Yeah, anonymous, haven't you heard? Being a self-hating Jew is so passe. It's all about being a self-hating American now. 

"Either way, the good news is that Israeli and American Jewish irredentists who might have been nursing a grudge against Moshe Katsav for shaking hands with Muhammad Khatami now have something real to be angry about." 

 I think that most Jews are smart enough resist the temptation to tie in two completely disparate people, simply because they both share the same cultural hyphenate.

Never use a double entendre where Eli Valley might be lurking. 

Philip Roth hasn't yet held a press conference to confirm that his writing demonstrates a distaste for other Jews. Neither did I say he has. What I said was that I didn't think he denied it at this point in his career. "The Ghost Writer", which is based on an encounter he had as a young writer with Bernard Malamud, explores some of his own feelings of guilt for having created characters which were ripe examples for anti-Semitic fodder.  

"...and letting them roam freely in Israel--- well, you can imagine what might happen."

Unfortunately the incompetence of the Israeli government has led to a great amount of just that. JPost/Haaretz reported some months ago that Israeli soldiers were taking refugees/illegal immigrants to police stations to be held in custody while the government figures out what to do with them. For whatever reason (moral/practical/it was cigarette break time), they were released before they could enter the building because nobody wanted to process them. They were released and left to their own devices.

These people are unfortunate, sad stories about the failures of governments to serve their people. Some of them, like many of our grandparents, are even genocide survivors. Maybe, in that light, Israel does have a moral obligation to help those particular refugees in some way; that doesn't mean sacrificing its own national security by haphazardly letting anyone into its borders. Deciding who actually is a refugee of genocide, who is seeking better work opportunity, and who is a security threat sneaking in under false pretenses is key. Practically speaking, that means detaining people until that can get done.

Maybe it also means using diplomatic means to pressure Egypt into handling them properly so that they don't fear for their lives and/or die of starvation. As a direct neighbor, Egypt is one of the countries actually lawfully responsible for harboring refugees from Sudan anyway. Maybe that means granting temporary visas to Darfuri refugees, and creating a well organized social agency to help them. From what I understand, the U.N. outpost in Israel has been the one to champion their cause, and we know how smarmy and morally high-handed those U.N. folks are when it comes to Israel. If they actually honored the statues of international law they would be aiming more of that at Egypt