ABSTRACT
The privileging of the repatriate Judaeans from Babylonia over others and the exaggerated legitimization of these as the true Israel is ideological. There is a discrepancy between ideological construct and social reality. In this, there are analogies with repatriation policy and practice today. People may set the xenophobia of Ezra-Nehemiah against the laws in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus that protect the resident alien. In Jewish tradition, Ezra and Nehemiah are treated as two strands of an original work and separate from other Biblical books. They reveal a close connection between ideology and politics. Since the 1990s, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) found "voluntary repatriation" to be "the most desirable solution to refugee problems", there has been a move towards "imposed return". International refugee agencies portray refugees as an undifferentiated mass of individuals who have flight or displacement in common, and they depict repatriation in fundamentalist terms as a return to the familiar context of one's former life.
