The Foreign Migrant Controversy

Two weeks ago Tuesday a debate on foreign migrants took place in the Tel-Aviv Jaffa College. Famous media personality Yael Dayan and Attorney Yonatan Feller represented the organizations working in favor of the migrants, Shlomo Maslawi represented the neighborhoods suffering from the sharp rise in violent crime since the migrants have infiltrated the poor sections of Israel's cities and Moshe Feiglin represented a completely different angle on the crisis.

From the very onset, the three other representatives began to clash over the technical aspects of the problem; the rise in crime and its impact on the residents of the neighborhoods. Moshe Feiglin insisted on debating the principles at the foundation of the conflict. "I must assume that the foreign workers, like most people, are good and honest people," he said. "What I cannot accept is the attempt to frame the debate as a struggle between racists (from the Right) and hypocrites (from the Left). I do not accept as fact that one side likes people less than the other and I have also discovered hypocrisy on both sides of the fence."

"I will explain with a simple example," he continued. "Just a few years ago, the State of Israel decided to implement the ethnic cleansing of ten thousand Jews who were legally living in Gush Katif. We could debate if it was justifiable for them to settle there or not. But what ultimately happened was that for a set of values dear to a particular political camp, they were willing to expel women, children and the elderly from their homes."

"And now," Feiglin stated, "the very same people who propelled the expulsion forward with all their might and even enjoyed it, are fighting against the present expulsion of foreign workers. Clearly, then, the internal motivation that determines their position on this subject has nothing to do with humaneness, love of people or anything like that."

"So what is the source of the debate?" the journalist asked.

"The source of the debate lies in the way that one perceives his Jewish identity," Moshe answered. "Yael Dayan, who just a moment ago expressed scorn for those people who oppose intermarriage, showed us that the preservation of Jewish identity is not significant to her. Those people who desire to strengthen Israel's Jewish identity are opposed to absorbing waves of foreign migrant workers, while those who would like to dilute Israel's Jewish identity and make it "multi-cultural" prefer to encourage it."