Helen Aksentijevic interviews veteran anti-Zionist Moshe Machover, one of the founders of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel

 Machover looks back on life since his childhood under the Palestine Mandate and describes both his own family and political background

There are not many people who can justly be described as legends in their own lifetime but Moshe Machover is one such person. An indefatigable optimist he was the ‘one who got away’. Targeted by the Zionists and expelled summarily by the Labour Party’s discredited Sam Mathews, there was such a groundswell of opposition both within and without the Labour Party, that Moshe was reinstated within a month after Corbyn’s office had been forced to intervene with the Compliance Unit.

Unlike the cowards of the Socialist Campaign Group, Dianne Abbot et al, Moshe was proud to appear in Zoom meetings alongside expelled members like myself and Chris Williamson, the only MP who did not subscribe to the false 'antisemitism' narrative

Moshe has subsequently been suspended by Starmer as part of his purge of anti-Zionist Jews (its official name, as befitting such doublethink,  is ‘rooting out anti-Semitism’).

Helen Aksentijevic is a filmmaker who decided to make a series of films about supporters of Palestine including Moshe. See Enlightenment and Pure Joy. Helen can best be described as a travelling protest photographer.

The first pamphlet that I read, at the age of 18 when I was coming out as an anti-Zionist, was by Moshe Machover and two fellow members of Matzpen, Akiva Orr and Haim Hanegbi. Up to then my opposition to Zionism was largely instinctive rather than theoretically worked out. This was a time when the very word ‘Palestinian’ was disputed. I had been brought up to consider Palestinians as just ‘Arabs’. It is as if Romanians or Swiss nationals were referred to as Europeans. Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister famously declared that there was no such thing as the Palestinians.

Moshe as a child

‘The Class Nature of Israeli society’ was published by New Left Review in January/February 1971 although I read it in a pamphlet published by the International Socialists (SWP). It helped me to clarify my intuitive feelings about Zionism, that it was an exclusivist and chauvinist project that rejected the basic ideas of Socialism. The pamphlet helped me to jettison many of the ideas that I had grown up with in a Zionist environment.

A Young Moshe Machover & Jabra Nicola

Matzpen (Compass), which Moshe helped form in 1962, was the first Israeli anti-Zionist organisation. In the film Moshe describes briefly the origins of the organisation and the influence of the Palestinian Marxist Jabra Nicola over him and others. Nicola saw the solution to the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians as being a regional one involving workers and peasants struggle in the Arab East to overthrow the corrupt and repressive regimes which dot the landscape.

The Israeli Communist Party, from which Matzpen broke, never rejected Zionism. Indeed it has never had any analysis of Zionism worthy of the name. It sees Zionism as largely irrelevant and doesn’t see the Israeli working class as a settler working class.

The Irgun, a terrorist militia which perpetrated the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 before the declaration of independence

By way of contrast Matzpen developed an understanding of Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial ideology and movement or what Moshe describes, using Kautsky’s terminology a ‘work’ or ‘exclusion’ colony as opposed to an ‘exploitation colony’.

In my view these categories are too rigid, as some colonies like South Africa could be both exploitation and exclusion colonies. Hence South Africa’s Bantustan policy.

Jabra Nicola

Rakah, the Israeli Communist  Party believed and still believes that the Israeli state can be reformed and that Israeli Palestinians can achieve equality within it. They never understood that it was Zionism which ensured that Israel could never become a state of its own citizens. Rakah was a Stalinist party that went along in 1948 with Stalin’s support for the establishment of a ‘Jewish’ state, a policy which all but destroyed the Arab Communist Parties in the region.

The idealised image of the Kibbutzim and Jewish Labour - what wasn't shown were the evictions of Arab peasants with the help of the British army to make way for the Kibbutzim

Today the Palestine solidarity movement and academia takes it for granted that Israel is a settler colonial state, but for many years people saw Israel as either a liberal democracy or a social democratic, if not socialist society, with the Kibbutzim as their idea of socialism in practice. The idea 60 years ago that Israel was a settler colonial state was ground breaking.

I freely confess that Moshe has been an enormous influence over my own political development although, as often happens with one’s mentors, we disagree on certain issues. I don’t for example accept Moshe’s belief that the Israeli or Hebrew people constitute a nation in their own right with a right to self-determination as a Hebrew state in the future. In my view such a state would inevitably contain within it forces seeking to reconstitute themselves as a Zionist and Jewish Supremacist state with all that entails. Hebrew culture in Israel is inevitably a culture of oppression.

Zionist 'socialism' was a strictly Jewish only affair and thus it negated the basic principle of socialism, the unity of the working class whatever its ethnic or religious origins. Today that has played out in the presence in a far-right coalition of the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz

Unlike Moshe I also believe that the idea or concept of a unitary democratic secular state is one that the Palestine solidarity movement should adopt. Why? Firstly because it negates the concept of a Jewish State, which the two state solution does nothing to challenge. But also because a solidarity movement that is unable to present a vision of what it is striving for will in the end succumb to partial solutions such as a repartition. How such a goal will be achieved is a separate question.

I also have less faith in the future potential of the Israeli working class than Moshe because experience has shown that in settler colonial states, be it South Africa or Ireland, the settler working class is to the right of its own bourgeoisie. Their support for an ethno-supremacist state means that they are incapable of acting as a class for itself.

The ethnic cleansing of Jaffa - the only people driven into the sea were the Palestinians

I see no progressive or socialist potential in the Israeli Jewish working class because its identity wrapped up in the super oppression of the Palestinian working class.

Today the idea of Israel as an Apartheid State has become widely accepted. This idea, that Israel is a state in which racial oppression is not a side effect or by-product of its other policies but inbuilt into the state itself, has gradually taken hold. Ideologically Israel and its defenders are in a weaker position now than they have ever been.

The flight of the Palestinians was necessary to create an artificial Jewish majority in Israel

This development has taken place at the same time as Israel is militarily and economically stronger than it has ever been although still dependant on its benefactor, the United States.

Where I agree with Moshe is that the Question of Zionism or Palestine cannot be solved within the borders of Palestine. The great mistake of the Palestinian leadership, the PLO, was to believe that they could become yet another corrupt Arab leadership in a Palestinian state of their own side by side with the Israeli state. The PLO leaders desired nothing more than the right to oppress their own people, as the Palestinian Authority today demonstrates.

Tel Aviv, a Jewish only city in its early days in British Palestine

It was this that led to the disaster that is the 1993 Oslo Accords. At the time those of us who opposed Oslo were very much in a minority. Fateh activists were enthusiastic about its prospects and their prospects. This enthusiasm derived from the belief that Zionism could be confined within pre-1948 borders and could live alongside a Palestinian state. Unfortunately the Palestinian leadership never understood the nature of Zionism and how it is an inherently expansionist and colonisatory project. Or if they did understand it rhetorically they never incorporated it in their theory and practice. Today it is very clear that the Israeli state cannot be reformed and Zionism cannot change its spots.

An artist's view of Tel Aviv

The other mistake of the PLO was, in exchange for subsidies to finance their operations, to establish uncritical relationships with the very Arab regimes which oppressed their own people. These regimes paid lip service to the Palestinian cause whilst in practice abandoning them. Today we can see this clearly with the Abraham Accords, which follow on from the 1978 Camp David Accords whereby Egypt recognised Israel. Following Oslo, Jordan also established diplomatic relations with Israel.

The Arab regimes fear, despise and oppress their own peoples. They are the junior allies of imperialism. Regimes such as that in Saudi Arabia and Egypt are some of the most brutal on the planet. They are jealously guarded by the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv yet the Palestinian movement has largely been uncritical of these regimes. The role of Israel is to ensure that radical Arab nationalism never triumphs in the region.

Where I disagree with Moshe is that I don’t accept that it is necessary for a socialist revolution to take hold in the Arab world before Zionism can be overthrown. If only because the establishment of socialism has proved rather more difficult than Marx and the early socialists envisaged. I think it is possible for nationalist revolutions to overthrow the ancien regimes in the Arab world and in that way to threaten the very imperialist interests that Israel is paid to watch over.

The original advert  in Ha'aretz

Moshe has lived through the entire period of the Israeli state. He recalls how, in September 1967, Matzpen was the first group to place an advert in Ha’aretz decrying the Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank which an Israeli Labor not Likud Government, presided over. Moshe also recalls the hostility and calls of ‘traitor’ that greeted this advert. The advert met with unbridled hostility and threats to the individual signatories.

Moshe tells how, at the age of 3, his first definite memory was the day that World War 2 broke out. He describes the bombing of Tel Aviv by the Italian airforce and says that by 1944 it was clear that something horrendous had taken place in Europe in respect of the Jews.

This is in itself instructive because the Zionist leadership in Palestine were well aware that the Holocaust was taking place from at least mid-1942 if not earlier but they did their best to play such reports down. The Hebrew press even whilst it reported on what was happening in Europe also cast doubt on its own reports. Zionism, which has fashioned the Holocaust into an ideological weapon, was at that time more concerned with state building than rescuing Jewish refugees.

Moshe emigrated to Britain in 1968. Many others in Matzpen also emigrated to the West because life was made very difficult for those who were seen as traitors to Zionism. Moshe became a Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy at King’s College in London. Far from being a democratic society Israel has always been extremely intolerant of Jews who dissent from the Zionist narrative.

Moshe describes in some detail how, in the wake of the Nakba between 1947 and 1949, he and other children would hike into the Galilee and see the ruins of the Arab villages. They saw the artifacts and belongings left after the Zionist militias had looted much of what remained when the original owners had been forced to flee from Palestine. The Zionist myth that people like Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli still propagate is that the Palestinians voluntarily left.

It was the Israeli Labor Party that presided over the 6 Day War and the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and Golan Heights. I remember very well how Israeli propaganda portrayed the situation as a possible new holocaust. We really believed that Israel might well suffer defeat and that the Jews would be driven into the sea. Of course this was a lie meant to fool not only Israeli Jews but the wider Jewish communities world-wide. We now know that this was, as Moshe says, ‘poppycock’.

The ILP was also responsible for the establishment of the first settlements. It was an Israeli Labor Government which launched a pre-emptive war on Syria, Jordan and Egypt with the intention of completing what was they considered unfinished business in 1947-9, namely the conquest of the whole of what was Palestine under the British Mandate. In 1956 Israel had launched the Suez War, in conjunction with Britain and France, against Egypt following Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. At that time Israel had been forced to withdraw after the US Administration of Eisenhower had made its displeasure clear.

The remains of the Arab villages after they had been looted and their inhabitants expelled or massacred

Moshe explains how one of the cardinal beliefs of the Zionists is that Jews don’t merely constitute a religious community but a nation in its own right. That is integral to the Zionist claim on what they call Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel). The basis of this claim is that God gave the land to the Jews. Given that the early Zionists were atheists, we have the absurdity that Zionism based its claim to Palestine on the promise of a god who doesn’t exist!

I hope you find this interview as illuminating and interesting as I did.

Tony Greenstein

A racist endeavor: Zionist Israel’s Black Jewish victims of color

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.