On Jan. 25, Interior Minister Aryeh Deir announced that he had approved the entry into Israel of some 100 Syrian children orphaned in their country's civil war. According to the plan prepared by the ministry, the children will be granted temporary residency, and after four years will be eligible for permanent resident status allowing them to remain in Israel. If first-degree relatives of the children are located at some point, the Interior Ministry will also consider granting them Israeli residency.

Deri came under pressure over the past year from various directions urging him to take some sort of humanitarian action, even if symbolic, proving that Israelis are not indifferent to events across its border. After all, Israel itself is a state of refugees who experienced the Holocaust, and it cannot sit around doing nothing when such horrific scenes are emerging from Syria. So far Israel has treated more than 2,500 wounded Syrians brought to Israeli hospitals, but none were granted residency and all were returned to Syria after their treatment and recovery.

Opposition Chairman Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Camp appealed to the government more than a year ago, in September 2015, saying Jews cannot remain indifferent when thousands of refugees are seeking safe haven. Herzog urged Israel to take in Syrians and grant them a life-saving asylum status. A fellow Knesset member from Herzog's Zionist Camp, Itzik Shmuli, waged a campaign on the issue and called on the interior minister to take immediate humanitarian measures to save refugees, wondering out loud how we had all become so inured to the wholesale slaughter of innocents.

We Israelis have not exactly been indifferent to events in Syria. Since the outbreak of the war almost six years ago, and especially since the massacres in Aleppo, various Israeli organizations have been energized into action. Some raised money for human rights organizations helping Syrian refugees, others mobilized Israeli public opinion in a bid to prompt government action, repeatedly haranguing the government to show its sensitivity to the murder of civilians.