

He feared that if he were arrested again, he would be sent back to northern Sudan and “be disappeared.” He and a friend decided to escape to Israel. The friend’s mother sold jewelry to pay the Bedouin smugglers who guided them on foot from El-Arish across the Sinai Desert. When they crossed the border into Israel one night in June 2006, they were found by an Israel Defense Forces patrol and sent to Ketziot prison in the Negev. Under Israeli law, they were told, they had come from an enemy country. “We explained that we are not enemies to Israel,” he said, and that “after the Jews were in genocide, in Sudan the government is committing genocide.”

Read the rest here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.

In other words: The law states that if a refugee from Darfur fleeing genocide reaches the State of Israel, he or she can expect not refuge but seven years imprisonment.

Consider yesterday’s vote a preliminary decision to declare that Israel is no longer a Jewish state – for to refuse refuge is to deny the most basic values of Judaism and to erase the lessons of Jewish history. Rather than “The Prevention of Infiltration Act,” this bill should be titled, “Act of Amnesia.”

According to Ha’aretz , the bill has been sent to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, “which does not have experience with migration issues and whose sessions are held in camera.” Before I go further, let me note that the fax number of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is +972 2 6753100 and the email address is v_bitchon@knesset.gov.il . The committee chair is Tzahi Hanegbi – fax +972 2 6753100 or zhanegbi@knesset.gov.il .

If a Biblical prophet or a sage from the time of the Talmud could be brought back to comment on this bill, his statement would likely begin with the words, “We have become Sodom.” In rabbinic tradition, following the simple meaning of the text of the Torah and Prophets, the city of Sodom stands for a polity that denies help to the poor and the stranger. In Genesis 18, God says he will check whether the “outcry” of Sodom reflects the actions of everyone in the city. As the late Bible scholar Nahum Sarna wrote in his classic Understanding Genesis, explaining the consistent meaning of “outcry” in Biblical Hebrew, the word

…implies, above all, heinous moral and social corruption, an arrogant disregard of elementary human rights, a cynical insensitivity to the sufferings of others.

As virtually all of Jewish tradition reads the story of the visitors who came to Sodom, it’s about a place where you had to act secretly to take in strangers, lest the entire community take mob action against you. The midrash in Pirkei Derabbi Eliezer (ch. 25) was taking very little license when it said that a law was proclaimed in Sodom that “everyone who strengthens the hand of the poor, the needy, the stranger with a loaf of bread will be burned by fire.” Maybe they called that “The Prevention of Infiltration and Poverty Act.”

In Jewish history, nations and kingdoms that gave us refuge are remembered as heroes; those who turned us away are villains. Visit Yad Vashem, and you’ll find a section on how the world refused to accept Jews from Germany. On one wall a quotation from an Australian official appears: “Australia cannot do more… as we have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” Britain – so learns a visitor to the museum – turned a ship carrying Jewish refugees away from Palestine, claiming it might be carrying German agents.

According to the bill in the Knesset, an “infilitrator” may be denied bail if security officials certify that in the region or country from which he comes, “activities are taking place that could endanger the security of Israel or its citizens.” In other words, refugees from Darfur or southern Sudan can be denied bail because of the anti-Israel activities of the Sudanese government – even if the refugee is suffering from the same government.

Let’s stress: Israel has the right to control immigration, and an obligation to its citizens to prevent infiltration by actual terrorists. But those needs must be balanced with humanitarian obligations to refugees and with human rights.

And yes, the refugee issue is a difficult one. This is the only Western country that can be reached overland from Sudan or Eritrea, via the long, easily crossed border with Egypt. We can’t bear the entire burden of saving Africa’s refugees. But our history and our religion obligate us accept part of that burden, and to prod the rest of the developed world to lend a hand and take in refugees who reach Israel.

So I repeat this proposal: Israel should convene an international conference at Yad Vashem, where the representatives of the nations will pushed, prodded and guilt-tripped to stand to make commitments on how many refugees they will accept.

To its great credit, the Diaspora Jewish community has taken a major role in raising the world’s awareness of the genocide in Darfur. The latest act was a call by nearly 200 Jewish leaders for Jewish tourists to boycott the Beijing Olympics, in part because of China’s support for Sudan. Israel, as a sovereign country, can do more: It can exploit its location and its history to take the lead in finding solutions for refugees.

The first step is stopping the Prevention of Infiltration Act in its present form. A wave of faxes, from within Israel and from the Diaspora, could make a difference. The bill was presented to the Knesset by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai of Labor. His Knesset fax number is +972 2 6408903, email matanv@knesset.gov.il . You can find a list of members of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committe here . Click on a member’s name, and you’ll get his or her email address and fax number. Send a letter. While you’re at it, send an email to others who can take action. It’s possible to make a difference.

*Corrected figure, thanks to a reader’s sharp eye.

Actually, no. Just a bit older than that.

After my post a few days ago on the need for a new policy on African refugees reaching Israel, I got an email from my son, who’s now studying at Ma’aleh Gilboa, the yeshiva of the Religious Kibbutz Movement. He sent me a text from Sefer Hahinukh, an anonymous 13th century religious text popular in Orthodox study. The book lists the commandments given in each weekly Torah portion, explains how each one is interpreted in Talmudic tradition, and then provides an ethical-spiritual understanding of the commandment.

Below is the Hebrew text he sent me, explaining Commandment No. 565: “Not to return a slave who escaped to the Land of Israel from his master outside the Land of Israel.” The basis of the law is the line in the Torah: “You shall not turn over to his master a slave who seeks refuge with you…” (Deut. 23:16). As Sefer Hahinukh explains:

…even if his master is a Jew, we do not return him to him, but rather free him…
And it is explained in Tractate Gittin (p. 45b) that the verse refers to a slave who escaped from outside the Land of Israel to the Land of Israel….
The root of the commandment is… that God wanted for the sake of the Land’s honor that one fleeing there should be saved from slavery…

I’d suggest that in Jewish thinking, the Land of Israel represents the place where there should be a Jewish polity – even if for most of history that wasn’t the case. That polity is supposed to offer refuge to anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who faces enslavement if sent back to where he or she came from. Or perhaps, simply, as Sefer Hahinukh puts it, God wanted to honor this land as the place of freedom.

I won’t claim slavery is history – as the Israeli Task Force on Human Trafficking states:

Israel is a destination country for human trafficking. Women and children are brought into the country every year to be exploited as modern day slaves.

That said, it’s a mistake to be narrowly literalist about the demand of a commandment. An obligation meant to challenge society when written should not be kept as a fossil; it should challenge us today. If someone fleeing slavery deserves asylum, the same applies to someone fleeing death or imprisonment or torture in Sudan or Eritrea. If Israel can’t grant refuge to all those fleeing – and practically, it can’t – it should take an active role in creating international agreement on refuge. In doing so, it would aspire to be a Jewish state.