Natural allies: Southern Sudan and Israel

I’ve written a lot of stories about the refugees from Southern Sudan since they started coming to Israel five years ago. Most of the articles were critical of the way the government treated them, and sought to gain sympathy for these people who saw their families killed and villages burned, who faced overt racism in Egypt and risked their lives to cross the Sinai and get to Israel.

But I also made it clear that however grudging or ungenerous the state’s reception of these people had been, Israel had treated them a hundred times better than Egypt had, and a trillion times better than Sudan had. The Southern Sudanese refugees, who are mainly Christians, escaped two Arab countries to get to the Jewish state. However tough a time the government has given them, their main concern has been that they won’t be allowed to stay, and their second concern has been that more of their countrymen won’t be allowed in to join them.   

Unlike Egypt and Sudan, Israel didn’t kill these people, didn’t enslave them, didn’t use any sort of violence against them. This is not by any means to say, though, that Israel took them in with open arms - for the first year of the migration, they were kept in jail, and since their numbers grew from the hundreds to the thousands, they’ve been made to feel distinctly unwelcome by the authorities and the poor people living in the neighborhoods they’ve moved into. But still in all, most of them are working, and they’ve received tremendous help from a range of Israeli NGOs, while the Tel Aviv Municipality, where most of them live, has treated them with humanity.

Southern Sudan, which officially became independent on Saturday, is a black African country that has traumatic memories of oppression at the hands of Arabs, and relatively good experiences with Israel. As oppressed Christians, they identify with the Jews of the Bible. Their country wants good relations with Israel, and vice versa, and the odds are it’s going to happen.

“[W]e would be happy to cooperate with it in order to ensure its development and prosperity,” Netanyahu said Sunday, announcing Israel’s recognition of the new state. Even if the two countries’ relationship is based on mutual self-interest – Israel sees Southern Sudan as a wedge in the hostile Muslim and Third World, while Southern Sudan sees Israel as a donor state and provider of entree to America – it’s enlightened mutual self-interest. The cause of Southern Sudan is a great one, and Israel has certainly been more of a friend than an enemy to it, especially in relation to the performance of the Arab world. If it’s fair to remind Israel of its complicity in apartheid, it’s fair to remind the Arabs about their complicity in Sudan’s murderous, medieval oppression of its black Christians.   

More than one refugee told me that the only soldiers who’d ever treated them well, who’d made them feel safe instead of in danger, were Israeli soldiers. So congratulations, Southern Sudan, and here’s to the beginning of a historic friendship.