Reader AJ from Miami responds to my earlier comments that:

If the organizing principle of of Israel is so tenuous that the giving of sanctuary to a few thousand people who have not themselves shown any animosity towards her amounts to “a suicide pact” – well, one wonders whether such a principle is worth preserving.

If we were talking about just a “few thousand” people, he’d be right, with regard to Israel or any other Western country. But not only are we talking about Muslim refugees (a substantial portion of whom are guaranteed to embrace Jew-hatred as the unofficial Sixth Pillar of Islam), but it won’t be limited to a few thousand. That was true with regard to the handful of Vietnamese boat people that Israel took in, whose arrival had zero possibility of sparking further arrivals. But not so with regard to the Darfur refugees — in fact, as a Washington Post article Sunday made clear, Israel’s earlier flexibility is what’s sparked the current flow:

The Israeli government earlier this year allowed a few of the Sudanese refugees to take jobs inside Israel. But that decision may have inadvertently encouraged this summer’s influx, the refugees said.