Misery Without Borders

Few are as gifted at distorting facts and blaming the wrong side as the United Nations. The just-released U.N. report bashing the Israeli military response to the incessant rockets fired by the Hamas terror group is only the latest example of how that world body never allows the truth to stand in the way of bias.

While much of the media has allowed itself to be distracted by the skewed Gaza report, it is all but ignoring the release of a much more factual, unrelated U.N. study on refugees.

Anyone who has seen the newly-released U.N. figures on refugees was likely shocked by it. Even those who follow the news and read the frequent reports about the desperate flight from Syria into Lebanon and Turkey, and the pitiful stories of migrants from Africa drowning in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe, may not be prepared for the harrowing scale of the problem as depicted in this report.

The aggregate number is 60 million, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report covering the year 2014.

As with all numbers this size, it is hard to grasp without some comparison. In this case, it means that the number of world refugees is nearly equal to the population of Britain or Italy, bigger than that of South Africa or South Korea, nearly twice that of Canadians in Canada. If they were a country, it would be the 23rd most populous country in the world.

But that, of course, is precisely the problem. These 60 million have no country. Many will never have a country of their own again; they will be refugees for the rest of their lives and their children — over half the world’s refugees are children! — will grow up in a foreign country.

As such, they depend on the kindness and forbearance of their hosts and the generosity of the international community. Unfortunately, the host nations are not always so kind. Italy, Lebanon and Turkey have their own economic and social problems and are ill-equipped to handle the burden of sudden mass immigration. Native populations are suspicious, fearful and often overtly hostile to the uninvited outsiders. Nor, for that matter, are the refugees themselves exactly glad to be there, even if they are glad to have escaped war with their lives.

As for the generosity of the international community, it has not been enough. U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres stated that “with huge shortages of funding and wide gaps in the global regime for protecting victims of war, people in need of compassion, aid and refuge are being abandoned.” He called for a larger humanitarian response and tolerance and protection for the people in these situations.

And, as in every episode of large-scale displacement and suffering, there are those who seek to profit by it. The warlords, the gangs of smugglers, the human traffickers, the common thieves, batten on their fellow human beings in an awful plight. For a ransom fee — for as much as they can get — they will put crowds of hapless refugees on a boat that can safely hold no more, that wasn’t seaworthy in the first place, and send them off to capsize in the sea. They will lead people into the desert, divest them of all their possessions and leave them to find their way across a bandit-infested frontier, where many will never make it to the better life they seek.

If it weren’t bad enough, the problem is getting worse. After holding more or less steady for about six years, the rate of displacement accelerated by more than 50 percent in one year, as the number of refugees grew from roughly 51 million in 2013 to 60 million in 2014. If one out of every 200 people were forced to migrate in 2013, that figure jumped to one out of every 133 people in 2014.

And the isolationist attitude — that this crisis is far away and not our problem — becomes harder and harder to sustain. Europe, for all its high-minded liberalism, is an increasingly reluctant host. In April, U.N. human rights officials issued a joint statement calling on the European Union to create a new rescue operation program for migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean and to commit to receiving many more.

Islamic State’s brutal redrawing of the borders of Syria and Iraq has been profoundly disruptive to the social fabric of neighboring Lebanon and Turkey. An estimated one-fifth of all refugees around the world in 2014 were Syrian. Over one-fifth of Lebanon’s population today consists of refugees.

We in America are half a world away from all this turmoil. But for our fellow Jews in Israel, the chaos is just a short drive to the northern border. In recent days, as the fighting in Syria has come close to the Israeli Golan, you can see the clouds of smoke from artillery fire even without the aid of binoculars. The IDF has been bracing for a possible massive rush of the Syrian Druze seeking safe haven on the Israeli side of the border. That, and the operations of Hizbullah and al-Qaida-linked forces in the area, make for a potentially explosive situation.

For Jews, with our own unparalleled history of persecution and exile, the suffering of the refugee is all too-well-known. We want to help; we do give help. Syrian casualties have been taken in and given medical care, and aid has been sent into Syria through the Israeli Druze community. But Israel dare not entangle itself in the civil war there, and open borders are not an option.

The global situation, unprecedented since the upheavals of World War II, strains not only the bounds of compassion but the imagination itself. We struggle to comprehend what is going on, in socio-political terms, and in human terms. It is truly a case of human misery without borders.

Sadly, the world community is too busy criticizing Israel for trying to stop a terror group that is firing rockets at its citizens to care about 60 million refugees.

If any sanity can be salvaged from it, perhaps it is the saying of Chazal, so simple yet so full of wisdom: “Pray for the welfare of the government, for if not for the fear of it, every man would swallow his fellow alive.”

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