Jews shoulder their historical responsibility to help Afghan refugees

COLIN SHINDLER: The lessons of history have driven many Jewish organisations worldwide to call on their governments to bring desperate Afghanis to safe shores

TWO WEEKS AGO, Jews in the Diaspora were instructed in the Torah reading of Parashah Shoftim: “Justice, justice, shall you follow”. Then the reality in Afghanistan intervened.

Joe Biden's long-held belief that US troops should not be in Afghanistan was implemented by an incompetent US military who had not taken into account the worst-case scenario that the Taliban were in fact simply pushing at an open door.

The sudden disappearance of the Americans from Bagram airbase further demoralised the underpaid, undervalued Afghan military whose leaders were deeply mired in corrupt practices.

In addition, the Taliban were presented in the West as solely a terrorist movement rather than as one which had considerable political support in the country — otherwise why would they have been able to survive two decades of a subterranean existence?

America's indecision as to whether it should try to change societies for the better or simply not even contemplate the idea has not been resolved. The question is still blowing in the wind — after the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba (1961), Vietnam (1965), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). The scenes at Kabul airport last week are not unprecedented.

The Europeans proved incapable of creating a rival military force to replace the departing Americans. Global Britain was shown to be a fiction and remained as impotent as it was during the Suez crisis in 1956 when it invaded Egypt with France, in collusion with Israel - and was then forced to swiftly retreat in the face of Eisenhower's opposition.

Jews therefore — and particularly those in Israel — reason today that in the final analysis they can only depend on themselves. This is the profound significance of the existence of a Hebrew republic in the Land of Israel.

Jews, of all peoples, can certainly relate to these terrible scenes of desperate families, attempting to escape from a vengeful enemy. UK Chief Rabbi Mirvis said recently that “our heritage must inform the way that we respond” while the late Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recalled in September 2015, the plight of the kindertransport children, in referring to the crisis of the Syrian refugees.