ABSTRACT
The very compellability of the right to leave as a human rights issue secured for Soviet Jewish emigrants a prominent place on the East-West human rights agenda, if not also a priority on the human rights foreign policy agenda of Western nations as exemplified by the Jackson-Vanick Amendment. Human rights non-governmental organizations, for example, have called on the US government to condition its security and economic assistance to Israel on Israeli compliance with human rights norms, which also “feeds” into the refugee status determination system as it does into foreign policy decision-making. The Israeli protest appeared to assume that the issue was the conferral of refugee status on Jews from the former Soviet Union and their non-Jewish relatives who had immigrated to Israel under the Israeli Law of Return. For Israel, the immigration from the former Soviet Union and successor Commonwealth of Independent States was a vindication of the Israeli raison d’etre of the “ingathering of the exiles.”.
