EUROPEAN RACISM: Israel’s Other War - The Brutal, Relentless And Merciless Persecution Of African Migrants In The "Holy Land"!
January 07, 2014 - ISRAEL - A recent Jerusalem Post op-ed on “South Africa’s obsession with Israel” resurrects complaints regarding the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which during its 2011 session in Cape Town concluded that “Israel’s rule over the Palestinian people, wherever they reside, collectively amounts to a single integrated regime of apartheid.”
The op-ed author reasons that, “[i]f… supporters of the tribunal were honestly concerned with the lives of Palestinians, why then was there not a single word mentioned about the abuse of Palestinians by Arab regimes such as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait, who keep them stateless, refuse them access to higher education and do not allow them the vote?”
This critique conveniently ignores the fact that Palestinian statelessness is a direct result of the establishment of Israel, whose initial crime of ethnic cleansing granted Arab regimes the opportunity to engage in such abuses.
Furthermore, none of these regimes is portrayed by the US political class and media as a highly ethical democracy meriting multibillion-dollar annual donations.
As it turns out, South Africa’s alleged ”obsession” with Israel extends beyond the treatment of Palestinians. In 2012, a resolution was passed “abhor[ring] the recent Israeli state-sponsored xenophobic attacks and deportation of Africans”.
One could argue that, because Africans are also treated like badly in other places around the globe, Israel is being unfairly singled out for criticism.
However, this debate is generally averted thanks to the relative silence surrounding the plight of Africans in Israel.
Battling the ‘cancer’
Among the diminutive ranks of the vocal minority is Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen, who reports relentlessly on the hazards to African existence in the Jewish state.
These range from verbal and physical abuse - including, for example, the pelting of African women and children with bottles, cassette players, and other impromptu projectiles and the firebombing of homes and daycares – to long-term incarceration in inhumane conditions without trial, to the mass secret forcible repatriation of Sudanese asylum seekers in violation of the UN convention on the status of refugees.
In a May blog post for +972 Magazine, Sheen marked the one-year anniversary of the ”anti-African pogrom” in Tel Aviv, when “a thousand Jewish Israelis ran rampant through the streets… smashing and looting African-operated businesses and physically assaulting any dark-skinned person they came across.”
The rioters were encouraged by the likes of lawmaker Miri Regev, who announced that African migrants are “a cancer in the body” of the nation – terminology generally reserved for Palestinians.
As Sheen notes, Regev “apologised after the violence, not to African asylum seekers, but to Israeli cancer victims, for comparing them to Africans – [and] was appointed by [PM Benjamin] Netanyahu to head the Knesset Interior Committee, the very body that decides the fate of those asylum seekers”.
Sheen’s fundraising campaign to write a book on the plight of African refugees in Israel has been met with widespread vitriol, including from Amir Mizroch, editor-in-chief of Israel Hayom English.
In an email, Sheen shared his response to Mizroch’s allegation that writing a book about racism against Africans in Israel without also discussing racism against Africans in Arab countries constitutes racism against Israelis: ”When I mocked his logic, asking him if it was necessary, in order to put the reports in their proper context, for me to also be locked up in an underground jail and tortured – sadly, the fate of many of these African refugees before they arrive in Israel – Mizroch tweeted: “now THAT I’d pay to see ;)”.
It’s worth reiterating that the mistreatment of Africans in non-Israeli locales often occurs in the countries from which they have fled and to which Israel has no qualms about illegally deporting them. Netanyahu has pledged to rid the country of its “tens of thousands of infiltrators” from Africa.
Monochrome Judaism
The deployment of the term “infiltrators” to denote Africans in general, who are caricaturised as animalistic criminals responsible for many of Israel’s ills, is disturbingly reminiscent of other historical periods involving the scapegoating of ethnic minorities.
Sheen remarks: ”When Israel rounds up and deports African refugees, it makes a mockery of the millions of Jews who died during World War II because no one would grant them shelter.”
Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon’s suggestion that the presence of Africans in Israel constitutes the establishment of “an enemy state of infiltrators” fails to account for the fact that the award for setting up adversarial countries on other people’s land goes to Israel itself.
Although the fundamental reason for restricting African access to Israel is to prevent a tipping of the demographic balance in favour of non-Jews, the circumstances facing Ethiopian Jewish immigrants indicate that religion only gets you so far. Lest the target national colour scheme be irreparably disrupted as well, Israel has been known to forcibly inject Ethiopian females with contraceptives.
Other partial exceptions to the goal of monochrome Judaism do, however, exist. Sheen noted in May: ”Since Israel took over responsibility for reviewing refugee status requests from UNHCR, out of the 60,000 non-Jewish African asylum seekers living in Israel, Israel has approved only one single solitary application. And that one African woman that the State of Israel… has deigned to bequeath refugee status upon - is an albino“.
As for the hyper-paranoid ruckus concerning the allegedly inherent criminality of Africans, such allegations don’t jibe with the statistics. As Sheen has documented, criminal behaviour is more prevalent among “veteran Israelis” than asylum seekers, but, while instances in which Africans accused of raping Jews produce calls for the indiscriminate deportation of refugees, no such hysteria is generated when the rapist is Jewish.
The hypocrisy is rendered even more acute by Israel’s institutionalised rape culture, of which Sheen provides a few contemporary examples:
“The Jerusalem chief of police was indicted for sex crimes involving nine female officers. An Israeli mayor charged with ‘repeatedly raping a female subordinate over a lengthy period of time was given no jail time, and [was]instead invited to attend an event organised by the municipality marking ‘International Women’s Day’.”
A new video produced by Sheen and bestselling author Max Blumenthal features footage of Israeli defenders of African rights being serenaded by other members of the public with shouts like “May you be raped!”
‘Landscape of denial’
Originally solicited and then rejected by the New York Times, the video also includes an interview with former Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, who declares: ”We are waging a war against the phenomenon of assimilation.”
Given such candidness with regards to politically incorrect designs, the international media’s complicity in censoring reality is no doubt partly to thank for the upkeep of Israel’s image.
So, obviously, is Israel’s PR machine, which as Sheen points out is ”[w]ell-oiled from decades of distributing disinformation about Palestinians”, and thus in a position to magically convert the horrendous treatment of Africans into a narrative of incomparable magnanimity.
The perpetuation of this narrative entails the attempted silencing of persons like Sheen, subject not only to verbal intimidation but also physical harassment.
The fabrications upon which the state of Israel teeters are meanwhile explored in a new documentary by Israeli journalist Lia Tarachansky, On the Side of the Road, which tells the story ”of those who fought to erase Palestine and created an Israeli landscape of denial”.
Parliamentarian David Rotem appears in Knesset footage in the film informing his detractors: ”You want to convert this state into a state for all its citizens, and you will not succeed. We will stop you.”
So much for democracy.
Cast as existential threats to the Jewish state, Palestinians and Africans have served as targets for Israel’s Prevention of Infiltration Law, devised to thwart Palestinian homecoming, and updated in 2012 to provide for the instantaneous imprisonment without trial of Africans.
It seems, however, that a neurotic nation that depends upon the forgery of ubiquitous enemies to justify the wanton trampling of rights and dehumanising subjugation of the “Other” might indeed be its own worst adversary.
After all, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has warned: ”A history which is no longer credible serves neither to legitimate the State nor to inspire… its citizenry.”
WATCH: Israel's New Racism - The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land.
More than 30,000 African asylum seekers who entered Israel illegally protested in Tel Aviv on Sunday, police said, in the biggest rally ever staged by migrants in the Jewish state.
“More than 30,000 demonstrators marched peacefully in Tel Aviv,” police spokeswoman Lubra Samri told reporters.
Gathered in the coastal city’s central Rabin Square, the protesters sharply criticised Israel’s refusal to give them refugee status and the detention without trial of hundreds of asylum seekers.
“We are all refugees” and “Yes to freedom, no to prison!” they chanted in English, with Israeli rights activists also joining the march.
Ultra-Orthodox MP Eli Yishai, the hardline former interior minister who in 2012 led the government campaign to round up and deport tens of thousands of Africans, denounced the protest.
Yishai said that the “infiltrators”, as authorities call them, were encouraged by “anti-Zionist human rights organisations”.
Rights groups say most African migrants in Israel cannot be deported because their lives would be under threat if they returned to their homes in Sudan and Eritrea.
Yishai told reporters that Tel Aviv, where many of the migrants live, “long ago became an African city”.
He said the demonstration was “a sharp and clear cry for the state of Israel and judicial and law enforcement authorities to apply all the means at their disposal to return the infiltrators to their countries”.
Dawud, an Eritrean asylum-seeker at the protest, said that: “We have fled persecution, dictatorships, civil wars and genocides.
“Instead of considering us refugees, Israel treats us like criminals,” he added, without giving his full name.
Dawud said the demonstrators intended to head for the UN refugee agency’s Tel Aviv office and foreign embassies in the city in further rallies on Monday.
Many African immigrants, who are often employed in menial jobs in restaurants and hotels, also launched a three-day strike in several Israeli cities on Sunday.
Under legislation passed on December 10, authorities can imprison African immigrants entering Israel for up to a year without trial.
WATCH: Africans Fight For Freedom As Israel Build The World’s Largest Prison To Jail Them.
The same month a sprawling detention facility named “Holot” or “Sands” opened in southern Israel’s Negev desert to house Africans crossing the nearby Egyptian border and for immigrants already in the country deemed to have disturbed public order.
The moves triggered protest marches by migrants, including inmates who are allowed out during the day but locked in at night, but Sunday’s was the largest demonstration by far.
Israel says that there are close to 60,000 illegal immigrants from Africa in the country and that they pose a threat to the state’s “Jewish character”.
Along with arrests and deportations, Israel has also built a high-tech fence along the border with Egypt’s barren Sinai, the main point of clandestine entry.
Many migrants live in poor southern neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv where violent race riots erupted in 2012.
Anti-migrant protesters there were addressed by MPs from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, including hardliner Miri Regev, who at the time called the Africans “a cancer in our body”. - African Globe.
The op-ed author reasons that, “[i]f… supporters of the tribunal were honestly concerned with the lives of Palestinians, why then was there not a single word mentioned about the abuse of Palestinians by Arab regimes such as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait, who keep them stateless, refuse them access to higher education and do not allow them the vote?”
This critique conveniently ignores the fact that Palestinian statelessness is a direct result of the establishment of Israel, whose initial crime of ethnic cleansing granted Arab regimes the opportunity to engage in such abuses.
Furthermore, none of these regimes is portrayed by the US political class and media as a highly ethical democracy meriting multibillion-dollar annual donations.
As it turns out, South Africa’s alleged ”obsession” with Israel extends beyond the treatment of Palestinians. In 2012, a resolution was passed “abhor[ring] the recent Israeli state-sponsored xenophobic attacks and deportation of Africans”.
One could argue that, because Africans are also treated like badly in other places around the globe, Israel is being unfairly singled out for criticism.
However, this debate is generally averted thanks to the relative silence surrounding the plight of Africans in Israel.
Battling the ‘cancer’
Among the diminutive ranks of the vocal minority is Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen, who reports relentlessly on the hazards to African existence in the Jewish state.
These range from verbal and physical abuse - including, for example, the pelting of African women and children with bottles, cassette players, and other impromptu projectiles and the firebombing of homes and daycares – to long-term incarceration in inhumane conditions without trial, to the mass secret forcible repatriation of Sudanese asylum seekers in violation of the UN convention on the status of refugees.
In a May blog post for +972 Magazine, Sheen marked the one-year anniversary of the ”anti-African pogrom” in Tel Aviv, when “a thousand Jewish Israelis ran rampant through the streets… smashing and looting African-operated businesses and physically assaulting any dark-skinned person they came across.”
 |
| Israel has begun to round up and jail African refugees. |
The rioters were encouraged by the likes of lawmaker Miri Regev, who announced that African migrants are “a cancer in the body” of the nation – terminology generally reserved for Palestinians.
As Sheen notes, Regev “apologised after the violence, not to African asylum seekers, but to Israeli cancer victims, for comparing them to Africans – [and] was appointed by [PM Benjamin] Netanyahu to head the Knesset Interior Committee, the very body that decides the fate of those asylum seekers”.
Sheen’s fundraising campaign to write a book on the plight of African refugees in Israel has been met with widespread vitriol, including from Amir Mizroch, editor-in-chief of Israel Hayom English.
In an email, Sheen shared his response to Mizroch’s allegation that writing a book about racism against Africans in Israel without also discussing racism against Africans in Arab countries constitutes racism against Israelis: ”When I mocked his logic, asking him if it was necessary, in order to put the reports in their proper context, for me to also be locked up in an underground jail and tortured – sadly, the fate of many of these African refugees before they arrive in Israel – Mizroch tweeted: “now THAT I’d pay to see ;)”.
It’s worth reiterating that the mistreatment of Africans in non-Israeli locales often occurs in the countries from which they have fled and to which Israel has no qualms about illegally deporting them. Netanyahu has pledged to rid the country of its “tens of thousands of infiltrators” from Africa.
Monochrome Judaism
The deployment of the term “infiltrators” to denote Africans in general, who are caricaturised as animalistic criminals responsible for many of Israel’s ills, is disturbingly reminiscent of other historical periods involving the scapegoating of ethnic minorities.
Sheen remarks: ”When Israel rounds up and deports African refugees, it makes a mockery of the millions of Jews who died during World War II because no one would grant them shelter.”
Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon’s suggestion that the presence of Africans in Israel constitutes the establishment of “an enemy state of infiltrators” fails to account for the fact that the award for setting up adversarial countries on other people’s land goes to Israel itself.
Although the fundamental reason for restricting African access to Israel is to prevent a tipping of the demographic balance in favour of non-Jews, the circumstances facing Ethiopian Jewish immigrants indicate that religion only gets you so far. Lest the target national colour scheme be irreparably disrupted as well, Israel has been known to forcibly inject Ethiopian females with contraceptives.
Other partial exceptions to the goal of monochrome Judaism do, however, exist. Sheen noted in May: ”Since Israel took over responsibility for reviewing refugee status requests from UNHCR, out of the 60,000 non-Jewish African asylum seekers living in Israel, Israel has approved only one single solitary application. And that one African woman that the State of Israel… has deigned to bequeath refugee status upon - is an albino“.
As for the hyper-paranoid ruckus concerning the allegedly inherent criminality of Africans, such allegations don’t jibe with the statistics. As Sheen has documented, criminal behaviour is more prevalent among “veteran Israelis” than asylum seekers, but, while instances in which Africans accused of raping Jews produce calls for the indiscriminate deportation of refugees, no such hysteria is generated when the rapist is Jewish.
The hypocrisy is rendered even more acute by Israel’s institutionalised rape culture, of which Sheen provides a few contemporary examples:
“The Jerusalem chief of police was indicted for sex crimes involving nine female officers. An Israeli mayor charged with ‘repeatedly raping a female subordinate over a lengthy period of time was given no jail time, and [was]instead invited to attend an event organised by the municipality marking ‘International Women’s Day’.”
A new video produced by Sheen and bestselling author Max Blumenthal features footage of Israeli defenders of African rights being serenaded by other members of the public with shouts like “May you be raped!”
‘Landscape of denial’
Originally solicited and then rejected by the New York Times, the video also includes an interview with former Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, who declares: ”We are waging a war against the phenomenon of assimilation.”
Given such candidness with regards to politically incorrect designs, the international media’s complicity in censoring reality is no doubt partly to thank for the upkeep of Israel’s image.
So, obviously, is Israel’s PR machine, which as Sheen points out is ”[w]ell-oiled from decades of distributing disinformation about Palestinians”, and thus in a position to magically convert the horrendous treatment of Africans into a narrative of incomparable magnanimity.
The perpetuation of this narrative entails the attempted silencing of persons like Sheen, subject not only to verbal intimidation but also physical harassment.
The fabrications upon which the state of Israel teeters are meanwhile explored in a new documentary by Israeli journalist Lia Tarachansky, On the Side of the Road, which tells the story ”of those who fought to erase Palestine and created an Israeli landscape of denial”.
Parliamentarian David Rotem appears in Knesset footage in the film informing his detractors: ”You want to convert this state into a state for all its citizens, and you will not succeed. We will stop you.”
So much for democracy.
Cast as existential threats to the Jewish state, Palestinians and Africans have served as targets for Israel’s Prevention of Infiltration Law, devised to thwart Palestinian homecoming, and updated in 2012 to provide for the instantaneous imprisonment without trial of Africans.
It seems, however, that a neurotic nation that depends upon the forgery of ubiquitous enemies to justify the wanton trampling of rights and dehumanising subjugation of the “Other” might indeed be its own worst adversary.
After all, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has warned: ”A history which is no longer credible serves neither to legitimate the State nor to inspire… its citizenry.”
WATCH: Israel's New Racism - The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land.
30,000 Africans Protest Israel’s Policy Of “Jailing All Africans”
 |
| Africans are protesting Israels policy of jailing Africans in desert prisons |
More than 30,000 African asylum seekers who entered Israel illegally protested in Tel Aviv on Sunday, police said, in the biggest rally ever staged by migrants in the Jewish state.
“More than 30,000 demonstrators marched peacefully in Tel Aviv,” police spokeswoman Lubra Samri told reporters.
Gathered in the coastal city’s central Rabin Square, the protesters sharply criticised Israel’s refusal to give them refugee status and the detention without trial of hundreds of asylum seekers.
“We are all refugees” and “Yes to freedom, no to prison!” they chanted in English, with Israeli rights activists also joining the march.
Ultra-Orthodox MP Eli Yishai, the hardline former interior minister who in 2012 led the government campaign to round up and deport tens of thousands of Africans, denounced the protest.
Yishai said that the “infiltrators”, as authorities call them, were encouraged by “anti-Zionist human rights organisations”.
Rights groups say most African migrants in Israel cannot be deported because their lives would be under threat if they returned to their homes in Sudan and Eritrea.
Yishai told reporters that Tel Aviv, where many of the migrants live, “long ago became an African city”.
He said the demonstration was “a sharp and clear cry for the state of Israel and judicial and law enforcement authorities to apply all the means at their disposal to return the infiltrators to their countries”.
Dawud, an Eritrean asylum-seeker at the protest, said that: “We have fled persecution, dictatorships, civil wars and genocides.
“Instead of considering us refugees, Israel treats us like criminals,” he added, without giving his full name.
Dawud said the demonstrators intended to head for the UN refugee agency’s Tel Aviv office and foreign embassies in the city in further rallies on Monday.
Many African immigrants, who are often employed in menial jobs in restaurants and hotels, also launched a three-day strike in several Israeli cities on Sunday.
Under legislation passed on December 10, authorities can imprison African immigrants entering Israel for up to a year without trial.
WATCH: Africans Fight For Freedom As Israel Build The World’s Largest Prison To Jail Them.
The same month a sprawling detention facility named “Holot” or “Sands” opened in southern Israel’s Negev desert to house Africans crossing the nearby Egyptian border and for immigrants already in the country deemed to have disturbed public order.
The moves triggered protest marches by migrants, including inmates who are allowed out during the day but locked in at night, but Sunday’s was the largest demonstration by far.
Israel says that there are close to 60,000 illegal immigrants from Africa in the country and that they pose a threat to the state’s “Jewish character”.
Along with arrests and deportations, Israel has also built a high-tech fence along the border with Egypt’s barren Sinai, the main point of clandestine entry.
Many migrants live in poor southern neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv where violent race riots erupted in 2012.
Anti-migrant protesters there were addressed by MPs from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, including hardliner Miri Regev, who at the time called the Africans “a cancer in our body”. - African Globe.
Belum ada Komentar untuk "EUROPEAN RACISM: Israel’s Other War - The Brutal, Relentless And Merciless Persecution Of African Migrants In The "Holy Land"! "
Posting Komentar