TOI: Prominent Israel advocates urge Netanyahu to reverse course on deportations

Five prominent Israel advocates, including Abraham Foxman and Alan Dershowitz, warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “incalculable damage” to Israel’s reputation should he press ahead with a plan to deport nearly 40,000 African migrants.

“We, a group of ardent Zionists, who have devoted our lives to defending the good name of the state of Israel and the Jewish people, write with urgent concern about the situation of the African asylum seekers,” said the letter signed by Dershowitz, a constitutional lawyer and prominent Israel defender; Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, a former chair of the US Holocaust Memorial Council, and Rabbi Avi Weiss, a longtime activist and rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York. Weiss initiated the letter.