The Zionist project at the turn of the 19th century was meant chiefly as a solution to the “Jewish problem”—a rescue mission whose dictum became “the ingathering of exiles” in the Land of Israel. However, early Zionism as a movement heavily informed by colonial and national European sentiments, engaged in another undertaking—the modernization of the indigenous population of Palestine. In this sense, Zionism heeded the Jewish biblical call to be “or lagoyim” (light to other nations). The escalating Arab-Zionist strife in the late 1920s deemed this patronizing position untenable. Then, with the mass immigration of Oriental Jews (also called Arab-Jews or Mizrahim) to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish elite of Israel revived that rescue mission, only this time its patronizing discourse targeted the putatively primitive Oriental Jew. Over the years, with the relative assimilation of the Oriental Jews into Israeli society at large, this discourse gradually lost its sway. Yet again, with the increasing presence in Israel of migrant workers from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, that trite rescue mission finds it expression in contemporary culture, including cinema. Some recent Israeli films about migrant workers depict the economic and personal hardships these laborers face in their respective homelands and in Israel. However, it is ultimately the benevolent Israeli who, out of moral conviction, determines to solve the problems these workers have been facing. In some documentary films, the filmmaker facilitates the positive denouement where the migrant finally reunites with his/her family back home. Addressing films such as Noodle, The Journey of Vaan Nueghn, and James’ Journey to the Holy Land, this talk examines the problematics of the rescue mission of the other in contemporary Israeli cinema, and, specifically the paradox that this intervention involves spewing the others/the migrants away from Israel back to their countries of origin.