Photo Credit: Matanya Tausig/Flash90

A few hundred female Africans and their children yesterday marched in protest to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. They insisted that Israel must grant them asylum and work rights.

Regarding the issue of seeking asylum, on the grounds that they had to flee their war torn Sudan and Eritrea, I’ve been puzzled by a logical problem: virtually all the Africans coming illegally into Israel have done it through the Israeli-Egyptian border.

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They’ve all come here not from the Sudan or Eritrea, but from Egypt.

No one has ever accuse Egypt of committing genocide against the people of the Sudan or Eritrea, therefore, as soon as these suffering Africans reached Egypt, legally they reached a safe haven.

But there isn’t enough work and food to go around even for Egyptians, so the Africans moved on to Israel. Except that now they were no longer fleeing a genocide, they were merely seeking work.

In that context, Israel is as responsible for their fate as any other third country, but it never served as a safe haven for any of them.

It makes perfect sense, then, that the U.S. embassy immediately offer these people work visas and fly them to America! And all the other Western countries must follow suit, to rid us of this episode of human suffering.

Why should Israel be stuck with the bill simply because its borders have been violated?

Pass it on.

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Yori Yanover has been a working journalist since age 17, before he enlisted and worked for Ba'Machane Nachal. Since then he has worked for Israel Shelanu, the US supplement of Yedioth, JCN18.com, USAJewish.com, Lubavitch News Service, Arutz 7 (as DJ on the high seas), and the Grand Street News. He has published Dancing and Crying, a colorful and intimate portrait of the last two years in the life of the late Lubavitch Rebbe, (in Hebrew), and two fun books in English: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption, and How Would God REALLY Vote.