Israel is not just a
Jewish Supremacist State but a White Supremacist State
First printed in MR Online
From time to time I
carry guest articles and the article below is by Gavin Lewis, a freelance Black-British
mixed-race writer and academic. His article is about how Israel not only
oppresses Palestinian people but Black Jewish people too.
However we have to be careful. It is always easy, as people have done in
the past, to slip into thinking that the oppression of Palestinians
can be subsumed under the Black-White paradigm.
Historically
the Oriental/Misrahi Jews from the Arab countries and North Africa have been
discriminated against. Horrendously so. At one time they formed a
group called the Black
Panthers after their American namesake and were involved in riots and
demonstrations. They were famously called 'not nice people' by
Golda Meir, the racist Israeli Labor Prime Minister who once said of
the Palestinians that
“It was not as if there was a
Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out
and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” (Sunday Times, June
1969)
[See When Israel’s Black Panthers found common cause with Palestinians, Jaclynn Ashly, Electronic Intifada, 7.3.19.]
The Oriental/Arab Jews became the poor white
trash of Israel. They were oppressed by White Ashkenazi Jews but in turn
they oppressed Israel's Palestinians.
Indeed
the base of support for Menachem Begin, the first Likud Prime Minister came
from these Jews. They were more
racist than their European counterparts. The same is true of today's Ethiopian
Jews. They are without doubt subject to severe discrimination. However they have no sympathy with the
Palestinians. Their goal is equality
with the Western Jews.
Two
years ago I wrote an article for Al Jazeera Online, Why Israel
is a Jewish, not a white supremacist state in
response to an article by Yoav Litvin which spoke of the ‘Zionist
fallacy of Jewish Supremacy.’ Except
that it is no fallacy. As the recent B’Tselem Report on Apartheid
Israel makes clear
The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it
controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the
Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a
wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one
group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.
Israel is, first and foremost, a state of Jewish Supremacy but that is not to
ignore the oppression of its Arab and Black Jewish citizens or in the case of a
group of Ugandan Black Jews, they are not
even allowed to become citizens of Israel because they are Black.
Gavin also touches on
the festering scandal of the theft of thousands of
babies from mainly Yemenite parents. There have been 3 government commissions
of inquiry. All of them a whitewash.
Babies were sold for $5000 a piece to
Jews in the United States or given to Ashkenazi Israelis.
Evidence given
to the Knesset Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from
Yemen, the East and the Balkans by researcher Eli Lipstein is
that they were subject
to medical experiments and then buried.
“Until
a few weeks old, they [the Yemenite children] were treated as biological
waste.”
Blood samples of Yemenite Jews was tested to find out if they had
'Negro blood'. [Times of Israel, 16.6.17.]
These babies weren’t considered Jewish.
This was in the early
years of the Israeli state. It was run,
not by Likud but the ‘socialists’ of the Israeli Labor Party. In reality the
Labour Zionists were wedded to the racist theories of social Darwinism and
the survival of the fittest. Arab Jews
were only tolerated because Israel need a working class. However there was a systematic campaign of
de-Arabisation.
This is a very
welcome article from Gavin Lewis.
Tony Greenstein
A racist endeavor: Zionist Israel’s Black Jewish
victims of color
Gavin Lewis
In the face of postwar condemnation of Western
conquest and apartheid domination of countries such as Rhodesia and South
Africa, as well as a more recent global tide of Black Lives Matter
consciousness, Israel has, via recent Western political media’s ideological
reengineering, escaped scrutiny for its systemic racist colonial construction,
even when its victims are Jewish people of color. Even when reports of its
racism escape this ideological censorship, examples of racism in Israel are
treated as isolated incidents, rather than systemic characteristics of the
entire racist regime.
In 2015, African-American Jewish mother Idit
Malka and her young son attempted to visit Israel as part of an extended family
celebration. According to the Jewish news agency Mondoweiss,
“Malka
was not even able to make it out of Ben-Gurion Airport. She and her 10-year-old
child were, upon arrival, promptly detained in a holding cell for close to 48
hours.”1
Both Mondoweissand the Jerusalem Post
reported that, before being deported, an Israeli woman official screamed at
Malka that “Eretz Yisrael isn’t a country for cushim [a racist Hebrew
slur for Black people]”2
In the period prior to her visit, Malka had come
to believe that, as a Black Jew, she was also permitted to regard Israel as a
homeland. What she believes now as a Black woman having experienced Israeli
racism is open to speculation. However, had she actually succeeded in going on
to spend protracted time in the country, and perhaps experienced its ongoing
practices, it might have caused her to rigorously revise her opinion.
Israel has subjected Black Jews to forced
contraceptive injections. In 2013, Haaretz and the Times of Israel
put the figure of suppressed Black Jewish reproduction at 50 percent.3 That is, even according to Israel’s own media
at the time, over 130,000 Black Jews have had, as a matter of institutional
practice, their potential reproduction forcibly curbed by up to half.4 Invoking the horrors of Nazi practices and
illuminating the reality of modern-day eugenics, even Forbes magazine
described it as “forced (if temporary) sterilization.”5
In 2009, Israel’s Ynetnews revealed that
there were Israeli neighborhoods operating whites-only housing polices—designed
specifically to keep out Black Ethiopian Jews—citing the town of Ashkelon as an
example.6 The irony of white Western settlers keeping
Black Jews out of the town is that, prior to the Nakba, Ashkelon had a
ten-thousand-strong Indigenous Arab population. In 2012, Israel’s Jerusalem
Post was still citing whites-only housing practices. One resident in the
city of Kiryat Malachi was cited by the news outlet as supporting the racist
practice, proclaiming that “a good Ethiopian is an Ethiopian in a grave.”7
In 2017, the Daily Beast reported that
Tel Aviv was racially segregating its kindergartens to keep Black and white
toddlers apart.8 In 2018, Israel’s Haaretz further
confirmed this segregation of children.9 Similarly, for years, Israel has rejected
so-called Black blood donations as “unclean,” which on occasion has caused race
riots.10 In 2013, the Times of Israel reported
that this restriction was even imposed on the blood donations of the unusually
prominent Ethiopian Jewish politician Pnina Tamanu Shata.11
In 2016, the U.S. San Francisco Bay View
National Black Newspaper reported that
“over
three hundred Black Jews have announced their intention to refuse any military
order to report for reserve duty, accusing the Israeli government of
state-sponsored racism against citizens of Ethiopian origin.”12
This widespread attitude was hardly surprising
given the climate and consciousness around race in the country. For example, in
2015, numerous news agencies, including Ynetnews, the Times of Israel,
and the Jerusalem Post, reported a police attack on an Ethiopian Jew
doing his national service, who was even in his Israeli Defense Forces uniform
at the time of the assault. Hundreds protested when it was announced that
police would escape prosecution.13
One of the marketed excuses for Israel’s
colonial conquest of Palestine is that the Jewish white Western invaders
supposedly shared an identity with Indigenous Jews of the region. Yet, in terms
of colonial racism, Jewish white settlers conquering Palestine clearly regarded
themselves as an elevated, superior, separate Western ethnic group, because
among their first victims were actually Indigenous Middle Eastern Jews. In
2017, it came to light that a large number of children who had been brought up
by settler parents were actually Yemeni-Jewish. Blood tests demonstrated that
they had been stolen from Yemeni parents who had been regarded as too
culturally primitive to successfully rear their own children.
As the Jewish news organization Mondoweiss
revealed:
Known
as the Yemenite Children Affair, in the first decade after the
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, there was a systematic
kidnapping of newborn Yemenite children, carried out by Israeli hospitals and
government institutions. Mothers, who often were in Israel for a short time and
did not speak Hebrew, would enter hospitals or other state facilities to give
birth. Once the child was born medical staff told the parents the child died.…
The babies who went missing, parents claim, were given away to childless
Ashkenazi families (Jews of European descent–the dominant ethnic group in
Israel at the time).14
However, as Mondoweiss further pointed
out, the complete extent of settler crimes against the Indigenous Yemeni Jews
also included eugenics-like human experimentation:
“a
Knesset committee followed up by confirming earlier this month that Yemenite
babies died during the 1950s after state medical institutions conducted
experiments on them.”15
The BBC refused to publicize this major scandal,
but the un-broadcast “The Yemenite Children Affair” story can still be found
buried on its website. In it, its reports confirm that “there are healthy
babies who died from an experimental treatment. It’s a crime, it was on
purpose, and it led to their death.”16
The BBC’s hidden un-broadcast report also
concedes, as part of Israel’s overall strategy, that
“post-mortem
examinations were carried out on children, who were then buried in mass graves
in violation of Jewish tradition, the special Knesset committee on the
disappearance of children heard. In some cases the children’s hearts were
removed for US doctors, who were studying why there was almost no heart disease
in Yemen.”17
Obviously, human experimentation, like the
forced sterilization of Black Jews, is reminiscent of Nazi policies.
Strategically, this inescapable comparison is something Israel forcibly
tries—most often through the imposed International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance definition—to suppress via the false ideological characterization of
this analysis as anti-Semitic; in effect, deliberately exempting Israel from
scrutiny for Nazi-type offences. This, regardless of the fact, that those who
actually fought the Nazis vowed to be ever-vigilant about scrutinizing the
potential reoccurrence of such fascist practices, wherever they may arise.
There is little space in this article to deal
with religious persecution in Israel. But it is worth reporting that during the
2012–13 soccer season, the Russian owner of Beitar Jerusalem football club
signed two young Chechen Muslim strikers. Because of their religion, they were
routinely described as “dirty Arabs,” which in itself says a lot about the
status and treatment of Indigenous Arabs in apartheid Israel. Literally
thousands of Israelis drove the athletes out of the club and country in a
campaign of intimidation and occasional violence, depicted in the 2016
documentary Forever Pure.
Clearly, Israel is not, as it chooses to market
itself, simply a Jewish nation, but a white-settler state that happens to be
Jewish, well deserving of the prefix apartheid attached to its name by
many, including the United Nations and other human rights observers such as
Nobel Peace Prize-winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter. The horrors
listed here have all been perpetrated against Black and Indigenous Jewish
people of color, including visitors to the country. However, in scale and
number, these practices are outsized by the equivalently racist, lethal,
tortuous, and entrenched racism against the Indigenous Palestinians. Sadly, if
even “Other” Jews can be victims of Israel’s racist oppression, nothing spares
Palestinians.
The global cover-up of Israel’s systemic racist
oppression has had enormous ramifications for domestic Western democracy. In
2020, Keir Starmer, the new neoliberal leader of the UK Labour Party, sacked
his shadow education spokeswomen Rebecca Long Bailey. Long Bailey’s crime was that,
after the killing of George Floyd, she retweeted a British corporate media
story referring to how Israel had trained U.S. police departments responsible
for Black Lives Matter offenses. Astonishingly, Starmer spun this as an
anti-Semitic Jewish conspiracy theory. Despite the numerous available
mainstream sources citing these police training events, no corporate media news
outlet, including the one that ran the original story, contradicted Starmer.
Incredibly, after images of George Floyd being
fatally choked were published, Starmer’s first instinct was to use the African
American’s death to propagandize for an apartheid country—where many
non-tourist areas would likely have been dangerous for Floyd and his family,
and entire towns in which the Floyd family would have struggled to so much as
rent a decent room. Perhaps part of Starmer’s motivation was the $62,000
donation he received from a pro-Israel lobbyist, revealed by the Electronic
Intifada this year. Significantly, during the leadership election, Starmer
refused to come clean about his campaign funding.18 In 2016, the UK government and corporate
media warned the LGBTQ+ community about potential dangers of visiting North
Carolina. Indicative of the second-class racial status of Black Britons,
neither Starmer nor other members of the elite professional political and media
class have warned them of the potential worst-case scenarios of visiting
non-tourist areas of Israel.
Similarly, in the United States, CNN fired
African-American academic Dr. Marc Lamont Hill as a contributor after he
publicly expressed support for Palestinians. Why should Lamont Hill, as a Black
man, say positive things about white-settler colonialism, particularly a
white-settler society responsible for the sort of practices listed here? Dr.
Lamont Hill has U.S. citizenship, a U.S. passport, and the right to vote. Yet,
apparently, he is “only” an African American. Even in the middle of the Black
Lives Matter movement, the entire U.S. media establishment finds it appropriate
to take the side of what is, fundamentally, merely a foreign country, over an
African American’s free speech right to articulate an antiracist sensibility.
Clearly, Israeli Zionism is a racist threat, the influence of which is not
restricted to just its own invented borders.
Afterword: Israel and
White-Settler Societies
The evils that accompany and result from
white-settler conquest should have by now been dumped into the rubbish bin of
history. Many on the political right, and even the political center, pretend
that the ramifications of colonial holocausts and land theft are no longer with
us. Despite this, structural inequalities remain the current lived experiences
of many. If you were a Black family in a Western society in the
twentieth-century postwar era, you would have found that much of the United
States was out of bounds to you because of segregation. As recently as 1967, if
you were a mixed-race family, around seventeen states—more than a third of the
United States—was off-limits because of anti-miscegenation laws (for decades
after, mixed-race relations were still rarely permitted to be represented in
U.S. popular media). White Australian and white New Zealand immigration
policies were designed specifically to keep out the British Black Commonwealth
and other Black nationals. Similarly, Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were
no place for Black people, be they arriving immigrant visitors or Indigenous
Africans.
Yet, in twenty-first-century, in the form of
Israel, Black and Indigenous peoples of the world are expected to put up with
variants of these traditional white-settler offenses. And, alarmingly, even
parts of the left are threatened into exempting Zionism from the sort of
critique and anticolonial resistance leveled against other white-settler
societies.
Notes
1. ↩ Ben Norton, “Israel Detains and
Deports American Jews Because They Are Black,” Mondoweiss, July 15, 2015.
2. ↩ Norton, “Israel Detains and Deports American
Jews Because They Are Black”; David Brinn, “Two American Jews
Held for Two Days at Ben-Gurion, Denied Entry to Israel,” Jerusalem Post, July 13, 2015.
3. ↩ Talila Nesher, “Israel Admits
Ethiopian Women Were Given Birth Control Shots,” Haaretz, January 26, 2013; Asher
Zeiger, “Ethiopian Women Claim
Israel Forced Them to Use Birth Control Before Letting Them Immigrate,” Times of Israel, December 9, 2012. See
also Nick Chiles, “Israel Admits
‘Shameful’ Birth Control Drug Injected in Unaware Ethiopian Jews,” Atlanta Black Star, January 29, 2013;
“Israel’s Black
Immigrants Forced to Use Birth Control,” Our Weekly, February 19, 2015; Jacqui
Deevoy, “Israel Admits Forcing
Birth Control On Ethiopian Jews,” NewsPunch, February 16, 2015; Katie
McDonough, “Israel Admits
Ethiopian Jewish Immigrants Were Given Birth Control Shots,” Salon, January 29, 2013.
4. ↩ Some sources make differing claims about the
size of the demographic, however, in 2015, the BBC listed the demographic as
130,000 (Yossi Mekelberg, “The Plight of Ethiopian Jews in Israel,” BBC, May 24, 2015). By 2019, the Economist
was using a figure of 150,000—presumably the effect of the lifting the
contraception policy (“The Killing of a
Black Jew Sparks Protests in Israel,” Economist, July 11, 2019).
5. ↩ Elise Knutsen, “Israel Forcibly
Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control, Report Claims,” Forbes, January 28, 2013.
6. ↩ Shmulik Hadad, “‘Ethiopian Tenants?
Out of the Question,’”
Ynetnews, February 13, 2009.
7. ↩ “Report: Kiryat
Malachi Neighborhood Bans Ethiopians,” Jerusalem Post, January 3, 2012.
8. ↩ Lisa Goldman, “Israel’s Most Liberal
City Introduces Racially Segregated Kindergartens,” Daily Beast, July 11, 2017.
9. ↩ Orly Vilnai, “I Refused to Believe
Tel Aviv Has Segregated Preschools – Until I Visited One,” Haaretz, January 21, 2018.
10.
↩ Serge Schmemann, “Ethiopian in Israeli
Riot Over Dumping of Donated Blood,” New York Times, January 29, 1996.
11.
↩ Stuart Winer, “Uproar as
Ethiopia-Born MK Denied Chance to Give Blood,” Times of Israel, December 11, 2013.
12.
↩ David Sheen, “Hundreds of Black
Jews Refuse Army Service, Charge Israel with Institutional Racism,” San Francisco Bay View National Black
Newspaper, December 9, 2016.
13.
↩ Noam (Dabul) Dvir and Omri Efraim, “Clashes and Arrests
at Ethiopian Anti-Racism Protest,” Ynetnews, June 22, 2015; Stuart Winer and
Marissa Newman, “Cop Who Beat
Ethiopian-Israeli Soldier Won’t Be Tried,” Times of Israel, June 14, 2015; Ben
Hartman, “Video: Violence
Breaks Out as Israeli-Ethiopians Continue Anti-Racism Protests in Tel Aviv,” Jerusalem Post, June 22, 2015.
14.
↩ Shiraz Grinbaum and Yotam Ronen, “Thousands in
Jerusalem Protest Abduction of Yemenite Babies Following Disclosure Some Were
Experimented on,” Mondoweiss,
June 26, 2017.
15.
↩ Grinbaum and Ronen, “Thousands in Jerusalem
Protest Abduction of Yemenite Babies Following Disclosure Some Were
Experimented on.”
16.
↩ Yolande Knell, “Missing Babies: Israel’s Yemenite Children
Affair,” BBC,
June 20, 2017.
17.
↩ Knell, “Missing Babies.”
18. ↩ Asa Winstanley, “Israel Lobby
Slaughters Corbyn Again,” Electronic Intifada, October 30, 2020.
About Gavin Lewis
Gavin Lewis is a
freelance Black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in
Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States on film, media, politics,
cultural theory, race, and representation. He has taught critical theory and
film and cultural studies at a number of British universities.
