Argentina’s cancellation of a friendly against Israel because of Israeli attempts to exploit the match politically is likely to reverberate far beyond the world of soccer and spotlights the risks of Israeli efforts to persuade the international community to recognize Jerusalem as its capital.
The Argentinian decision suggests that despite the fact several countries, including East European nations, are debating whether to follow US President Donald J. Trump’s decision earlier this year to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state and move the US embassy to the city, Israel is likely to find it difficult to capitalize on the US move in ways that convincingly project widespread international support.
Even worse, the decision illustrates that efforts to force recognition could backfire.
The Argentinian move has buoyed the grassroots Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign that seeks to isolate Israel in non-violent defense of Palestinian rights after Israel has made countering the movement one of its top foreign policy objectives.
“The cancellation of Israel’s ‘friendly’ match with Argentina is a boost to the Red Card Israel campaign, which has called on FIFA to expel Israel – as it expelled apartheid South Africa – due to its violations against Palestinian football and its disregard for FIFA statutes,” BDS said in a statement.
The cancellation is BDS’s greatest success to date. Before that, it had only persuaded a small number of artists and organizations to boycott Israel.
An online campaign late last year convinced New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde to cancel a planned concert in Israel. She followed other artists who have cancelled performances, including Elvis Costello, Lauryn Hill and Gorillaz.
The Argentinian decision has prompted concern that it could become the model for similar efforts in the future. One immediate target could be Israel’s scheduled hosting next year of the Eurovision song contest.
Argentina decided to cancel the match in the run-up to this month’s World Cup in Russia after Israel insisted on moving it from the Mediterranean port city of Haifa, home to Israel’s best stadium, to Jerusalem as part of the Jewish state’s 70th anniversary celebrations. Tickets for the Jerusalem match had sold out quickly.
The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and Argentinian media said the decision was in response to a series of unidentified “threats and provocations” against star player Lionel Messi and his wife.
“Since they announced they would play against Israel, various terror groups have been sending messages and letters to players on the Argentina national team and their relatives, including clear threats to hurt them and their families. These included video clips of dead children,” said hard-line Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev, whom many hold responsible for Israel’s public relations fiasco.
Ms. Regev was referring to video clips that had been circulated by the Islamic State, including pictures of Mr. Messi in an orange jumpsuit and ones that insinuated his beheading. A Palestinian campaign against playing the match in Jerusalem involved images of Mr. Messi’s white and sky-blue striped jersey stained with red paint resembling blood and threats to burn Messi posters.
The Palestine Football Federation (PFF) had early called on its Argentinian counterpart to cancel the match because of the move to Jerusalem, which it described as a violation of world soccer body FIFA’s principle of a separation of sports and politics.
PFF president Jibril Rajoub also urged Palestinian fans to burn pictures of Messi and replicas of his shirt if he played in the match in Jerusalem.
“He’s a big symbol so we are going to target him personally, and we call on all to burn his picture and his shirt and to abandon him. We still hope that Messi will not come,” Mr Rajoub said after talks with Argentinian diplomats based in the West Bank city of Ramallah prior to the cancellation.
It was FIFA’s ban on political interference in soccer that persuaded Argentine President Mauricio Macri to reject a request by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to pre-empt the cancellation of the match.
The Israeli failure to have the match played in Jerusalem strengthens not only the BDS movement.
It also boosts Mr. Rajoub’s so far unsuccessful effort to persuade FIFA and the International Olympic Committee to impose sanctions against Israel because of the Israeli settlements in occupied territory and travel restrictions on Palestinian players and other allegedly security-related measures that hinder the development of Palestinian soccer.
Mr. Rajoub and a liberal Israeli newspaper put responsibility for the soccer fiasco at the doorstep of Ms. Regev.
“She’s the main culprit for legitimizing Argentina’s decision not to come… Beyond squandering millions in taxpayer money, in forcing the game to move to Jerusalem, Regev displayed gross intervention… If the game had stayed in Haifa, it would have happened… There’s a saying that a thousand wise men can’t rescue a coin thrown into a well by a fool…. All it takes is one fool to burn down a forest,” said Haaretz reporter Uzi Dann in an article entitled, Who Needs BDS: Israel Scores Spectacular Own Goal in Argentina Soccer Fiasco.
“Instead of soccer, Miri Regev wanted politics and she got politics… It’s a great farce that gives immense momentum to the BDS campaign against Israel”, added Itzik Shmuli, a centre-left member of the Israeli parliament.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin appeared to echo the sentiment by saying that “the politicization of the Argentinean move worries me greatly” even if he blamed the Argentinians for involving politics by cancelling the match.
Assertions by Israeli officials that the Argentinian decision had handed a victory to terrorism may go down well with hard-line public opinion in Israel as well as supporters of Israel across the globe but is unlikely to help Israel forge bridges to opponents of its policies or facilitate its efforts to get a broader international buy-in of its insistence that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of the Jewish state.
Israeli opposition leader Avi Gabbay pinpointed the potential fall-out of the cancellation of the match when he warned on Twitter: “We just absorbed a shot in the face. This is not just sports. This, unfortunately, could start an international tsunami.”
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and the forthcoming China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
June 8, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | Argentina, Human rights, Israel, Miri Regev, Palestine, Zionism |
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Hardly a day goes by without Israel accusing Palestinian leaders of incitement against the state and its citizens. They argue that such incitement was one of the triggers for the seven-month long uprising which has seen forty Israelis killed by Palestinians, mostly in knife attacks, and over two hundred Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces, many executed while posing no threat to anyone. Such accusations of Palestinian incitement extend all the way up to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He admitted recently that there is some incitement from the Palestinian side in his interview with Israeli Channel 2 TV. On other occasions, Saeb Erekat, General Secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its chief negotiator has also accepted that there is some incitement from the Palestinians.
Incitement as far as Israel is concerned covers a wide spectrum, from calling those killed by Israel “martyrs” to objecting to repeated incursions by Jewish settlers into Al-Aqsa Mosque, and including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign; seeking membership in international organisations such as the International Criminal Court; calling Israel out as an apartheid state; describing the horrific impact of the occupation to the UN General Assembly; and even reminiscing about the towns and villages (most of which have been wiped off the map by Israel) from where Palestinian refugees come and to which they long to return.
Israel has worked tirelessly to convince the so called “international community” to accept its definition of “terrorism” and make it cover any form of resistance that is quite legitimate, including throwing stones. Even attacks against Israeli soldiers maintaining an illegal occupation in Palestine are deemed to be “terrorism”. The international community now works according to Israel’s definitions and narrative and seems to require the victims, the occupied people, to be exemplary and simply curse their predicament but do nothing about it. How many victims of an acknowledged crime are required to protect the criminals? The Palestinians under Israeli occupation are.
The situation is the same across the Atlantic. US presidential candidates making their obligatory, embarrassing pilgrimage to the main pro-Israel lobby group conference, AIPAC, earlier this month joined in this nauseating spectacle of dancing to Israel’s tune. Their words were carbon copies of what an Israeli spokesman would say. They accused the Palestinians of raising their children to hate and of loving death more than life. Both are inaccurate and very racist accusations designed to pander to the lobby. Only Bernie Sanders skipped this festival of anti-Palestinian hatred and then took Clinton to task for barely mentioning the Palestinians in a recent debate between the two Democrat front-runners for the White House.
While Palestinians can understand why Israel trivialises the impact that the loss of their homeland in 1948 (the Nakba) and the occupation of the remaining 22 per cent in 1967 (they Naksa) have had on them, they cannot fathom how and why supposedly intelligent people like the presidential candidates can be so insensitive to this. The fact that they see the Palestinians as the villains and their Israeli colonisers and occupiers as the victims is like being stabbed in the heart. To call on them to submit to Israel’s brutal occupation is in itself a form of incitement.
If the Palestinians are guilty of incitement, then what does Israel’s 24/7 occupation amount to? What the Palestinians can do pales into insignificance when compared to Israel’s deliberate daily provocation and humiliation of subjugated people in the hope of a reaction, to which the so-called Israel Defence Forces (IDF) can “respond”. This provocation – and provocation is not a strong enough word to convey the impact it has — is the most significant incitement of young Palestinians to take matters into their own hands. If those calling on them not to react could put themselves in their position for even one day and be on the receiving end of what it is like to live under occupation, I am confident that they would understand why they might be driven to violence.
The list of examples of incitement by Israel is long.
When Zionists claim that historic Palestine belongs to the Jews and use this to argue not only that modern day European Jews with no connection to the land have a “right to return” but also deny the same right to Palestinian refugees driven out of their homes and land in 1948 by Jewish terror groups, that is incitement by Israel.
When Palestinian children are abducted in the night by the army of an occupying power; denied legal rights including representation; shackled when brought to court; and made to sign confessions in Hebrew, that is incitement by Israel.
When an Israeli armoured bulldozer accompanied by dozens of soldiers arrives and demolishes a Palestinian home in occupied East Jerusalem under the pretence of the lack of a building permit, then that is also incitement by Israel.
When illegal Jewish settlers protected by the security forces throw a family out of their home in Sheikh Jarrah, and move into it themselves, that is incitement by Israel.
When Israeli settlers break into the grounds of Al-Aqsa Mosque under the protection of the security forces and claim that the mosque site is theirs, then that is incitement by Israel.
When Muslims are barred from reaching their holiest mosque in Palestine at the whim of the Israeli security forces, then that is incitement by Israel.
When homes are built for Jewish Israelis on Palestinian land and the owner’s movement is restricted to allow them freedom of movement, then that is incitement by Israel.
When the IDF fires tear gas canisters into Palestinian schools causing the children to suffocate or faint, then that is incitement by Israel.
When the occupying state takes over the main mosque in Hebron and divides it between Jews and Muslims, and determines when Palestinians can and cannot pray in it, then that is incitement by Israel.
When the occupation authority builds roads which encroach on Palestinian land for use by Jewish settlers only, then that is incitement by Israel.
When Jewish settlers terrorise the local population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even murder Palestinians such as Mohammed Abu Khdair and the Dawabshe family under the protection of the IDF, then that is incitement by Israel.
When Israel lays siege to 1.8 million human beings in the Gaza Strip for ten years with no prospect of the blockade ending, then that is incitement.
When the occupiers use the most powerful and devastating weapons on earth, save for nuclear weapons, to kill and maim in war after war against the Palestinians in Gaza, then that is incitement by Israel.
As far back as 2006, PLO Secretary General Dr Erekat said, “The Israeli ministry of defence is telling its citizens to carry weapons when trailing in the occupied West Bank near Palestinian villages.” This, he added, is an outrageous case of incitement to violence against Palestinians that reflects Israel’s official policy and mindset. “It should be of grave concern to the international community.”
Israeli incitement goes right to the top. In the 2015 general election campaign Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu incited the Jewish population against Israel’s Palestinian citizens when he said, “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves” as if they were a swarm of cockroaches. He was also accused of incitement by Palestinian citizens when he promised Israeli Jews, “We will dramatically increase law enforcement services in the Arab sector.” Netanyahu told the press at the site of a shooting that Israel “will open new police stations, recruit more police officers, [and] go into all the towns and demand of everyone loyalty to the laws of the state.” Israeli lawmaker Miri Regev incited against African refugees claiming, “Heaven forbid [that] we compare Africans to human beings.”
At a recent conference to counter the BDS movement, an Israeli minister called for the “civil targeted killing” of BDS leaders like Omar Barghouti. Even foreign political figures have been the subject of incitement as Saeb Erekat has noted. He strongly condemned the hateful Israeli campaign against Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom following her legitimate calls for an investigation into Israel’s extrajudicial killing of Palestinian civilians.
Those searching for a peaceful resolution to the injustice affecting Palestinian must recognise Israeli provocations and incitement as serious contributing factors to the violence. They cannot expect the occupied Palestinians, victims of Israel’s colonisation project, to turn the other cheek when slapped. That cheek is badly bruised and cannot take any more humiliation, provocation and, yes, incitement by Israel.
April 23, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Benjamin Netanyahu, Human rights, Israel, Israeli settlement, Jerusalem, Miri Regev, Palestine, Zionism |
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Dov Lior, a popular chief rabbi in Israel, recently called Obama a Kushi, which is Israel’s equivalent to nig*er. Most Americans are completely unaware of the general contempt that many Jewish people have towards blacks, as Max Blumenthal found out when he interviewed dozens of young people in Israel who reiterated the Rabbi’s sentiments about Obama. Blumenthal’s video titled Feeling the Hate in Israel was removed from YouTube, Vimeo, and the Huffington Post shortly after going viral.
In order to understand the nature of this hatred we need to understand the historical context, which dates back hundreds of years. Although Jews were just a tiny percentage of the European population, they dominated the African slave trade. Jewish historians were so proud of this accomplishment that they bragged endlessly about their involvement and dominance of the industry in their historical texts. In Jews and Judaism in the United States: A Documentary History, prominent Jewish Historian Marc Raphael wrote “Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French, British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated. This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the triangular slave trade that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses….”
Jewish historical records show that Jewish involvement in the North American slave trade was so dominant that slave posts were frequently closed on Jewish holidays. Arnold Wiznitzer, a Jewish historian, wrote, “the buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of their lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices. If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed” In The United States Jewry 1776-1985 Jacob Marcus wrote, “all through the eighteenth century, into the early nineteenth century, Jews in the North were to own black servants. In 1820 over 75% of all Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah owned slaves. Almost 40% of all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more.” In the South, which had a much higher ratio of slave ownership than the North, only 5% of white people owned slaves.
White Europeans would have ended the morally corrupt practice of slavery in North America much sooner if it weren’t for powerful Jewish businessmen lobbying to keep their profitable industry alive. As Rabbi and historian, Bertram Korn said, “many Southern Jews believed slavery to be indispensable to their happiness and security. “The road to social and economic advancement and acceptance [for the Jews] was made easier by the institution of slavery.”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan discovered these facts and published the book: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which quotes Jewish historical records such as the aforementioned to prove the case. The Anti-Defamation League, mainstream media, and many other Jewish American organizations slandered Farrakhan for publishing the book, even calling him anti-Semitic for merely assembling a collection of Jewish historical records.
This racism has not abated in recent times unfortunately. For example, when black African Jews returned to Israel in 1969 under the Right of Return Act, the government ruled that they were not real Jews and therefore did not qualify for citizenship or any legal status. The black Hebrews were also denied state benefits and work permits. It wasn’t until 2003 that black Hebrews were granted permanent residency, but not the automatic citizenship granted to all other races returning on the exact same provision. If it wasn’t for a group of Americans who shamed the Israeli government into granting black African Jews some legal status, they would probably never have received it. To this day black Jews are still not accepted by the Jewish community in Israel. Racial slurs, insults, and discrimination in housing rentals are commonplace. This treatment has reached such an unbearable level that Ethiopan Jews have taken to the streets to protest. In response, Sofa Landver, the Israeli Immigrant Absorption Minister, smugly replied that they should be grateful for all that Israel has done for them. This is reminiscent of white supremacist rhetoric in the America, which claims that Africans should be grateful their ancestors were brought to America. Israel was clearly created under the premise of future safety for all Jews, not just white European Jews. Therefore, black African Jews should have the same rights and entitlements to Israel as any other Jews.
The Israeli government has even been caught attempting to sterilize Ehtiopan Jews by giving them the controversial birth control, Depo-Provera, without warning them of the potential side effects. Ethiopian Jews are less than 1% of Israel’s population, but yet account for 60% of the women on Depo-Provera. The side effects are quite severe, including pain in the hands and back, heavy bleeding, and in some cases permanent sterilization. Around 10% of the women taking this drug develop substantial side effects. In 2004, the FDA warned against the dangers of the drugs. Unfortunately, many Ethiopan Jews fear being deported if they speak up about these types of human rights abuses.
In an effort to “preserve the Jewish character of the country,” Israel now plans on deporting immigrant workers and their children; even in cases where the children were born in Israel, speak Hebrew, and have spent their entire lives as Israeli residents. In 2012, massive riots broke out in Israel protesting the presence of African refugees. The crime rates of African refugees were half the rate of the Jewish population in Israel, yet the local population claimed to live in fear of the black immigrants. A member of the Jewish Knesset (Parliament) name Miri Regev said that the Africans are “a cancer in the body.” The Jewish Interior Minister said Israel, “belongs to the white man.” A survey of Jewish Israelis by the Israeli Democracy Institute found that a majority of Israelis agreed with Mr. Regev, and 33% supported anti-African violence against the refugees.
Israeli racism is so great that when the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) took a poll in 2007 they found that 66% of Israeli teens believe Arabs are less intelligent, uncultured, and violent. Fifty percent of the Israelis taking the poll said they would not share an apartment with an Arab, befriend an Arab or let their kids befriend Arabs, or even let Arabs into their homes. A poll taken by the ACRI in 2008 found that these trends were increasing. Another poll taken in 2007 by the Center Against Racism found that 75% of Israeli Jews did not approve of Jews living in the same apartment buildings as Arabs, and that more than 50% of Jews would not have an Arab boss and thought that marrying an Arab was tantamount to national treason. Fifty percent of Israelis also thought Arabs should not be allowed in the same entertainment sites and 40% wanted Arab’s voting rights rescinded. Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet), recently admitted that Israel has become “more and more racist.”
Now imagine how much higher those percentages would have been if they were asked about black people. In Israel, it is against the law for a gentile to marry a Jew, which is presumably directed at preventing black immigrants and Arabs from marrying white Jews. Amnesty International has condemned their marriage policy as discriminatory.
Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, Israel Hayom, recently published a column which stated, “It is not uncommon to see 13 or 14-year-old girls dating members of ethnic minorities…. You see them sitting together on street benches and out on the town. Dating a member of an ethnic minority no longer carries a stigma. They come along with money, a car, buying her things that her parents can’t give her, spoiling her. There are a million stories like this around here.” There are enough statistics on exploitation, seduction and coercion of young girls, but when it comes to ‘members of ethnic minorities’ – shhh! Don’t awaken the beast, or you might be considered a racist. The words ‘danger of assimilation’ are also kept out of our clean and enlightened lexicon.”
In a 2012 ynet article, a Jewish journalist claimed that she spent 15 of the most terrifying minutes of her life because lots of African refugees were around. She said that Tel Aviv was turning into the Harlem of the 80′s, and therefore black people should be deported from Israel.
In 2010, the leader of the Sephardic community and founder of the Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, stated that the sole purpose of non-Jews was to serve Jews. He also said in a television interview that “gentiles need to die… goyim have no place in this world.” Many of the top Israeli Rabbis issued a religious edict saying, “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
Even though Israel takes a great deal of money from US in terms of direct foreign aid, “scrapped” military equipment that is really worth billions, one-sided contracts, and even charitable donations from Jews and Christians, according to Official Direct Assistance (ODA) Israel is one of the stingiest developed countries in the world. Israel is one of the richest countries on the planet with more than 10,000 millionaires, but gives nearly 10 times less than the world average and gives the 4th least of any developed nation per capita, only barely beating out much poorer countries like Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. So while Israel took in $3 billion from America in direct aid and tens of billions in the other aid measures mentioned above, they only gave $141 million in foreign aid to nations in need of assistance in 2010. While Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were pledging billions to Africa, the 40% of American billionaires who are Jewish, focused their charitable contributions on Jewish causes, which arguably need the money the least.
Unfortunately, Jewish Americans seem to have mimicked their Israeli counterparts’ prejudice. In 1993, San Francisco newspapers broke a story that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which has close ties to Israel, was supporting South African apartheid by paying police officers for confidential information, illegally wire-tapping phones, and even dumpster diving to acquire private information on anti-apartheid activists. The Anti-Defamation League later sold the information to the South African government.
The American media, which is predominately controlled by Jewish Americans (see this article for the names, pictures and titles, to prove this fact), spends a ridiculous amount of airtime focusing on racial strife in America in order to cause a divide between blacks and whites. The truth of the matter is that there is very little inequality between whites and blacks when Jewish people are subtracted from the white column. Although Jewish people represent only 2% of the American population, they comprise 33% of the Supreme Court, 12-35% of the Ivy League student population and nearly 80% of the top administrative positions, 64% of the Federal Reserve including the top two spots, 13% of the Senate, 6.5% of the House of Representatives, and the top positions of the IRS and SEC. In addition, 10.25% of America’s millionaires, 36% of America’s billionaires, and 45% of Forbes’ 40 richest Americans are Jewish. Given these figures, it is statistically impossible for white gentiles to be over-represented in many of these positions. What is really taking place is that Jewish tribalism and nepotism keeps black people from positions of power and influence, but uses their media to blame the inequality on white racism.
The American media also spends vast amounts of airtime on Israel and Middle East, but little to no airtime on Africa, even though America has just as much strategic and humanitarian interest in the continent. America gets more oil from Nigeria than Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, and Iran combined. The media has fooled the American people into believing that they get their oil from the Middle East so they continually intercede on Israel’s behalf. The reality is that America produces half of its own oil and gets the vast majority of the rest from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria. And given the history, Americans certainly owe much more to Africa than to Israel and the greater Middle East. Miraculously the Jewish controlled media ignored the Rwandan genocide, which killed nearly one million Africans; most likely because they didn’t care about the black people they once enslaved and didn’t want to take away from the sympathy of the Jewish holocaust. There are dozens of Jewish lobbies in America that have secured vast aid to the Middle East, but there are no Jewish lobbies for black African countries.
Even to this day the Jewish community is yet to apologize or acknowledge any role in the African slave trade. In fact, they even deny it, and crucify anyone who discusses it, which is similar one would think to holocaust denial. The denial of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, considering all the Jewish documentation, is equally as preposterous as denying the Jewish holocaust.
Update: In 2012, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai deported hundreds of black families from Israel to Sudan for not being Jewish, despite universal opposition from human rights groups. Many of the deported children had been born and raised in Israel and spoke fluent Hebrew. The Israeli government decided not to ship the deportees’ belongings with them back to Sudan, and instead left the refugees’ possessions to sit around in a warehouse for months while Israeli immigration officials were reported to have stolen what few valuable possessions were contained within. A week after the deportation, many of the refugee children began to die due to disease, in large part because their medicine was held back with their luggage in Israel.

December 26, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Supremacism, Timeless or most popular | African Jews, Israel, Miri Regev, United States |
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The last electoral campaign in Israel has been dominated by racism. It is not just racism against Arabs, which is as old as the existence of the Zionist entity, but also racism against Black people, whose life is becoming more and more miserable in Israel. According to the statistics, there are currently about 60,000 African immigrants in the Zionist entity. Most of them come from South Sudan, Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Congo and other countries.
The situation of Africans in Israel, both Jews and non-Jews, is actually desperate. Some thousands have low-quality jobs where they are unscrupulously exploited by Israeli employers. Others are homeless and are begging on the streets of Israeli cities to survive. In spite of claims of rampant crime in the suburbs of South Tel Aviv where most Africans live, a senior police commander, David Gez, was quoted as saying the level of crime among this population was actually relatively low.
The last episode of anti-Black racism was a recent video made by the religious Shas party – which represents Sephardi Jews, who ironically have also been historically subjected to discrimination by Jews of European-origin (Ashkenazis). The five-minute video sought to fuel fear of Africans and increase support for the Shas´s anti-immigration platform ahead the January 22 parliamentary elections.
The message of the video was that only the leader of the Shas party, Eli Yishai, who is also currently interior minister, can successfully fight against the “threat” allegedly posed by African immigrants, whom Yishai and other Israeli politicians repeatedly refer to as “infiltrators.” In an interview with Ynet, Yishai said the “the threat from infiltrators is no less severe than the Iranian nuclear threat.”
In May, Yishaid told Maariv that in the previous months dozens of Israeli women had been raped by “infiltrators” in South Tel Aviv but they had decided not to report the attacks so that people would not think they had “contracted AIDS”.
The content of the video was not different to other similar ones made by far-right European parties. There were in it remarks by local residents who express their fear for their safety and anger over a housing shortage — all allegedly due to the African immigrants. According to the Times of Israel, one woman says that “it is their fault that there are no apartments. It is their fault that housing is very expensive.” A man complains that “tomorrow the Sudanese will keep on walking around here, continue to beat (people) up, continue to stab and continue to rape our women.”
The narrator says that the black “infiltrators” “control neighbourhoods in south Tel Aviv, Eilat, Ashdod, and other cities,” and pose a “social, religious and security threat.” He goes on to assert that the “greatest threat of all is the demographic threat.” The video also claims that the majority of African migrants are Muslim, and that they therefore “do not believe in the State of Israel´s right to exist.”
Ironically, the Shas has also denounced the racial bias of the other Israeli parties. Recently, Aryeh Deri, the number three of the party, accused the Likud-Yisraeli Beitenu party of “being a party of Russians and whites” and having ostensible bias against Sephardi Jews, who have been considered a second-class citizens in the Zionist entity, where the power has been traditionally in the hands of Ashkenazi Jews, who mostly came from Eastern Europe.
For his part, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that he wants to expel tens of thousands of African undocumented immigrants and that the inflow into Israel from Egypt has been brought to a halt due to the new barrier. “Our aim is to repatriate tens of thousands of infiltrators now in Israel to their countries of origin,” he said, adding Israel was in contact with some governments from Africa “to solve this problem”.
On May 23, Likud leading members took part in a demonstration in Tel Aviv’s impoverished suburb of Hatikva to protest against the presence of Africans in Israel. Miri Regev of Likud addressed the rally to which more than 1,000 people attended. There, she described the Africans as a “cancer in our body” and pledged to do everything she could “in order to bring them back to where they belong”. She attacked human rights and “left-wing” groups aiding the immigrants.
Danny Danon, another leader of Likud, said that the only solution to the issue of the “infiltrators” would be to “start to talk about their expulsion”. “We must expel the infiltrators from Israel. We should not be afraid to say the words “expulsion now”,” he said. He went on saying that Africans had set up an “enemy state”, whose capital was Tel Aviv.
Violent attacks
Shortly after the speeches, violent incidents broke out. Demonstrators smashed shops, properties and cars belonging to the African immigrants and beat up men and women while chanting “Blacks out”.
In April, apartments where Africans lived as well as at a kindergarten were attacked with Molotov cocktails in Shapira in south Tel Aviv.
On July 12, an Eritrean man was badly burned and his pregnant wife suffered smoke inhalation after attackers tried to burn down their apartment in central Jerusalem (Al Quds). The incident, the second arson attack on African immigrants in the city within six weeks, took place near the city’s Mahane Yehuda market, AFP quoted a police source as saying.
The Israeli government has refused to condemn these attacks on African immigrants and instead used them as an excuse to promote its anti-migrant agenda, which included a new law allowing the authorities to keep undocumented Africans imprisoned for three years and jail those who help them for up to 15 years. According to recent polls, one in three Israelis support those attacks.
Even “left-leaning” parties, such as the Labor, support racist policies. The Labor leader, Shelly Yachimovich, accused recently the the government of “having failed… and let the slums be flooded by migrant workers and refugees, thereby helping to kindle wild passions” and claimed the need to “protect the country from facing a huge mass of migrant workers”.
In March, Israel started to build a huge prison camp, the world´s largest, in the Negev desert. Such a facility is situated near the Ketziot prison, where thousands of Palestinian prisoners have been jailed. The camp will be run by the prison service and thousands of Africans will be locked up there. A spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Interior confirmed that Yishai wanted to eventually jail all of the thousands of undocumented African immigrants currently in the Zionist entity.
Other immigrants have already started to be expelled. On June 10th, the immigration police began a mass roundup operation, which was initially focused on South Sudanese nationals but was then expanded to include those from the Ivory Coast. Hundreds of these Africans were detained and around 240 were sent to Juba, capital of South Sudan.
There is no doubt that racism and xenophobia are being fueled by the current Israeli government and nearly all the Zionist parties. Their main goal is to divert growing outrage over the decline of living standards and rising social problems by promoting racist claims and demands to preserve the “Jewish identity” of the Zionist entity at a time when the latter is getting weaker and more internationally isolated due to its settlement policies.
January 24, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Eli Yishai, Israel, Miri Regev, Sephardi Jews, Shas, South Sudan, Tel Aviv, Zionism |
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Beginning on Wednesday and continuing through Saturday night, mobs of right-wing Jewish Israelis have attacked the neighborhoods of African immigrants in the southern part of the city of Tel Aviv, throwing stones and bottles at residents and looting shops.
According to an eyewitness report by a volunteer with the Hotline for Migrant Workers in Israel, “[a]fter a dose of racial incitement from the Members of Knesset who addressed them, Miri Regev, Danny Danon, Yariv Levin and Michael Ben-Ari, a handful of the protesters went on to attack Africans and stores owned by them in the Hatikva neighborhood. I arrived in the neighborhood with a camera to document what had happened.”
The eyewitness, identified as Elisabeth Tsurkov, said, “I saw a policeman protecting a group of Eritrean refugees after one of the family members was attacked with a glass bottle while carrying his son, who as a result was dropped to the ground…I saw the blood of a Sudanese refugee on the pavement after he was stoned by a group of Israelis chasing him. I saw a shop owned by an Eritrean refugee, which was looted after its storefront was broken.”
The string of attacks comes in the midst of increasing incitement against the non-white Israeli population, including indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel and African immigrants into the country, by Israeli politicians and party leaders. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently stated that the African immigrants, many of whom are refugees from war-torn regions, “threaten Israel’s social fabric”, and called for the implementation of policies that would refuse them services, deny them entry, and force the deportation of many who are living in Israel already.
In Tsurkov’s account of the events of the last few days, she wrote, “Some [of the Israeli attackers] called the refugees ‘cockroaches’, a woman said they should be killed and exterminated because non-Jews should not exist in the land of Israel, another of the residents said the refugees’ heads need to be cut like chickens, others simply thought ‘they should be deported back to Sudan.’ The hatred was also directed at the ‘leftists’ whom the residents blamed for the encroachment of refugees in their neighborhood.”
The Hotline for Migrant Workers called on the Israeli government to take responsibility for the situation of migrant workers in Israel, and allow for a legal process for refugees to be allowed to seek asylum in the Jewish state – a status which is currently denied to non-Jews.
May 28, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Benjamin Netanyahu, Danny Danon, Israel, Michael Ben Ari, Miri Regev, Tel Aviv, Yariv Levin |
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