Cairo, Egypt ? Israel’s decision to close its doors to asylum-seekers from Darfur and all other non-Jewish refugees has Israelis and Jews around the world struggling with their distinct identities of Israel: a Jewish state with a Jewish people, or alternately a state born from the Holocaust with a determination to challenge future genocides and succor their victims.

Israeli refugee groups this week said that they would challenge in court Israel’s new policy of blocking Africans who enter the country from Egypt. International and Israeli rights groups maintain that returning the would-be refugees without assessing their claims for asylum violates international accords, including the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, as well as Israeli law and government commitments.

In its decision announced last weekend, Israel also said it would expel to Egypt all but 500 people from Darfur already in the Jewish state. Since 2003, an Arab militia linked to the Sudanese government has led a campaign of violence in the western region of Sudan that has left as many as 450,000 African villagers dead and displaced 2.5 million, rights groups say.

Turning back the Darfur refugees “is unconscionable by any standard,” columnist Evelyn Gordon wrote in the Jerusalem Post.

The issue has posed a quandary for many of the groups heading efforts to stop the killing in Darfur. Jewish groups in the United States have taken a leading role in raising awareness about the killing and in urging the United States and other entities to take action against Sudan. The American Jewish World Service and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum founded the Save Darfur Coalition, the biggest raiser of private funds for Darfur in the United States.

However, international Jewish organizations that have spoken out against Sudan and against China, the United States and other governments for not doing more to help Darfur’s people have remained silent on Israel’s decision to shut its borders to the Darfur asylum-seekers. Some have defended the action.

“We don’t have to solve every problem of the world,” Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said by telephone. “This is creating all sorts of pressure on Israel which is really not justified.

“I’m 1,000 percent in favor of doing everything possible to stop the genocide,” Zuroff said. But “Israel can’t open the gates and turn this into a free-entry zone.”

The Wiesenthal Center is promoting an Internet petition urging the U.N. Human Rights Council “to focus its attention away from resolutions bashing Israel and rather on what the U.N. itself has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis: Darfur.”

Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, said Israel had taken the “moral approach” by allowing 500 of the refugees to stay. European countries with more room should take in more refugees, Shalev said.

At least 1,700 African refugees, an estimated one-third of them from Darfur, have streamed into Israel this year.

Most Darfur refugees outside Sudan live in camps in Chad, where they have been attacked. Some of the refugees have gone to Libya, which has deported them.