In Israel non-Jewish Life is Cheap

For Killing a Palestinian prisoner 9 months, for slapping an Israeli soldier 8 months - Israeli Justice at its finest

The Lynching of Hoftar Zarhum

When Palestinian prisoners went on hunger strike to demand better conditions, the standard Israeli retort was that of Avi Dichter, the Public Security Minister and former head of Shin Bet, Israel's MI5:  ‘Barghouti Has Blood on His Hands, Must Stay in Prison’.

Of course if you are Jewish then having the blood of Palestinians on your hands is no problem.  Indeed it can be a positive boon.  Elor Azaria, an Israeli army medic no less, who fired at point blank range at a Palestinian lying prone on the ground because he had allegedly tried to stab a soldier with a knife, became a hero.  His charge was reduced from murder, which it obviously was, to manslaughter. Why are Israelis lauding soldier Elor Azaria as a hero?  

Sentenced to a ludicrous 18 months imprisonment even this was successively reduced to 9 months. As a final insult to his victim, Azaria was let out of prison two days early in order to attend his brother’s wedding.

Ahed Tamimi

Indeed Azaria received just one month more for murdering a Palestinian than Ahed Tamimi did for slapping a heavily armed soldier who invaded the grounds of her house.  Remember that originally Education Minister Naftali Bennett had said that Ahed should spend the rest of her life in prison.

None of this should surprise people.  In 2009 Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote a book, Torat HaMelech (the King’s Torah).  This learned study explained how it was possible to murder non-Jews, including children and infants, according to halacha (Jewish law) without incurring a penalty.  As should be widely known, the Talmud makes a distinction between the killing of a Jew and a non-Jew, only the former of which is a capital offence. [see Murder and Genocide in Jewish Religious Law, Israel Shahak]

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein declared that the authors would not be prosecuted.  In the case of the leader of the Northern League, Sheikh Raed Salah, the Israeli state pulled out all the stops to convict him  of incitement to hatred, even though the evidence was so tenuous that the original decision to acquit him by the Jerusalem Magistrates Court had to be overturned by the Jerusalem District Court in a nakedly political decision.  

Raed Salah had allegedly invoked the Jewish blood libel myth in an attack on the Israeli authorities for barring access to the Al Aqsa and Golden Dome mosques.  However Raed Salah denied making any such comparison.  As he exclaimed “Show me one Jewish inciter who has been jailed.” 

That is why the horrific incident below when an Eritrean refugee was lynched by Israeli vigilantes is so outrageous.    Their punishment?  Not the 35 years for Marwan Barghouti or other Palestinians, but community service.  This is yet another reason why Israel is an apartheid state.  Justice for Palestinians is always different from that for Jews.

Tony Greenstein

Nine Israelis Who Savagely Murdered African Refugee Get Off with Community Service

by Richard Silverstein

In all the annals of miscarriage of justice, Israel-style, this one is right up there.  Two years ago, during the Knife Intifada, an Israeli Bedouin attacked the Beersheva bus station.  One soldier was killed and ten others wounded.  In all the confusion, Israeli vigilante bystanders, who included both police personnel and prison guards, saw an Eritrean refugee, Haftom Zarhum, who'd come to Beersheva to renew his work visa.

Hoftar Zarhum, lynched by bloodthirsty Israeli vigilantes who get slap on the wrist for cold-blooded murder

Even though Eritrean refugees look nothing like Palestinians and he had no weapon, they decided that Zarhum was the terrorist and began assaulting him.  Eight shots were fired into his body from almost point-blank range.  They kicked him in the head and beat him senseless.  Then the "piece de la resistance" of torture was the vigilante who ripped a row of metal chairs from the floor, ran over to the victim and brought the entire apparatus down on his head with full force.  Though the coroner said the bullets killed him, this was certainly the coup de grâce (I don't know French well enough to know that the opposite of grace is in this case--the word is certainly is inapt in this grisly case).

I posted about this case when it was first reported.  Though there was tremendous soul-searching in some Israeli circles about the savagery of this attack.  I apologize for the violence in the above video--I usually eschew this approach to reporting, but this incident is so egregious I want everyone who can stomach it to watch the horrific violence and consider where it comes from and what it means).  Some Israelis were horrified by the homicidal racism which spurred this lynching.

But I knew in my heart it would all be swept under the rug.  That indeed is what the Israeli justice system proposes.  After all the outrage, the overwhelming force of the national security state came to bear.  The police and prison authority united to protect their own.  As a result, the guy (referred to as "Moyal" in the passage below) who smashed Zarhum with the chairs gets off scot-free (just after the killing he told an interviewer: "what's to apologize for?").  The other seven defendants get off with no jail time at all.  They will do community service and perhaps shed a crocodile tear or two (or not) and return to their lives:

Under the plea bargain offered, Moyal, who had worked at a shwarma sandwich shop at the bus station during the incident, will be convicted of abusing a helpless person. The penalty under law is up to seven years in prison. The original charge, of aggravated assault, carries up to 20 years imprisonment. But if the plea bargain is approved, Moyal won’t do a day behind bars, after the prosecution agreed to community service, the extent of which will be determined by the court. Moyal’s defense lawyers will also be able to demand that Moyal’s conviction be set aside...

In June 2016, a Prisons Service tribunal decided against charging prison warden Hananiya Shabbat for involvement in the mob attack on Zarhum.

In some circles they'll even be applauded as heroes of the nation just as the IDF murderer of Abd al-Fatah a-Sharif, Elor Azarya, was hailed as the conquering hero after the IDF brought him up on relatively minor charges in the aftermath of the cold-blooded execution.  They'll say of the Beersheva killers: "well you never know with these people. He could very well have been a terrorist.  You did what you thought best to protect us."

But make no mistake, this was an act of terrorism, cold-blooded vigilante lynching like what Southern whites did to Blacks a century ago.  It doesn't matter what the killers thought they were doing or how confusing the situation might have been.  This was blood vengeance.  And the Israeli justice system's whitewashing of the legal case with these pathetic sentences is state sanctioning of such terrorism.

This is the fate of African refugees in Israel.  Viewed as little more than infiltrators. A spreading cancer, toxic to the Jewish state and its pure bloodlines.  Instead of, if not welcoming, them, at least being cognizant of the Jewish people's historic responsibility to treat strangers with a minimum of dignity, they are hated, imprisoned, and expelled, contrary to international humanitarian law.  This is but one of many reasons I believe it's a misnomer to call Israel a Jewish state.  It ignores or even disdains some of the most cherished traditions of Judaism, in favor of a truculent, violent, even homicidal version of the religion, which I prefer to call Judeanism.  Personally, I find this distorted religion to be little more than pagan idolatry, the worship of supposedly historical myths, relics and ruins, in favor of real living people and ethical values.

See also Israeli Prison Guard Who Murdered African Refugee: “What’s to Apologize for?”

The Lie of Liberal Zionism and Israel’s African Refugees

Jonathan Freedland Turns a Blind Eye to the ‘Jewish’ State’s Inherent Racism

The proposed expulsion of Israel’s Black African refugees is highly embarrassing for Israel’s ‘liberal’ defenders.  It is demonstrating that the Zionist ideology that underpins the ‘Jewish’ State of Israel in inherently racist in a way little else has done.  It is impossible to argue that the refugees are a ‘security threat’ as their only crime has been to flee persecution.  The only reason that Israel refuses to grant them citizenship is because they are not Jewish and are Black.  If that isn’t racist what is?

As Netanyahu freely admits, the reason for their expulsion is because ‘threaten’ Israel’s Jewish identity in the way that Jews once threatened Aryan or Magyar identity.  It is racist to the core.  It clearly demonstrates what ethno nationalism means in practice – the expulsion or removal of the other.  What makes it worse is that it isn’t simply the fact of the refugees not being Jewish.  One-third of the million Russian immigrants who came in the 1980’s weren’t Jewish either but, unlike these refugees they were White.

Jonathan Freedland is Britain’s most prominent liberal Zionist.  As such he is adept at walking the tightrope between defending Israel and Zionism and distancing himself from what he sees as its excesses.  As a senior editor at the Guardian as well as a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle Freedland tries to square support for Israel and opposition to overt racism.  It is a difficult juggling act, even for as keen an apologist for Israel as Freedland. 

Freeland was also one of the key figures behind the false anti-Semitism allegations in the Labour Party.  See for example Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem Freedland has made it a mission to demonstrate that opposition to Israel and Zionism is, by definition, anti-Semitic.  His argument was that ‘93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity.’  In fact the most authoritative study The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel in 2015 found that just 59% of British Jews identify as Zionists, down 12% in five years and 31% did not identify as Zionists. 

But even were Freedland correct, it is both a dishonest and an intellectually sloppy argument.  Opposition to an identity is never the same as racism.  If a majority of an African country were to identify with FGM would it be racist to oppose FGM?  Or if a majority of Afghans were to identify the Burka as integral to Islam is it racist to oppose the Burka?  It is indicative of the intellectual slippage of Zionists. 

Asylum seekers outside Holot internment camp in the Negev Desert

In an article for the Jewish Chronicle Benjamin Netanyahu’s appalling betrayal of Jewish values, Freedland had to admit that

‘the desire to be rid of these African newcomers has been mired in plain racism from the start. Recall that, in 2012, Likud’s Miri Regev, now the culture minister, referred to them as a “cancer.” She eventually apologised for the comparison — to people living with cancer.’

Freedland quoted the testimony of Emanuel Yemani, an Eritrean refugee who described his conversation with an Israeli immigration official.

“soon we’ll deport all of you, and you’ll sit under a tree, open your mouth and wait for a banana to fall, like a monkey.”

“But I’m a human being, not a monkey,” Yemani answered.

“Don’t you see yourselves, that you look like monkeys?” the official replied.

This is the visceral racism that drives the expulsion of Israel’s African refugees but Freedland refuses to draw the conclusions and ask where this racism comes from. 

Whereas sentiments such as this are confined to the political margins of society in the West, in Israel they are centre stage.  In Britain even UKIP would distance themselves from such atavistic racism.  Not so in Israel.  Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dayan declared in a radio interview in 2013 regarding Arabs that ‘To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”  In most countries he would be out of the government and out of Parliament.  In Israel he still remains Israel’s cabinet and why shouldn’t he when his Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel needs a fence in order to keep out the ‘wild beasts’ in the surrounding countries?

Netanyahu himself was explicit that the Black African refugees pose a threat to Jewish identity. In May 2012 he told Israel’s cabinet meeting that:  "If we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state. This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity."

And by his logic, Netanyahu is correct.  Because what is a Jewish state other than a state with a Jewish demographic majority?  That is Freedland’s dilemma.  A Jewish state is nothing if it is not a Jewish majority state.

Freeland understands how terrible it looks for Israel to be deporting thousands of Black African refugees solely because they are not Jewish (he doesn’t mention the question of their colour).  This is something that worries even Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, who warned Netanyahu of the damage to Israel’s reputation internationally.

Freedland instead of asking why it is that Israel is so desperate to get rid of little more than one half of one percent of its population, tries to avoid facing up to what Israel as a Jewish state really means.

Instead he asks ‘What do we mean when we refer to Israel as a Jewish state?’.  Is it solely about demographics, a Jewish majority or does it have something to do with its ‘Jewish character.’  Does it ‘embody Jewish values’?

And here you see the dishonesty of Zionism’s liberal defenders writ large as they attempt to reconcile the inherently racist character of Zionism with the idea that Israel embodies an ahistorical set of ‘Jewish values’ preserved in aspic since Moses came down from Mount Sinai.

African refugee in chains

Freedland argues that it isn’t the refugees that threaten the Jewish character of the Israeli state but the expulsions that threaten its ‘Jewish values’.  This is of course nonsense.  Israel was not born in the spirit of the prophets but with the sword of Joshua.  It was, to use a biblical metaphor founded in original sin amidst the terrorism of the Zionist militias, the massacres and the expulsions.  The aim of the Zionist movement was not the creation of heaven on earth or a light unto the nations so much as a Jewish racial state.  Hence Israel’s obsession with demography. 

This tension runs throughout the discourse of Zionism’s defenders as they pretend that Israel is a ‘Jewish democratic’ state.  Freedland is fully signed up to this oxymoron of an idea which conveniently forgets that a Jewish majority could only be obtained by driving out ¾ million Arabs in 1948.  Israel’s democracy is conditional on Jews being in a large majority.  If this is ever threatened then either the majority excludes or expels the existing Arab population or it admits that Israel is no longer a democracy but an ethnocracy i.e. an Apartheid state.  That is the dilemma in the West Bank, where 4 million Palestinians live.  Israel can’t remain a Jewish majority state and annex the West Bank including its people.  This is where the fiction of a ‘peace process’ originates.  As long as there is a pretence of ‘negotiations’ then the final status of the West Bank can be put off indefinitely.

Freedland like the liberal defenders of Apartheid in South Africa has to resort to euphemisms and circumlocutions, as he tries to evade the meaning of words and concepts.  Freedland refers to the description of the African refugees as ‘infiltrators’ but is coy about what that term actually means.  His reticence is understandable. 

Infiltrators is the term that was applied to the Palestinian refugees in the early years of the Israeli state.  Having been expelled from their lands, they attempted to come back in the quiet of the night.  They, the indigenous population of the land, were shot on sight because they were deemed by Freedland’s Labour Zionist friends as ‘infiltrators’, literally infiltrating and therefore undermining the  existence of Israel as a Jewish state.  It is a term that encapsulates the racist mindset of the settler colonial state of Israel.

A good example of what a Jewish state means in practice is the Jewish National Fund’s response to the decision of the Supreme Court in the Kadan case in 2000, which ruled that Arabs could not be barred from renting or buying ‘Jewish’ land.  The JNF declared that:   

A survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its citizens.

Despite the pretence that a Jewish and a Democratic state were compatible, Israel has always found in practice that the Jewish and the democratic were in opposition to each other.  After all if a state is truly democratic then its Arab component must have the right to become a majority.   Whereas if the Jewish part is most important then preventing that scenario is the most important of the state’s tasks.

Israel was not founded in order to protect and defend  Freedland’s ‘Jewish values’ but as a state based on a Jewish racial majority.  Zionism consciously set out to transform being Jewish from a religion to a nation/race.  Zionism was a volkish movement that believed in a blood and soil version of nationalism, the idea that putting Hebrew land under the feet of Jewish immigrants would transform them from their diaspora mentality.

That is why the appeal to an eternal and mythical concept of ‘Jewish values’ is absurd.  Jewish identity has changed many times over the centuries.  From traders to money lenders to militant workers and revolutionaries to settler colonials.  Today the majority Jewish identity is Zionist, but it is not the only Jewish identity.  Indeed today what one means by Jewish values depends on where you are.  The values of the Jewish community in America, which are generally liberal, differ vastly from the overwhelming racism of the Israeli settler state.

Freedland is, of course, quite right to point to the Biblical injunctions to protect and safeguard and not to turn away the stranger but it is not these passages that Zionism looks to.  Zionism looks to the most bloody and racist passages of the Bible.  It is the god that smote and wiped out the heathen that Zionism takes sustenance from.  The example of Phineas, the grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron, who killed a Jewish man and his Moabite wife, is cited by those opposed to miscegenation, sexual relationships between Jews and Arabs.  Opposition to mixed marriages on racial grounds is a majority opinion in Israel.  Some 3 out of every 4 Israeli Jews sees marriage to a non-Jew as 'national treason' - their opposition is not on religious but racial/national grounds.

So although Freeland understands very well where the racism that manifests itself in the expulsion of African refugees comes from, he is not prepared to draw the conclusion that it is Zionism, the belief in a Jewish  majority state, based on a Jewish race, that has led to this situation.  Thus it is that the liberal Zionist is forever living a lie.  That is the price that Freedland pays for maintaining the pretence that a ‘Jewish’ Israel is compatible with the liberal values that he takes for granted in Britain.

One suspects that if Jews were treated in the same ways as Palestinians in Israel then Freedland would be the first to cry ‘anti-Semitism’.

Tony Greenstein  

Benjamin Netanyahu’s appalling betrayal of Jewish values

The desire to be rid of these African newcomers has been mired in plain racism from the start, writes Jonathan Freedland.

African asylum seekers and human rights activists protest against deportation outside the Rwandan embassy in Herzliya (Flash90)

What do we mean when we refer to Israel as a Jewish state? Do we simply mean a state with a majority of Jews — or a state that somehow has a Jewish character, one that at least aims to embody Jewish values?

There is nothing abstract about this inquiry. On the contrary, this week it acquired moral urgency. On Sunday, the Israeli immigration authorities issued deportation notices to an estimated 20,000 asylum seekers from Africa. For now, women, children and fathers are exempt. The focus in this first round is on men without children, men who had fled mainly from Eritrea and Sudan while those countries were shaken by brutal political violence and war. The refugees have 60 days to leave Israel — or else be jailed indefinitely.

When this plan was first agreed by the Israeli cabinet back in November, officials said it was necessary to expel these “infiltrators” — the word favoured by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — in order “to protect the Jewish and democratic character of Israel.”

The intended meaning was, presumably, that the presence of 60,000 Africans in Israel threatened to alter the country’s demographic make-up: expanding the non-Jewish minority and thereby making the country numerically less Jewish. But, in fact, the threat is the exact other way around. It is not the refugees but these expulsions that threaten the Jewish character of Israel, for they violate every value Jews are meant to hold dear.

For what injunction burns through our most sacred texts? “Do not ill-treat a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. I recall what the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, once told me in the context of Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians: “You cannot ignore a command that is repeated 36 times in the Mosaic books: ‘You were exiled in order to know what it feels like to be an exile.’” Sacks said he regarded that as “one of the core projects of a state that is true to Judaic principle.”

Yet Israel is now abandoning that core project and trampling all over that Judaic principle. A people who spent two millennia as intermittent refugees is turning a hard heart towards those who find themselves as strangers in a strange land. Indeed, Israeli officialdom refuses to recognise their plight at all.

In recent years, tens of thousands of Eritreans and Sudanese fled their ravaged homelands, making the perilous trek, often on foot, through Sinai: the very route taken by the Children of Israel as they fled slavery under Pharaoh.

Of those who made it to Israel, evading the brutal grasp of both Egyptian security forces and people traffickers, the total number to be granted refugee status is ten. You read that right. Ten.

This violates not only the teachings of Judaism, but of Jewish history. Our experience as a people over many centuries was one of expulsion, exile and the desperate search for shelter. Yet now Israel says it does not believe that these Africans were fleeing bloodshed, insisting that most are mere economic migrants. As if the same was not said of our forebears when they washed up on England’s shores more than a century ago. Netanyahu’s rejection of refugees even departs from recent Israeli history. His predecessor as a Likud prime minister, Menachem Begin, managed to find room for several hundred Vietnamese “boat people” four decades ago. But now, when Israel is so much richer and more capable of generosity, there is no room for those who look different.

And make no mistake, that’s what this is about. The desire to be rid of these African newcomers has been mired in plain racism from the start. Recall that, in 2012, Likud’s Miri Regev, now the culture minister, referred to them as a “cancer.” She eventually apologised for the comparison — to people living with cancer.

If you doubt the unvarnished bigotry at play here, listen to the testimony of Emanuel Yemani, an Eritrean refugee who, in now-fluent Hebrew, described an encounter with an Israeli immigration official. He was told that the documents he’d brought as requested were no longer needed, because, 

“soon we’ll deport all of you, and you’ll sit under a tree, open your mouth and wait for a banana to fall, like a monkey.”

“But I’m a human being, not a monkey,” Yemani answered.

“Don’t you see yourselves, that you look like monkeys?” the official replied.

The good news is that the opposition to this move has been fierce, from Israeli Holocaust survivors pleading for the refugees to be allowed to stay, to El Al pilots refusing to fly the planes that would deport them. In a significant shift, Jewish groups and religious leaders in the US and Canada have been petitioning Israeli embassies, urging a change of heart. Some have done that here, too, but more of us need to join that effort. There is nothing anti-Israel in denouncing this immoral policy. To fight it is not to oppose the Jewish state – it is to urge it to be worthy of that name.


Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Ha'aretz Compares Israel’s Policy of Expelling Black African Asylum Seekers to Eichmann's Expulsion of the Jews of Vienna in 1938-9

According to the Zionists' Fake (IHRA) Definition of Anti-Semitism this article in Ha’aretz is Anti-Semitic

At the present time the Israeli government, with the full support of the Israeli Labour Party, is doing its best to physically expel all its estimated 40,000 Black African asylum seekers, most of whom are from Sudan and Eritrea.  B.Michael in Israel's sole liberal daily, Ha'aretz makes the comparison between this and Adolf Eichman's policy in 1938 Austria where, between March 1938, when Hitler invaded till December 1939, Austria's Jewish population was reduced from 192,000 to 57,000.

One of the 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ according to the bogus International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’.  Not only is anti-Semitism out of control in the Labour Party but it would appear that Israel, especially its liberal press, is suffering from an epidemic!

B.Michael in his normally pungent and satirical style, compares the policy of Adolf Eichmann towards the Jews of Vienna to Israel's policy of forcing out Black African asylum seekers.  Eichmann's policy of impoverishing, terrorising and stripping Jews of their rights was considered a massive success at the time in forcing the Jews out of Austria.  Israel is only just learning how to accomplish the same feat.  Israel’s refugee population of 60,000 has already been reduced by 10,000-15,000 through a combination of tactics such as imprisonment in the desert camp at Holot, depriving them of the right to work, pogroms and racist attacks.

Israel has learnt well, as B.Michael says, from the Jews traditional enemies.  Just as the anti-Semites used every trick in the book to force out Jews so Netanyahu does the same to Black non-Jews.  But we shouldn't just blame Netanyahu. The Israeli Labour Party and its new, even more right-wing leader Avi Gabbay, is fully behind Netanyahu’s stance.  The refugees from Eritrea are bogus, no matter that every international body and human rights agency says that Eritrea is one of the worst police states in the world.

Unlike the Israeli Labour Party, Netanyahu is quite honest - it doesn't matter if the refugees are fleeing persecution - they are not Jewish

What is the crime that these refugees have committed that Israel is seeking to force them out and deport them to 3^rd world countries such as Rwanda, a breach of international law in itself?  Well there are two crimes that these refugees have committed.  Not only are they not Jewish in a Jewish state but they are also Black.  Faced with this double criminality, Israel really has no choice to act if it is to preserve itself as a Jewish state. This is why a Jewish State cannot be other than a racist state.  It isn't like England, a Christian state only in so far as the head of state is head of the Church of England.  It isn't even like the Islamic state of Iran where although the law is derived from the Sharia, the 20,000 or so Jews in Iran don't suffer any civic penalties as a result.

Is Israel being racist by forcing out these refugees?  According to its own criteria it’s just seeking to preserve its racial or ethnic purity.  Indeed just accusing the Israeli state of racism is itself anti-Semitic because the IHRA definition also states that 'claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour' is anti-Semitic.

David Sheen's video is particularly shocking in that it shows how members of the Israeli government, including its present 'Culture' Minister Miri Regev deliberately fanned the fires of racism and enabled a pogrom to take place against the Africans of Tel Aviv.

It used to be the case that Jews experienced pogroms in Eastern Europe.  It is Israel's unique achievement to turn Jews into pogromists.

The last of the three articles from Ha’aretz here is about a Kenyan Jew Kimani who was deported the moment he set foot on Israeli soil.  Normally people who have converted to Judaism, are admitted under the racist Law of Return.  That includes conversions carried out by the Conservative, Liberal or Reform strands of Judaism.  Ultra Orthodox rabbis have been trying to change this to only Orthodox conversions for years but they haven’t succeeded because this would cut off the vast majority of American Jewry at a stroke.  However Kenya’s small Black African Jews have far less political clout and unlike American Jews they are not White.

Of course there are some people who will say that none of this is racist but then there are some people who deny the Holocaust and even people who say the Earth is flat.

Tony Greenstein

Opinion The Sick Historical Precedent for Israel's Asylum-seeker Expulsion Push

Israel's push to expel 45,000 African asylum seekers and migrants borrows from Eichmann's 1938 playbook for expelling Austria's Jews

B. Michael Jan 11, 2018 11:03 AM

African asylum seekers at Israel's Saharonim detention center. Ilan Assayag

Sometimes even history’s sense of humor exceeds the boundaries of good taste. This time it’s no joke; it’s not even irony or sarcasm. It’s just a bitter, sardonic spit in the face.

On March 13, 1938, Austria was annexed to the Nazi Reich amid cheers and excitement. Slightly more than five months later, on August 26, 1938 the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration (the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) was opened, headed by a talented executive named Adolf Eichmann.

Its objective was to organize and expedite the expulsion of Jews from Austria. It bears remembering that in 1938, before the war, the Final Solution and the death camps, the Nazis “merely” wanted to purify the Reich of the stinking Jews swarming in it.

Eichmann, a disciplined and diligent manager, developed an efficient system for accelerating emigration: forbidding Jews to work, rescinding their rights, discriminatory and humiliating laws, confiscation of property, taxes, boycotts, exclusion, monetary incentives, turning a blind eye to acts by the racist rabble and of course, threats of imprisonment for those who refused to leave.

And it worked.

 Demonstrators for and against expulsion of asylum seekers at a Tel Aviv protest, January 9, 2018. The sign says: "The rehabilitation of south Tel Aviv begins with the expulsion of the infiltrators." Moti Milrod 

Within around three months Eichmann’s immigration authority expelled 45,000 Jews. Many others abandoned everything and fled for their lives, without availing themselves of Adolf’s services.

Most of those who remained were murdered.

The state founded by those fugitives now also has an immigration authority. It, too, is essentially an expulsion authority. It deals with exporting members of inferior races and religions. Recently it has been assigned the weighty task of expelling 45,000 burdensome blacks. They are burdensome because they aren’t white, and also a bit because they aren’t Jews.

Holot internment camp in the Negev desert

They are non-Jews and blacks, which is really too much.

For years the Israeli expulsion network has been using against them the entire arsenal of abuses that proved itself in Eichmann’s office – forbidding them to work, denying them rights, passing discriminatory and humiliating laws, taxes, boycotts, exclusion, monetary incentives, turning a blind eye to the acts of the racist rabble and of course, threats of imprisonment for those who refuse to leave.

But it’s not working so well. Blacks, it turns out, are like crabgrass. They aren’t easy to uproot. There was no choice but to ceremoniously announce an “operation.”

The Population, Immigration and Border Authority is also seeking to hire workers; expulsion workers. Help wanted ads were published in newspapers, and one of the prerequisites is “experience in this field of endeavor.” There are lots of Jews with related experience, but most of them experienced it as expellees, not as expellers, and that’s not what’s required.

Nor is there any point in approaching veterans of the Nakba – when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the War of Independence. They’ll deny it ever happened. It seems, therefore, that the best list of those with “experience” can be found in Yad Vashem. The immigration authority ought to look there.

This operation to deport refugees is a co—production of Interior Minister Arye Dery and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan. They’ve allotted two years to the mission of expelling 45,000 shvartzes. How shameful! Eichman and his team at the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration expelled 45,000 Jews in a few months. Dery, Erdan and their team at the Central Bureau for the Emigration of Shvartzes need two years to expel an equal number of people. Oy vey, look how we fall short. We obviously still have a lot to learn from them. But we can at least say that we’re moving in the right direction.

Only Ms. History looks at us from above, with a malicious smile on her face as she sees the persecuted become the persecutor, the refugee become the expeller, the uprooted become the uprooter, the oppressed become the oppressor, the beaten become the beater, the trampled become the trampler. “It’s true,” she whispers to herself, “I really am repeating myself. But I find this role reversal exceedingly funny.”

I don’t find it funny at all. My parents were expelled from Vienna. My country is desecrating their memory.

B. Michael

Haaretz Contributor

The UN refugee agency calls on Israel to stop deportation campaign targeting asylum seekers, offers help incoming up with 'alternative solutions'

Haaretz and Ilan Lior Jan 09, 2018 6:25 

Multiple African asylum seekers who were forcefully deported from Israel suffered abuse, detention and torture after they were made to take hazardous journeys when they were sent away from the Jewish state, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a rare statement released Tuesday.

The UN refugee agency's statement, which quoted a speech by agency spokesperson William Spindler, noted that the agency conducted research into the subject and highlighted 80 individual cases of people who risked their lives after they were relocated by Israel and then had to make hazardous journeys to Europe through Libya.

According to the world body, its staff conducted interviews with the asylum seekers in question to better understand their plight. "Feeling they had no other choice, they travelled many hundreds of kilometers through conflict zones in South Sudan, Sudan and Libya after being relocated by Israel," the statement recounted the difficult experiences of the asylum seekers as they were told to UN staff who interviewed them in Italy.

The interviews took place between November 2015 and December 2017 in reception centers and informal encampments around Rome. All the interviewees are adult men, and some are reported to have family members still living in Israel. They all came into the Jewish state via the Sinai area, and the UN statement said that "in every case they reported torture, mistreatment and extortion before reaching Israel." 

The statement went on to say that the men suffered "abuse, torture and extortion before risking their lives once again by crossing the Mediterranean to Italy" after Israel had sent them away.

The refugees also reportedly told UN staff that they were transferred from Israel to countries in Africa with very little money to support them later on their way, and that when they arrived they faced minimal accommodation and limited aid. "They reported feeling unsafe many experienced extortion and detention," the statement stressed.  

The statement also lamented the fact that while Israel has become a temporary shelter for tens of thousands of asylum seekers, "since Israel took over refugee status determination from UNHRC in 2009, only ten Eritreans and one Sudanese have been recognized as refugees."

The agency called on Israel to halt its planned deportation of thousands of asylum seekers, namely those who fled to Israel from Eritrea and Sudan and are now slated to be sent back to the African continent.

The UNHCR "is seriously concerned over Israel's plans announced on January 1st to forcibly relocate Eritreans and Sudanese to countries in Africa or have them face indefinite detention," the statement said. "At a time when UNHCR and partners in the international community are engaged in emergency evacuations from Libya, forced relocation to countries that do not offer effective protection and the onward movement of these people to Libya and Europe is particularly worrisome."

The agency extended an offer to help Israel in finding other possible ways to handle the situation, saying that it "stands ready to work with Israel to find alternative solutions for the protection needs of asylum seekers, in line with international standards. This includes resettlement out of Israel, as has happened previously."

Last week, Israel's Population, Immigration and Border Authority announced that it was launching its campaign to begin ridding Israel of its African asylum seekers, declaring that many Eritrean and Sudanese nationals will have to leave the country within the coming months or be incarcerated indefinitely.

There are some 35,000 Eritrean and Sudanese natives living in Israel, who have another 5,000 children who were born here. The overwhelming majority of the adults have temporary visas that they must renew every three months. The next time many of them come to renew their visas, they will be told it is the last renewal and that they will have to leave before the visa expires. The authority will propose that they either return to their countries of origin, or leave for Uganda or Rwanda.

First Israel Deported a Convert From Kenya. Now Birthright Might Cancel an Entire Trip for African Jews

Plan to bring 40 Ugandan converts on an Israel tour is at risk amid fears the participants wouldn't be allowed in, officials at the Jewish Agency and world Conservative movement say

Judy Maltz Jan 04, 2018

Plans to bring a first-ever group of Ugandan Jews to Israel on a Birthright trip are in jeopardy following the recent deportation of a member of their community.

The group of 40 Ugandans had been scheduled to arrive in Israel in late May on the free 10-day trip available to young Jewish adults from around the world. But Birthright officials are now concerned the group may be turned away upon arrival, just as 31-year-old Yehudah Kimani was, because the immigration authorities do not consider them Jewish.

The trip has been in the planning for two years.

The prospective participants all belong to the Abayudaya community, which has been practicing Judaism for more than 100 years. Its members, however, only underwent formal conversions over the past 15 years, most of them under the supervision of Conservative rabbis.

In late December, Kimani, who hails from Kenya but lived for a year among the Abayudaya while converting, was detained upon entering Israel and deported the following morning, even though he had a valid tourist visa.

On Wednesday, at a special session of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, an Interior Ministry official defended the decision to deport Kimani and insisted he was not Jewish despite his conversion.

According to officials at the Jewish Agency and world Conservative movement, following Kimani’s deportation, Birthright notified them of its intention to cancel the trip from Uganda, fearing a similar fiasco when the group arrived. Marom Olami, the young adult division of the world Conservative movement, has helped arrange details of the itinerary.

According to the officials, the Jewish Agency and world Conservative movement persuaded Birthright to refrain from any drastic moves at this point. Birthright officials responded that they would consider moving forward with the trip if two conditions were fulfilled: only Ugandans who converted after 2009 would be allowed to participate, and every participant would obtain prior approval from the Interior Ministry.

In response to a request for comment on Thursday, Birthright said: "Birthright Israel has received a request to bring a group of Jewish young adults from Uganda and is currently examining it."

The Abayudaya community is estimated to number between 1,500 and 2,000 members. Most were converted in 2002, before a smaller wave in 2008.

Only in 2009, however, did they join the world Conservative movement, and for that reason, the Jewish Agency only recognized the Abayudaya as an official Jewish community from that year. The assumption is that anyone who was converted after 2009 will have a better chance of entering Israel. (Kimani, however, was converted in 2010, and that did not prevent him from being deported.)

Yehudah Kimani blows the shofar with his son. Courtesy of Francis Kimani

The status of the Abayudaya community has been under discussion between the Conservative movement, the Jewish Agency and the Interior Ministry for the past five years. The ministry still does not recognize members of the community as Jewish and, in response to queries over the years, has said it is still studying the matter. The ministry has the final say on who gets recognized as a Jew in Israel and who is allowed to enter the country.

Asiimwe Rabbin, a 28-year-old member of the community, applied last year to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return after visiting the country. Anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish spouse, or anyone who has converted in a recognized Jewish community (regardless of the affiliation) is eligible to immigrate under the Law of Return.

Last week, Rabbin received a letter from the Jewish Agency notifying him that, for the meantime, his request had been rejected because the Interior Ministry had still not recognized the Abayudaya community as Jewish. Any decision on the matter, the letter warned, “can take several years.”

Jewish Agency representatives met last week with Interior Ministry officials hoping to obtain guarantees that the Birthright group from Uganda would be welcomed into Israel. No agreement of substance came out of the discussion, and a follow-up meeting has been scheduled for next week.

Birthright has brought more than 500,000 participants to Israel from 67 countries since its inception in 1999. Several members of the Abayudaya community have taken part in other programs in Israel in recent years, but this would be the first time such a large group was coming.

Forward to Nuremburg: Israel’s Quest for Racial Purity Dominates the Refugee Question

Israel: A State where ‘Death to the Arabs’ Mavet la’aravim is the National Slogan

Despite all the racist stereotypes, the crime rate among foreigners in Israel was 2.04% in 2010 compared with 4.99% among Israelis. Photograph: AP 

When Miri Regev a Likud MK stated that ‘"the Sudanese are a cancer in our body." she sparked off a pogrom against refugees in South Tel Aviv.  Later she apologised to cancer victims, for having compared them to refugees!  She also apologised for comparing the refugees to human beings.

Today Miri Regev is Israel’s Culture Minister!

Israeli Opinion Poll

Fence erected between Egypt and Israel to keep out refugees

The attitude of Regev is no different from that of her government.  Refugees are called ‘infiltrators’ not refugees in order to compare them with Palestinians who tried to return to Israel after being expelled in 1948.  Not one Syrian has been given refugee status despite the country being Israel’s neighbour.  As Professor Gideon Kunda explained:

 “Infiltrator” is a very loaded word, and it was not chosen by accident. It’s part of our collective memory, going back to the early period of the state, to Ma’aleh Akrabim [a 1954 attack on a bus in the Negev in which 11 Israelis were shot dead by cross-border marauders] and to Palestinians who tried to return to their land.  'It's No Accident That African Refugees Are Called Infiltrators'  

Large numbers of African refugees, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, began arriving in Israel in the second half of the 2000s and accelerated from between 2010-2012.   There were an estimated 60,000 refugees at one time though the numbers today are thought to be no more than 46,000.  Large numbers have been ‘persuaded’ via a bribe of some $3,000 to ‘self-deport’ and via long periods of detention at Holot.  As The Times of Israel reports ‘Israel has recognized fewer than 1% as asylum claims, and since 2009, less than 0.15% — the lowest rate in the Western world.’   Although most refugees from Eritrea and Sudan are recognised internationally as refugees, in Israel virtually none are given refugee status.

In every country in Europe there is anti-refugee feeling.  But in Israel it is qualitatively different as opposition to refugees isn’t about competition for jobs, social or other economic issues.  It’s about race and ethnicity.  Israel is a Jewish state and the refugees aren’t Jewish.  They dilute the Jewishness of the Jewish State.  As Netanyahu remarked:[Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state, Guardian, May 20 2021]

"If we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state... This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity."

This is an objection on explicitly racist grounds.  Israel is prepared to take any Jewish immigrant from any country.  Sometimes, as with the Iraq Jews in the 1950’s and the Soviet Jews in the 1970’s/1980’s it is prepared to force them to come, even against their own wishes, but in the case of non-Jewish African refugees they are a threat to ‘national identity’, that is Jewish national identity because Israel’s Arab population are themselves barely tolerated guests.  And of course they are a threat to ‘national security’ because a threat to ‘national identity’ is an existential threat and therefore a security threat.

Israeli Labour Party
The Israeli Labour Party has been no better than Netanyahu and Likud.  Indeed they have tried to outflank them from the Right.  As David Sheen wrote, in May 2012, their leader, Isaac Herzog wrote an opinion piece, challenging arguments by human rights groups that Eritreans in Israel deserved protection as refugees.  In March 2015, Herzog repeated this refrain on the eve of the Israeli national elections, saying, “We need to negotiate with Eritrea on the return of the Eritreans back to Eritrea.”   We should bear this in mind when the Jewish Labour Movement boasts that the Israeli Labour Party is its ‘sister party’ in Israel. 

Refugee Killed Because He Approached Jewish Girls as Arabs hunted down in Jerusalem by Lehava’s Jewish neo-Nazis 

Below is the horrific case of a refugee who, after being thrown into Israel’s Holot detention camp in the Negev desert for a year, was eventually released, making his way to Petah Tikvah.  One evening he made an approach to 3 Israeli Jewish women which they rejected.  He wasn’t violent or threatening but the idea of a non-Jewish African man approaching Jewish women was enough for his attackers who took nearly an hour to beat him to death.  Not only did no one intervene to put a stop to this but those who were around sympathised with the attackers.

It was not until an article in Ha’aretz nearly two weeks later that they got around to arresting two Jewish youths.  It is unlikely that they will face a murder charge because their offence was ‘spontaneous’.  Of course if it had been the opposite way around then it would have been called ‘terrorism’, police raids would have ensued, loud headlines and no doubt Tom Watson MP would pontificate about terror in Israeli streets.    See The Legal Attacks by Government on Refugees

The article on Lehava by Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, is equally horrific.   Lehava, an openly fascist organisation whose leaders derive from the Jewish Nazi Kach party, which was banned in Israel in the 1980’s openly organise groups of young thugs to attack any Arab in a ‘Jewish’ area.

Protestors outside Eritrea's Embassy in Tel Aviv  holding posters showing Eritrean refugees, who were forced by Israel to leave, being executed by ISIS in Libya

Lehava’s purpose is to ‘dissuade’ Arabs from having any social or sexual relations with Jewish women.  This stuff is out of Nuremburg but it is also at one with the idea of a Jewish state.  Lehava isn’t just a fringe fascist group like Britain First.  It is based in the settlements, it has hundreds of young supporters but more than that, it has political support in the government.

It was Tzipi Hotoveli, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel who invited Lehava into the Knesset to explain how to prevent the appalling vista of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews.  As the Guardian noted

In her capacity as chairwoman of the Status of Women Committee in the Knesset in 2011, she invited the racist group Lehava to explain how they prevent romantic contacts between Jews and Arabs. Responding to criticism, Hotovely said it was "important to examine procedures for preventing mixed marriages, and Lehava members are the right people for that". 

The Hemla hostel in Jerusalem, a safe house for 'troubled' Haredi girls.

One of the consequences of this invitation to the Knesset was that the ‘charitable’ wing of Lehava, Hemla (Mercy) has received government funding totalling about half of its income.  As Ha’aretz observed: [A Strange Kind of Mercy]:  ‘The right-wing organization Lehava is noted for its vehement anti-assimilation views, and many of its members are disciples of Meir Kahane. Yet Hemla (Mercy), a group closely linked to Lehava, receives state funding for its rehabilitation work with Jewish women.’  And who are these women who need rehabilitating?  Jewish women who have had affairs with Arab men. 

Although not spoken of, there is an unwritten consensus across the Zionist spectrum that relationships between Arab males and Jewish women (miscegenation an ugly word used in the Deep South of America) should be prevented.  An obsession with inter-racial sexual relations has been a characteristic of all movements for national purity – whether it is the KKK, the Nazis, Apartheid South Africa or Zionism.  Israel unlike South Africa does not enact Immorality Laws, it relies on moral and social pressures to prevent such liaisons. 

An opinion poll on YNet found that over half the Jewish population believed that marriage to an Arab was ‘national treason’.  Many religions historically, whether Jewish or Catholic, have frowned upon inter-marriage.  This is religious chauvinism not racism but when that becomes the policy of a state then that is racism.  It becomes a quest for racial purity. 

Dorit Rabinyan - author of Borderlife - banned for endangering Israeli 'national identity'

When Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan wrote ‘Borderlife’ about the relationship between a relationship between a Palestinian man and a Jewish woman, it was banned from Israel’s high school syllabus.  As Education Ministry official Dalia Fenig explained:

“Adolescent youth tend to romanticise and don’t have, in many cases, the systematic point of view that includes considerations about preserving the identity of the nation and the significance of assimilation,”

Imagine a book in Britain depicting a relationship between Black and White people being banned because youth were impressionable and wouldn’t understand ‘considerations about preserving the identity of the nation’ there would be uproar.  It is only the National Front and fringe fascists who believe that ‘the nation’ doesn’t include Black people.  Yet in Israel it is a majority Jewish and Zionist viewpoint that ‘the nation’ does not include Palestinians, because Israel is the state of the Jewish nation, not the Palestinian or Arab nation.

Israeli fascist groups like Lehava march to the drumbeat of ‘Death to the Arabs’ and the equally lovely ‘A Jew has a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore’.  Lehava, which organises gangs of thugs to attack Arabs in the street and who hand out ‘kosher’ certificates to employers who refuse to employ Arabs, feed into an already existing national consensus.   It is a consensus whereby 90% of Israel’s Jewish population don’t even recognise the concept of a non-Jewish African refugee.  A consensus whereby nearly 80% of Jews take it for granted that Jews in a Jewish state are entitled to preferential treatment over Arabs.  Israel’s Religiously Divided Society

This is why the Israeli state is reluctant to ban Lehava as a terrorist organisation whereas it has no compunction in banning the Northern Islamic Movement, which was a political and welfare association  that had massive support amongst Israeli Palestinians and which had led the political/religious struggle against Zionist attempts to take over the Temple Mount and the area of the Golden Dome in Jerusalem.

Dareen Tatour - gaoled Palestinian poet

It is the same reason that Israel gaoled Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour who posted a poem to social media [Dareen Tatour, Palestinian poet imprisoned by Israel for social media posts, shares her story].   According to +972 Magazine ‘The main clause of the indictment was based on a poem that she (or somebody else using her name) posted on Youtube under the title: “Qawem ya sha’abi, qawemhum” (Resist my people, resist them).’  Whereas Jewish racists who post death threats and worse on social media are never troubled by the Israeli police, a Palestinian poet who calls for resistance is dragged from her home, at 3.30 in the morning, by a large group of policemen who have no warrant and is then held for 6 months in prison and 6 months under house arrest far from her home.  The much vaunted ‘independent’ Israeli court system is complicit in all of this, before an international campaign fronted by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and others forces Dareen’s gaolers back off and allow her to transfer to house arrest in her home town. 

Darfur Refugee Beaten to Death for Trying to Consort with Israeli Girls

December 5, 2016 By Richard Silverstein 

Bibikir Adham-Abdo, murdered in Petah Tikvah in brutal hate crime

Bibikir Adham-Abdo fled his native Darfur  nine years ago during the civil war.  During one especially savage battle, he lost several fingers.  Eventually, he made his way across the Sinai desert to Israel, where he found work in the resort hotels of Eilat.  Because he is a refugee with no legal status (which Israel refuses to offer), he was picked up by the Border Police and thrown into the Holot detention camp in the Negev desert.  He was released, but told he could not go back to Eilat or move to Tel Aviv.  That left other smaller cities, where he might find pockets of other refugees with whom he might some sense of community.  So he went to Petah Tikvah, a central Israel town near Tel Aviv.

19 year-old, Dennis Barshivetz, suspect in the murder of a Darfur refugee

Two weeks ago, Bibikir, age 40, joined his roommate for an evening of drinking and socializing downtown, where other young people and foreign workers congregate.  According to Ynet (Hebrew), three Israeli girls were sitting and chatting when Bibikir approached them.  They fled (he was inebriated according to the Haaretz account) from him screaming that he should get away from them. 

Suddenly, an Israeli Jewish youth appeared, approached Bibikir and yelled at him.  The victim then raised his hands in resignation and turned away.  With his back turned, the attacker kicked him and threw a bottle of beer at him.  He kicked him more till he fell on the ground.  The kicking continued. He beat him all over his upper body including his back and head as the victim lay defenseless on the sidewalk.

As the victim tried to get up, Barshevitz arrived on the scene and gave him such furious kicks that Bibikir fell back on the pavement and struck his head.  After the victim’s body began making frightening rumbling sounds showing physical distress, they fled.

Security cameras show them beating him mercilessly for almost an entire hour.  Whenever the victim attempted to raise his head, they beat him more.  Clearly, no one came to his aid.

At 2AM, emergency services found him mortally wounded and brought him to the hospital.  There he lingered for eight days before succumbing to his wounds.  Though the crime happened two weeks ago, until Haaretz published a story about it no one had even been arrested.  Curiously, two days later the two suspects were arrested.  One is 19 years old and the other a minor, age 16.

The State prosecutor is already damping down expectations of a murder conviction, arguing that the cold-blooded murder was actually a “spontaneous” act.  Since the coroner could not attribute with specificity which blow killed Bibikir, each suspect is blaming the other for the fatal one.  Haaretz quotes a Jewish resident of Petah Tikvah justifying the violence: “Look at the streets here.  It’s like Harlem!  A fifth column.”

Comments on Facebook have been even more disgusting and virulent:

No matter how racist or threatening, Jewish racism on Facebook never faces any legal sanctions - they are reserved exclusively for Palestinians

David Elimelech: “Now’s the time to exterminate all the refugees. They’re the ooze from the garbage.

Nechama NB: “…If they want Jewish girls they should die.  Or send them back to their jungle!  The Sudanese infiltrator is no refugee.”

Sara Malul: “One less, wonderful.  This is the way to send them packing back to from where they came.  Most are terrorists.  Sudanese are even worse than Arabs.”

Oved Sason: “[They’re] garbage created by Satan, these infiltrators.”

Add to this the incitement from Bibi Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders during last week’s raging forest fires, when they accused Palestinians of acts of arson.  Israel Arrests 22 Over Wildfires, as Arson Is Suspected.  Netanyahu was quoted as saying that “a considerable number” of the fires were set and described them as “terror,” a term usually given to militant attacks by Palestinians.  “There is a price to crime, and there is a price for terror and incitement, and we will exact it,”  Unfortunately in Israel there is no price to pay for racial incitement, especially when it comes from the Prime Minister. 

Though 30 people were arrested for arson, only one has been indicted. That person had no terrorist motive at all.  Most of the others have been released.  This is the state of current affairs in Israel.  A nation seething with hate, ready at a moment’s notice to blame the weak and vulnerable for the most savage crimes.  When in reality, it is Israeli hate which leads to the most savage crimes against the victims.

Lehava: Israel’s ‘racist lynch mobs’ attacking Arabs

Jonathan Cook 4 December 2016

The far-right group stokes hatred and incites followers to violence against Palestinians, say analysts

Four youths in black T-shirts, bearing a distinctive yellow-flame insignia, approached “A” in July as he got out of a taxi in central Jerusalem to meet friends. They asked him the time. Suspicious of his accent, they confronted him directly: “Are you an Arab?”

“The moment I said, ‘yes,’ one of them punched me in the eye. The others jumped on me and started hitting me all over my body. There were many people in the area, but no one took any notice or tried to help.”

“A” managed to break free and fled to a nearby restaurant, where a friend worked, and hid inside. “If I hadn’t been able to run away, they would have killed me,” he said.

His filmed testimony is one of several taken of Palestinians in Jerusalem who have been violently assaulted recently by far-right Jewish activists. Fearing reprisals, most of the victims agreed to testify only on condition that their real identities were not disclosed.

The attacks were carried out by an extremist group called Lehava, or Flame in Hebrew, an acronym for the Organisation for the Prevention of Miscegenation in the Holy Land. Run by a rabbi, Ben-Zion Gopstein, Lehava rejects any interaction between Jews and Palestinians.

Opposed to intermarriage

Founded in 2009, Lehava is distinguished from other far-right groups by its official focus on stopping miscegenation and intermarriage between Jews and Palestinians. In addition to the 300,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem, some 1.7 million of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian by origin, making them nearly a fifth of the population.

In 2014, some 200 Lehava supporters –protested outside the wedding of a Palestinian man and a female Jewish convert to Islam in the city of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. Some carried placards with the slogan: “Miscegenation is a Holocaust”.

Jerusalem’s streets, meanwhile, are littered with fliers and stickers in Arabic warning, “Don’t even think about a Jewish girl” and in Hebrew stating, “Beware the goys [a derogatory term for non-Jews] – they will defile you”.

Lehava’s hardcore supporters number in the hundreds, according to the Religious Action Centre, the advocacy arm of the Reform Judaism movement, which filmed the testimonies. But it believes Gopstein can draw on the open support of thousands more.

David Sheen, an Israeli journalist who has reported on far-right groups for many years, told Al Jazeera: “Lehava’s aim is to rile up Jewish youth on the streets, to create a strike force that can help ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the main areas of Jerusalem.”

‘Rescuing’ Jewish women

Aviv Tartasky, a field researcher with Ir Amim, an Israeli group advocating fair treatment for Palestinians in Jerusalem, told Al Jazeera: “The idea of rescuing Jewish women from Arabs – bringing them back to Judaism – has wide support from Israelis, including from the left. The attitude among most Israeli Jews is that, even if we don’t support your methods, your violence, we approve of your goals.”

Gopstein, in a speech last year called for “action” to stop coexistence, calling it a “dangerous cancer”. Lehava leaders were all formerly active in Kach, an anti-Arab group that was outlawed in 1994 after one of its followers, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinians at worship in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque.

Rabbi Meir Kahane - the Judeo-Nazi who inspired Lehava's founders

Last month, Gopstein attended a memorial event in Jerusalem for Kach’s founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane. At the rally, he waved a cleaning rag with the face of Lucy Aharish, the only prominent TV presenter from Israel’s Palestinian minority, saying he would wash the floor with her. He added: “She compared me to Hamas. So we’ll make her nightmare come true.”

Gopstein, who lives in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement next to the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank, was a student of Kahane. He was arrested in 1990 on suspicion of murdering a Palestinian couple, in what appeared to be retaliation for Kahane’s assassination, but was later released.

Before its banning, Kach openly supported the violent expulsion of Palestinians from the region under the slogan: “Arabs to the Arab states and Jews to Zion”. Like Lehava, one of its main activities was preventing mixing between Jews and Palestinians.

New version of Kach

Sheen said Lehava had created “an instantly recognisable brand that is all about racial purity. This is just a new version of Kach. They can’t use the same slogans without breaking the law, but the similarities are unmistakable.” He noted that both organisations used the same colours of black and yellow in their emblems – Kach’s was a fist, while Lehava uses a flame.

“When Kach existed in the 1980s, it was seen as so racist that it was likened to the Nazis and boycotted by other parties in the parliament. It was seen as beyond the pale,” said Sheen. “Now it’s in the mainstream. It even has supporters in the Likud party [of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] who are happy to whitewash it.”

Blind eye from police 

As Lehava’s supporters have grown in numbers and confidence, large parts of Jerusalem’s city centre have rapidly become a no-go area for Palestinians after dark. The victims, as well as human rights groups and religious leaders, have complained that the Israeli police are turning a blind eye to the wave of intimidation and violence.

“There are racist lynch mobs roaming the streets of Jerusalem, driven by a hatred of Arabs, and the police are showing no interest in investigating,”

Steven Beck, a spokesman for the Israel Religious Action Centre, told Al Jazeera. The centre, which promotes equality and social justice in Israel, video recorded the testimonies of Lehava’s victims as part of a campaign called “Lehava is Burning Jerusalem”. It warns: “Jewish terror is not created out of thin air. It is fueled by ideological incitement and hatred that is spread by extremist rabbis.”

“H”, who was assaulted twice this year, filed a complaint with the police after he was knifed in the back and shoulder by a Lehava gang. “Until now, no action has been taken,” he said. “The police are with them, covering for them.”

Another victim, Jamal Julani was left in a coma by a Lehava group in 2012, when he was 17. Investigators told him none of the security cameras were working in the area of the assault, even though it took place close to two banks. “How that’s possible? I don’t understand,” he said. “There are maybe 10 cameras there. How did none of them work?”

Like others, “H” said he had been left emotionally, as well as physically, scarred. Fearful of further attacks, he said: “Now, I’m scared to go out alone. Even if I try to fight back, everyone will shout, ‘Terrorist, terrorist’. If a policeman is passing by and sees the incident … I’ll be the one who gets shot.”

Calls for ban grow

The 300,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after 1967 in violation of international law, have residency permits that entitle them to live and work in Israel. Many travel into Jerusalem’s city centre for the nightlife and shopping not available in their own deprived neighbourhoods, or to work in Jewish-owned restaurants and shops.

This is when many of the attacks occur, with Lehava claiming that the Palestinian men use the visits to consort with Jewish women.

Calls for proscribing Lehava have grown since three followers were found guilty last year of an arson attack on Jerusalem’s only binational school, for Jewish and Palestinian children. Walls were daubed with racist slogans, such as “End miscegenation” and “No coexistence with cancer”.

Early last year, Moshe Yaalon, then defence minister, was reported to be considering outlawing Lehava. By August, however, the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, said it had no evidence on which to recommend banning the group. The current defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, is considered unlikely to try to curb Lehava’s activities.

Meanwhile, Lehava has called for boycotts of city businesses that hire Palestinian workers. Critics say the group also intimidates landlords who rent to Palestinian families. Dan Biron, owner of the Birman restaurant in central Jerusalem, said Palestinians among his staff had been attacked on four separate occasions.

One time, he said, a mob came to his restaurant demanding that he hand over Palestinian workers. “Send them out so we can kill them,” he recalled. He stood his ground until they left. “There is anarchy in Jerusalem. The police do not enforce the law here,” he said. “There are serious criminals who wander around freely, criminals who beat up people, and the police do nothing.”

Christians attacked

The city’s Christians have found themselves increasingly targeted, too.

Last December, Gopstein called Christians “blood-sucking vampires” and demanded they be expelled from Israel. A few months earlier he told a meeting he supported torching churches to prevent “idol worship”. Church leaders suspect Lehava supporters are behind a recent wave of vandalism against Christian sites in Jerusalem and intimidation of priests and nuns.

Dozens of Lehava youths, led by Gopstein, rioted in September at a performance by a Palestinian Armenian choir at a music festival in a Jerusalem shopping mall. The singers were forced to leave after the youths shouted “Jew murderers!” and “Go to Syria!”.

The Vatican filed a complaint last year on behalf of local bishops to Israel’s attorney general, demanding that Gopstein be indicted for incitement to violence.

Wadie Abu Nassar, spokesman for the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, told how the Israeli authorities had not responded. “Gopstein is continuously saying racist and inciteful things in public, so one has to wonder why no measures have been taken against him. He seems immune.”  He added: “There is a clear backing among members of this government for far-right groups like Lehava.”

Government funding

Lehava has in the past received significant funding from the Israeli government – as much as $180,000 annually through a sister charity, Hemla. The latter runs a hostel in Jerusalem for the “rehabilitation” of Jewish women “saved” from marriages to Palestinians.

The Israeli media revealed last month that funding to Hemla has nearly doubled this year, to $350,000. Gopstein formally severed Lehava’s connections to Hemla two years ago. However, the registrar of non-governmental organisations is reported to have warned that secret ties between the two may have continued and has recommended an investigation.

There have also been suspicions of close ties between Israeli police and Lehava. They were fuelled in February when it emerged, following an investigation of Gopstein’s activities, that a Border Police officer had supplied the group with details of Jewish women dating Palestinian men.

Tartasky, of Ir Amim, told how: “The dominant culture in the police regards the Palestinians as not proper residents of the city. The police see their role as defending Jews from Palestinians, not the other way around.”

He said Jerusalem’s politicians also contributed to an impression that Palestinians had no place in the city. “The mayor [Nir Barkat] has not made a single statement against Lehava, even though they are inciting and carrying out regular attacks in the heart of his city. That has sent a clear message that Lehava has protection.”

That impression was underscored by statements from Barkat’s deputy, Meir Turgeman, in September, following the arrest of a Jerusalem resident, Mesbah Abu Sabih, on suspicion of killing two Israelis. Turgeman said he would “punish” the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem for their “animal behaviour … There are no carrots left, only sticks”.

Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, denied that the police were failing to take Lehava’s violence seriously. “There has been a significant rise in the number of patrols in the centre of Jerusalem to prevent such incidents,”. He added that the police were “dispersing” gangs of Lehava youth as soon as they were identified.

Hotline to stop mixed dating

The legal authorities have been accused of failing to rein in Lehava, too. Beck said the Religious Action Centre had submitted 25 complaints to the attorney general against Gopstein for incitement but had not received a response.

In April, a Jerusalem judge ruled that Gopstein had made an “honest mistake” in beating up two left-wing Jewish activists when they entered a West Bank settlement. Gopstein claimed he had believed they were Palestinians. Video footage showed Israeli police arresting the two victims rather than Gopstein.

One of Lehava’s public services is a hotline so that Israeli Jews can inform on family or friends who are dating non-Jews. Beck said: “Lehava has perpetuated a lie that thousands of Jewish women are being held against their will by Palestinians in abusive marriages. It stokes hatred and incites followers to violence.”

In reality, official figures show that only a tiny number of marriages between Israeli Jews and Palestinians occur. In 2011, the year for which official figures were released, there were only 19 such marriages. Nonetheless, the group has quickly pushed miscegenation on to the political agenda. Back in 2011, Gopstein was invited by Tzipi Hotovely, now the acting foreign minister, to advise a parliamentary committee set up to investigate the issue.

In 2013, similar numbers said they wanted Palestinians, including those with Israeli citizenship, expelled from the region.

Counter-protests launched

However, some Israeli Jews in Jerusalem have started to fight back against Lehava. Since 2014, a group named “Talking in the Square” has been organising counter-demonstrations in Zion Square, where Lehava stages a weekly rally.

One of their activists, Ossnat Sharon, said they tried to “keep an eye on [Lehava], curbing their attempts at violence as best we can.”

Palestinians were venturing into the city centre in bigger numbers, he said, because their own neighbourhoods had been cut off from nearby Ramallah and other Palestinian cities of the West Bank by Israel’s completion of its so-called separation barrier.

Better public transport links after Israel opened its light rail system have also contributed to the trend of Palestinians seeking work and entertainment in Jerusalem’s city centre. “Lehava’s growth indicates how uncomfortable some Israelis have become with seeing Palestinians in what they consider to be their city,” he said. “It has given them a sense of grievance and increased their extremism.”