Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked (Yamina) on Sunday night announced a significant change in her ministry’s policy regarding receiving refugees from Ukraine. In a statement she issued at Ben Gurion Airport, Shaked said that any Ukrainian who has relatives in Israel will be able to enter the country and will be exempt from the refugee absorption quota.
“After a meeting with the Deputy Attorney General this morning, it was decided that relatives would be exempt from the quota,” the interior minister said, explaining: “This means that whoever has a relative and comes to Israel, and the same Israeli citizen signs that the same relative is staying with him for a month or two to get some fresh air, will be exempted from the quota.”
The quota, to remind you, is 5,000 Ukrainians who are not Jewish and do not qualify for Aliyah. This number was initially added to the 20,000 or so Ukrainian citizens who have been in the country for years as foreign workers, legal or otherwise, and Shaked was able to claim that Israel was ready to host 25,000 refugees – 80% of whom were not refugees at all.
It didn’t sound or look good for the right-wing minister whose only goal was to maintain the Jewish majority in Israel, let it be overwhelmed by opportunity-seeking folks from Eastern Europe looking to take advantage of the war. To that end, Shaked instituted the bail bond policy, forcing the Israeli hosts of Ukrainian newcomers to deposit NIS 20,000 (about $6,000) to guarantee that in a month or so they would leave. That, too, made for horrible optics.
OK, there was something else: had someone in the interior ministry done their homework, as Yossi Verter pointed out in Ha’aretz Monday morning, they would have discovered that in 2010 Israel signed a visa exemption agreement with the Ukrainian government benefitting Ukrainian citizens with relatives in Israel. They are entitled to enter Israel whenever they wish, and this is the practice in ordinary times – so during a war, Israel should deprive them of this legally binding right?
Shaked remained belligerent, despite the 100 percent softening of her policy. She told reporters at Ben Gurion: “The State of Israel is first and foremost the national home of the Jewish people. I suggest to all the people who criticize and hint – go to Terminal One (arrivals – DI), see how hundreds of new olim are arriving every day. Yes, the beneficiaries of the Law of Return have also escaped the war and they come here and we absorb them and we naturalize them. No country is facing such an order of magnitude of immediate absorption. Despite all of those who attack and despite those who criticize – I do not forget that we are first and foremost the national home of the Jewish people. And we will invest most of our efforts in those who are entitled under the Law of Return and are come here in droves.”
She continued, hopefully, while being aware of the contradiction between her patriotic statements and her just-flipped legal measure, but maybe not: “At the same time, certainly as the Jewish nation that was persecuted, we understand what being refugees means, so we also open our hearts and doors to those who are not entitled under the Law of Return. But this must be done to a limited extent. We cannot open our gates to everyone. This will not happen on my shift. In the end, I could have done something populist, but I choose to do something right even if it isn’t popular.”
In the end, alas, no one will remember those high-minded declarations, only Shaked’s action of opening up the floodgates to a process she will not be able to control. In the end, the Interior Minister ate the stinking fish, received the blows, and was run out of town.
And on that happy note, the Ukrainian embassy petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice against Interior Minister Shaked and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, the entire Israeli government, and the country’s Population and Immigration Authority, demanding the lifting of restrictions on entry for refugees from Ukraine.
Happy Purim.
