Expelling refugees to be like all other nations?

I wish to call attention to Dr. Elana Maryles Sztokman's Expelling refugees to be like all other nations?.

I'll briefly note: "Never Again" means that no one on earth will have another Holocaust. "Never Again" does not mean only to Jews; "Never Again" means "Never Again", period, whether the victims are Jewish or not.

With that said, let me briefly quote Dr. Sztokman. I encourage reading her article in full.

The announcement this morning by Interior Minister Eli Yishai of Shas [was] that the foreign workers will undergo a "massive expulsion." ... What shocked me was his rationale: "Whoever is found will not receive refuge — just like every ‘civilized’ country in the world," he said.

The irony here cannot be understated. Yishai, in his various governmental positions, has been one of the greatest proponents of the idea that Israel must be a nation unlike all others. ...

Now, however, Yishai conveniently wants us to be like all other nations. Just as other nations freely close their eyes to human suffering, so, too, the Jewish nation needs to be able to do the same. Just as the United States was able to send away the St Louis when the boat full of European Jewish escapees sought shelter from Nazi Germany, returning every passenger to the gas chambers without even the slightest flinch of what we might call "conscience," so, too, Yishai reasons, the Jewish nation can turn a blind eye to the plight of refugees, and thus be considered "civilized".

I completely agree in every way, and I don't think I can add anything to her words.

Dr. Sztokman further notes,

So here we are, witnessing this tragic irony in which the first time an ultra-Orthodox leader declares an opposing vision to be like all others, it is for the sake of being able to use an iron fist to expel the weakest members of our society.

Yishai has it backwards. This is a deplorable reversal of when we should be thinking for ourselves and when we should take inspiration from others. If the rest of the world kicks out refugees, we should not emulate others but explore our own morality. By contrast, if, in the rest of the world, abused women are allowed to freely exit marriage, we should not be so insistent that this is “our way” and therefore women are stuck. The unwillingness to see the global perspective and the universal moral implications of the agunah issue are rooted in an archaic, stubborn insistence that this is the Jewish way. It’s heartbreaking.

This reminds me of a certain Rabbinic aggadah. The Rabbis are faced with two different verses in Tanakh (I forget where), saying, alternately,
(1) We sinned in that we imitated the nations;
(2) We sinned in that we did not imitate the nations.
The Rabbis reconcile this contradiction by saying that we imitated the nations when we should not have, and we did not when we should have. The nations have things we should learn and things we should not learn, but we reversed the two, learning what we should not have and not learning what we should have.

Dr. Sztokman continues,

But there is another tragic distortion at work here. What should make the Jewish nation distinct is not the strict, unbending adherence to the greatest minutiae of ancient, archaic Jewish regulations. What should make us distinct is our commitment to the Jewish ethic. Torah is meant to offer us a set of moral precepts that would take us through history as a compassionate, ethical people. I’ve said this many times before, but I’ll say it again. The most fundamental ethic of Torah is compassion.

Regarding this, I'll refer readers to my The Morality Crisis in Orthodox Judaism.