Israel’s War Against Asylum Seekers and Refugees

52% of Israelis agree - African migrants are a cancer

I make no apologies for writing once again on Israel’s racism towards African asylum seekers who escaped from war and genocide in Africa in the mid 2000’s.  Up to 60,000 came from 2005 onwards but after 2011 and under Netanyahu’s regime they were treated as the enemy within. 

Human not cancer - refugees demand that they be recognised as human beings in Israel, not seen as a pathology and a disease

In November 2010, the Israeli government approved a plan to build a massive detention center, Holot, in the Negev/Naqab desert, to hold thousands of asylum seekers and their families before deportation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time: “We must stop the mass entry of illegal migrant workers because of the very serious threat to the character and future to the state of Israel.”

When the Palestinian refugees were expelled in 1948, because without ethnic cleansing, a Jewish majority state could not be formed, those who tried to return were called ‘Infiltrators’.  The idea that those who were born and were indigenous to the land should be called infiltrators by those who were settler colonials beggars belief but is part of the racist mentality of colonialism.

Anti-racist Israelis confronting Zionist racists who want refugees to depart

Hostility to refugees relates to the Zionist nature of the Israeli state.  Quite simply, Israeli society is overwhelmingly hostile to refugees because they are not Jewish.  They dilute the Jewish gene pool and threaten the Jewish demographic majority.  As Prime Minister Netanyahu said, non-Jewish immigrants threaten the ‘Jewish identity’ of the Israeli state.  Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state

Racist anti-asylum demonstrators - the Nazis used to say Jews were also criminals

Many refugees have settled in the south of Tel-Aviv where they have been subject to pogroms and violent demonstrations by racist Israelis.  This, you understand, in liberal, gay friendly, pink washing Tel-Aviv.  They are accused of having illegally entered Israel because it is illegal to claim asylum in Israel.  

The Zionists accuse refugees of being 'infiltrators' which was the accusation levelled against Palestinian refugees - they are really 'terrorists' out to destroy the Jewish state

All refugees in Israel are, by definition, illegal. Even worse though is the attitude towards them.  Culture Minister Miri Regev called them  a ‘cancer’ in Israeli society.   When criticised for this comment, she then apologised to cancer patients, for having compared them to asylum seekers.

Miri Regev -  the racist Culture Minister who first described African refugees as 'cancer'

Israel’s Refuses to Accept a Single Refugee from Syria or elsewhere because they aren’t Jewish

Israel is now proposing to steal, because that is what it is, 20% of the incomes of the poorest section of Israeli society, people who have little or no access to medical or health facilities, who get no public housing or benefits.  There used to be strong Jewish religious principles in Jewish religious law about sheltering the stranger, even offering them up your own bed.  Israel, as a racist ethno-religious state, sees that refugees are not Jewish therefore they should not be there.

Israel Begins to Confiscate 20% of Asylum-Seekers’ Incomes

Watch interview:

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transcript

SHIR HEVER: Welcome to the Real News Network. From the beginning of this month a new policy's implemented in Israel. African asylum seekers who work in Israel have part of their wage income garnished by the state and placed into an account to which they have no access.

According to a law which was legislated in 2014 and only now implemented, 20 percent of the wage of asylum seekers will be deposited into a special bank account. In addition their employers will be required to deposit 16 percent of the wage which would normally be allotted to the worker's pension and to the future of severance compensation into that same account. And the asylum seekers would theoretically gain access to the money saved, only upon leaving the country. Israeli bank, Mizrahi Tefahot, has won the tender to manage these accounts, and has already informed its' investors that the policy would improve its liquidity and reserve ratio, because the money will not be accessible to its owners, and the bank can use it to offset loans.

Right-wing anti-refugee demonstration

They policy is intended to discourage asylum seekers from entering Israel or from working in Israel, but as most of the asylum seekers in Israel are refugees from Eritrea or from Sudan, escaping conditions of slavery and mass murder, one really wonders if the policy will act as a deterrence, or merely as a mechanism to make the lives of these refugees even harder than they already are. As refugees are usually forced to work in precarious and low wage jobs, garnishing a significant part of the wages make it very difficult for them to make ends meet.

Refugees trying to appeal to the better nature of the Zionists - the problem is that Zionism doesn't have a better side

So we are joined now to speak about this with Lia Tarachansky. Lia Tarachansky is an Israeli Russian Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker. She reported for the Real News Network on Israel and the Palestinian territories. She's made five films already, and one of them Ethnocracy: Israel's African refugees, is specifically about the topic that we want to discuss right now, so thank you very much Lia for joining us.

LIA TARACHANSKY: Thanks for having me Shir.

SHIR HEVER: So, how many asylum seekers are currently residing in Israel?

LIA TARACHANSKY: According to the latest estimates, and also from the numbers of the Ministry of Interior, about 40,000.

Anti-racist Israeli Jews - you won't find Labour Zionists among them

SHIR HEVER: And let's talk a little but about the history of this situation, because Israel was responsible for expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, creating the longest lasting refugee population in the world since 1948. But no longer the largest refugee population. Does this have an effect of how African refugees are seen and treated within Israeli society?

LIA TARACHANSKY: So the mechanisms that the state of Israel is using to essentially expel, imprison, and minimize the number of African refugees in its attempt to be the first developed nation with zero refugees, are the same mechanisms that the state of Israel and pre state used against the Palestinian refugees. For example, the anti infiltration law, closing the borders, and mass expulsions. Including a whole matrix of administrative and bureaucratic manipulations in order to basically withdraw status from people. So those same processes that the state of Israel uses against the Palestinian refugees, are used against the African refugees. However, the African refugees don't have any history of conflict, neither with Israel nor with the Jews. And so when they first arrived in 2006, they were actually welcomed and treated well by Israeli soldiers that were greeting them at the border, and then by the Israeli public. But when the government of Netanyahu decided to take a 90 degree turn on that treatment of the African refugees, what resulted was a full out war against them. Even though they don't have a history of conflict with either Israel or the Jewish people.

What's amazing is that because, or rather despite the fact that these people are escaping genocidal regimes that are actually at conflict with the state of Israel, and it would be a phenomenal propaganda tool for Israel to treat these people humanely, instead what the government does is incite against them, dehumanize them, an essentially treat them and scapegoat them as if they are the core of the problem. So for example, in the city of London alone, there are 250,000 asylum seekers, refugees, and other claimings. In the entire state of Israel , there are 40,000. They are less than .001% of the population, and yet they are constantly being talked about as though they are threatening Israel's Jewish majority. A demographic threat, which is something that the state of Israel uses frequently against the Palestinian minorities in Israel.

So what's amazing here is that we're seeing that even a population that is innocent of any of the kinds of things that the state Israel accuses its enemies of, is still being treated as an enemy, simply because they are not Jewish. And the product of all of this is because of course, Israel is an ethnocratic state, which means that only Jewish people can become citizens. Which means that there is no mechanism whatsoever for anyone to actually be in Israel long term, unless they are Jewish.

SHIR HEVER: I want to get back to the point that you focus on. Policy of the Israeli government, that there is some tension also between the Israeli government and the Israeli public on this issue. Or maybe not tension, but some divergence of opinion. Because originally, and we've covered this in the Real News, the Israeli government, the giant prisons, to keep all the asylum seekers incarcerated without a trial, and this policy was found illegal by the Israeli high court. Now many asylum seekers are still in prison, but this new policy of garnishing wages, do you see this as a response by the Israeli government or by the Israeli parliament to the decision of the high court?

LIA TARACHANSKY: I don't think those two things are related because the cabinet and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has proven not once, and not twice, that they are simply willing to ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court, where those rulings do not serve their interests. They don't need to prove anything. They don't need to actually counter the court in any way. They're simply not implementing it, and there's a silent consensus about that on the entire spectrum of the Israeli Zionist political leadership. Even so called centrist politicians like Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid and Yitzhak Herzog are all respecting the status quo of essentially ignoring the ruling of the supreme court.

But if you're trying to understand where this latest attack on African refugees fits, what you need to do is look at it from the perceptive of the five part plan that the government of Netanyahu actually implemented. And this is the plan that we cover in the film that I co directed with Canadian filmmaker, Jesse Freeston, called Ethnocracy: Israel's African refugees.

So if we're looking at it as step by step by step, the first step that actually took place was that the Government basically said, "These people have no status." And so, when they were first were coming in, what a lot of African refugees did, is they would go to the UNHCR, the UN body responsible for refugees. What the government did in its very early attacks, is it basically gutted the UNHCR of the ability to decide who is and is not a refugee. And the UNHCR office in Tel-Aviv basically just became a shell. A meaningless rubber stamp that had no power whatsoever. So the Ministry of Interior basically gutted that ability and the used that ability to basically say, "Well we don't know who's a refugee, because, nobody's checking who's a refugee and who is not a refugee. Therefore these people are not refugees." So that was the first attack.

The second attack is that they used that designation as essentially not knowing and not wanting to know and eliminating the processes of getting to know, who is a refugee, to then mass deport anyone who is from a country that the government decided is deportable. And under this policy we saw the Ivory Coast refugees deported. Some of them in the middle of the night by riot police. We've seen the south Sudanese refugees reported. Of them, more than half have ... We can't track them down. There's been dozens and dozens of people that have been reported killed as a result of this policy. A direct product of Israel's attack on the African refugees. And basically, over the years, since 2011, when a few right wing politicians saw that they can use xenophobia to basically ride a wave of racism to the front of the parliament from the back benches, which is where they were, we've seen this huge change. And in that change we have seen all of the African refugees that are basically not from Eritrea and Sudan deported with a few individuals as exceptions. Then the next step was that the government of Netanyahu built a 240 kilometer wall along the border with Egypt for the first time in human history, cutting off Asia from Africa. And this wall essentially reduced to number of African refugees entering Israel to zero.

The next step was building the biggest prison for refugees in the entire developed world. And they build this massive camp in the middle of the desert, surrounded by other prisons and military bases and they basically created a racial profiling police force that went down the streets of Tel-Aviv and asked for IDs from anyone who is brown or black, and then basically on mass deported thousands of people to this prison.

And so, the last step of the program essentially has been to pressure those people that are in that jail and everyone else who hasn't yet been put in jail into self deporting. So this is the most important part of the 5 part plan. Which is essentially, the government of Israel knows that if they deport Eritrean or Sudanese refugees, which are refugees that come from countries that the level of refugee recognition worldwide for them is about 80% and up. If they deport people to these regimes, Eritrea being a dictatorship, and Sudan being essentially run by a war criminal genocidal maniac. If they deport these African refugees to these countries, they would significantly lose the support of the international community because they would be seen as clearly non-humanitarian move. So instead what they do is that the government of Israel basically came to an arms agreement with a number of three African states on a number of arms agreements. Basically saying that those states are gong to take Israel's unwanted African refugees, in exchange for discounts of arms being sold to them by the state of Israel.

And now they're trying to shuffle the African refugees to self deport to one of these three countries. And the latest attempt in the pressure which the UNHCR actually said is in complete violation of international law, is to push these African refugees to self deport because of also basically stealing 20% of their salaries. Now as you yourself reported Shir, when you were talking about the Histadrut basically theft of the taxes of Palestinian laborers, I have every little faith that the African refugees are ever going to see that money again.

SHIR HEVER: Well finally I want to get back to the point that you said before when you made the comparison with London, for example. And you said that Israel has the largest prison for asylum seekers in the developed world. Lets talk a little bit about kind of the international comparison. Is there any other county in the world that garnishes the wages of asylum seekers in this way in order to create an incentive for self deportation? And do you think that this policy is completely for internal purposes, like you said? For the back ventures to be able to move forward through populism or is it also something that could affect policy towards refugees in Europe or in other countries, which might copy Israeli policy.

LIA TARACHANSKY: Yeah so the African refugees, like the Palestinian laborers, paid taxes to the state of Israel while they receive absolutely no services whatsoever from the state of Israel. They don't get shelter, they don't get basic food supplies, they don't get healthcare. Zero, nothing. So on top of paying taxes to a government that does not provide them with any services, they are now going to have these wages taken. And as far as I know, and I'm of course not a refugee expert, no other country does that. Now you have to understand that Israel actually promotes itself to Europe, which is currently seen as in a crisis of migration, as the frontier of effective policies on how to basically prevent migrants from coming into your borders. So Israel is using this as yet another tool in its marketing campaign that its trying to convince other western nations, other developed nations, to adopt in their attack on globalized migration.

SHIR HEVER: Alright this is very interesting but of course very concerning about what will be the implications of this policy. Thank you very much, Lia for joining us.

LIA TARACHANSKY: Thanks for having me, and I would like your audience to know that if they'd like to watch Ethonocracy, its available for free on Vimeo, and they can also

find it on narrativeproducions.com.

Israel - the most hostile of all western countries to refugees & asylum seekers

Soldiers instructed by Defence Minister Lieberman not to play with refugee children

Israel jails asylum seekers, labels them "infiltrators"

New law jails asylum-seekers for longest in West

Zionist Pogrom in Jerusalem

Israeli Police Tell Palestinians to Shut Their Shops as they Protect Settler Violence and Racism

Every year Jerusalem day is the pretext for an orgy of hate and violence from settler mobs, aided and abetted by the Israeli Police and Border Guards.  This year a legal attempt was made to secure an injunction by the Supreme Court rejected that, despite the video evidence from last year.  The Deputy Chief Justice confronted with the evidence simply expressed pious wishes that the Police would exercise zero tolerance towards those who chanted ‘Death to the Arabs’ and similar slogans. 

I’ve included a number of reports and videos from a variety of sources to show the flavour of the day.  

There was a contingent from Lehava, dedicated to preventing pure Jewish women being ensnared by wily, predator Arab men.  An image that is derived directly from the Nuremburg Laws 1935.  There have, of course, been no condemnations by ‘mainstream’ Israeli politicians such as Netanyahu.

As that great Orthodox scholar and Professor at the Hebrew University, Yeshayahu Leibowitz said, religious-nationalism is the direct opposite of religion.  He first coined the term ‘Judeo Nazis’ to describe the little pogromists that are evident in the videos.  Israel and Zionism have taken the Bible and fashioned it into a nationalist creed and used  the bits they agree with (never the Prophets!) to legitimise their racist and fascist sentiments.

Whereas previously, under Labour Zionism and Begin, there was an attempt to keep the racism hidden from view, today it is on display for all to see.  In some ways we should be grateful for the fact that there is no pretence anymore but Palestinians are paying a  high price for this.

Tony Greenstein

Video: Israeli mobs celebrate “Jerusalem Day” with anti-Palestinian rampage in Old City

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Mon, 05/18/2015 - 11:48

Lehava' s gang, "Jerusalem day", 17.5.2015

Note: To see 
Thousands of young Israelis, many of them children, rampaged through the Old City of occupied Jerusalem on Sunday chanting “Death to the Arabs” and other racist and anti-Muslim slogans.
Some attacked bystanders and journalists and banged on the shutters of Palestinian stores that had been ordered to close at midday.

The mob march was the climax of “Jerusalem Day,” an Israeli national holiday to celebrate the occupation of the eastern part of the city in 1967. Zionist militias ethnically cleansed and captured the western sector of Jerusalem in 1948.

Under international law, Israel’s purported annexation of Jerusalem following the 1967 conquest is null and void and is not recognized by any country in the world.

Racist chants

Sunday’s violent scenes began as occupation forces allowed large numbers of religious and nationalist Israeli Jews to flow into into the area of the Damascus Gate in the late afternoon.
This is an entrance to the walled Old City that was long a bustling market for Palestinians from surrounding villages until Israel made access to the city virtually impossible for millions of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Israelis, many chanting racist slogans, rally at the Damascus Gate before marching into Jerusalem’s Old City, 17 May.(Charlotte Silver)

Groups of young men and boys banded together in circles, chanting and dancing.

The atmosphere quickly shifted to that of an angry mob, which first turned on two women who held the Palestinian flag and then, with increasing frequency, toward random Palestinian bystanders and journalists, according to The Electronic Intifada’s Charlotte Silver, who reported from the scene.

Haaretz published a video of a mob attacking a Jordanian television crew and The Times of Israel captured video of young Israelis harassing a female journalist and preventing her from speaking to her cameraperson.

Many sang Bible verses set to popular music, often embellished or altered to justify Israeli rule over Palestinians. Among the numerous racist slogans was “A Jew is a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore.”
The frenzied, sustained and widespread nature of the racist vitriol is documented in a large amount of footage obtained by The Electronic Intifada, only a small part of which is included in this post. This video, shot by the Jerusalem resident known as Zalameh, provides a good sense of the mixture of Jewish extremism and outright racism on display:

Israeli mob chants anti-Palestinian slogans in occupied Jerusalem

The video also shows two women holding a Palestinian flag being verbally abused.
But Israeli Border Police on horseback, armed with sound bombs and guns, kept most Palestinians out of the Damascus Gate area. Police monitored the crowd, attempting to intervene when a pack of marchers would attack someone, Silver said.

“May they all die”

In this video, several youths who spoke to Silver make virulently racist comments. One says that they had come to celebrate the “liberation of Jerusalem from the Palestinians,” others chiming in with “may their memory be erased.”

"Jerusalem Day" at Damascus Gate (occupied East Jerusalem), 17 May 2015

“May they all die today, all together,” another interjects. A child asserts repeatedly that Jerusalem was “liberated” from “the donkeys.”

Similar expressions could be heard throughout the day from the chanting mobs.

Israel expert Dena Shunra notes that the curse calling for someone’s name or memory to be erased was typically used for enemies as despised as Adolf Hitler; its use by Jewish youths against Palestinians is an indicator of extreme levels of hatred.

While deeply disturbing, children cannot be held responsible for spouting such views. But the large number of children participating in the hate march underscores the systematic indoctrination and anti-Palestinian incitement to which Israeli youth are exposed.

Jewish women as Jewish “goods”

The marchers then entered the Old City, charging down the narrow streets which are usually full of Palestinian business owners and shoppers.

Members of the anti-miscengenation group Lehava, some again appearing to be very young, also took part in the march, shouting “Arab beware – my sister is not abandoned goods” (see video at the top of this post).

They also chanted, “Girls of Israel, for the Nation of Israel [Jews].”

These are warnings to Palestinian men to stay away from Jewish women who are described, in effect, as property exclusively available to Jewish men.

Religious hatred

The same marchers can also be heard singing “Kahane still lives” to the tune of a popular religious-nationalist song, “Our Father Still Lives” – which refers to Abraham.

Meir Kahane, the assassinated Brooklyn rabbi who founded the the Jewish Defense League, is thus elevated almost to the level of a biblical patriarch.

Kahane also founded Kach – an organization so racist and extreme that even in Israel it was outlawed and classified as a terrorist group.

He is most remembered for his demand that the entire Palestinian population be expelled from lands occupied by Israel.

Voices can also be heard chanting that the Muslim prophet Muhammad was a “homo” and a “son of a whore,” among other slogans calculated to provoke and denigrate.

The expressions of virulent, even genocidal, hatred for Palestinians are reminiscent of the “Death to the Arabs” marches in the city which culminated in the abduction and burning alive of Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khudair last July.

Demolish Jerusalem’s mosques

A leaflet distributed at a “Jerusalem Day” march calls on the Israeli government to “bring down” the al-Aqsa mosque so it can be replaced with a Jewish temple.(Charlotte Silver)

Jewish extremist organizations handed out leaflets demanding that the Israeli government demolish Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock to make way for a Jewish Third Temple in their place.

The destruction of the al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest places for Muslims, is a long-standing goal of some Israeli Jewish organizations backed and financed by the Israeli government.

The leaflet in the picture, collected at the Sunday march, states:

In honor of Jerusalem Day, we all demand of the Israeli government: to bring down the mosques on the Temple Mount so that we can build the Temple and renew the offering of sacrifices.

It is signed by an organization called “Returning to the [Temple] Mount.”

The atmosphere of intense hatred and religious-nationalist chauvinism was no doubt encouraged by a declaration from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “Jerusalem was always the capital of the Jewish people alone – and not of any other nation.”

The march culminated in a mass rally at the Western Wall, attended by education minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home (Habayit Hayehudi) party among other government figures.
With thanks to Dena Shunra for translation and analysis.

Netanyahu: Jerusalem was always the capital ‘of the Jewish people alone’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the Jerusalem Day celebration at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, on May 17, 2015. (Photo: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Jerusalem has always been the capital “of the Jewish people alone, not of any other people” at a Jerusalem Day ceremony on Ammunition Hill, in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem on May 17.

“Jerusalem won’t become once again a wounded and bisected city,” he continued. “We will forever keep Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty.”

Netanyahu pledged to “continue to build and nurture [Jerusalem], to expand her neighborhoods.”

The prime minister has long insisted that Israel must control East Jerusalem. In the same celebration in 2010, he maintained that “We cannot divide or freeze a city as vibrant and creative as Jerusalem – we will continue to build and be built by it” and averred “We are the generation which was lucky enough to see our holy sites liberated and returned to our hands, and it is upon us to transfer this right to our children.”

Jerusalem Day, celebrated every year on the 28th day of Iyar, the second month in the Jewish calendar, commemorates what Israel calls the “reunification” of  Jerusalem.

Extremist Israelis mark the day every year by marching through the Old City of occupied Jerusalem chanting racist and anti-Muslim slogans like “Death to the Arabs.”

Journalist Charlotte Silver, reporting from the 2015 commemoration for The Electronic Intifada, interviewed Israelis who proclaimed “May they all [the Palestinians] die today, all together.” A young Israeli applauded Israel for liberating Jerusalem from “the donkeys.” Another expressed hope that the memory of the Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem will be “erased.”

Israeli leftists protest a Jerusalem Day march on 17 May 2015. (Photo: AFP/Gali Tibbon)

Several hundred Israeli leftists protested the march, chanting slogans such as “Jerusalem will not be silent, outlaw racism.” The activists, largely from the left-wing organization Jerusalem Won’t Tolerate Racism, dubbed the demonstration a “march of hate,” and held signs reading “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies” (red sign in Hebrew above) and “We are against incitement. We are against racism” (purple sign in Arabic above).

Decades of Illegal Occupation

Israel militarily occupied East Jerusalem in 1967. For decades, the United Nations has insisted that this occupation is illegal. “Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem and the surrounding West Bank hinterland contravenes international law. It is not recognized by the international community which considers East Jerusalem an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territory,” the UN maintains, citing Security Council resolutions 252, 267, 471, 476, and 478.

“Since 1967, Israeli measures have altered the status of East Jerusalem and affected the residency status of Palestinians, their access to basic services, and their ability to plan and develop their communities,” the UN continues.

“Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem is illegal and occurs at the expense of land and resources for Palestinian construction and development, placing residents at risk of forced eviction, displacement and dispossession,” the UN also notes. “As the occupying power, Israel is responsible for administering the occupied territory for the benefit of the protected Palestinian population.”

Attacked Journalists

Palestinian photojournalist Nidal Ashtiyeh was shot in the face by Israeli occupation forces on 17 May 2015. (Photo: Ahmad Talat Hassan)

Israeli police assaulted and broke the cameras of Palestinian journalists who were filming the Jerusalem Day protests. The reporters say they had the proper accreditation to film the march, but were attacked anyway.

A journalist reported that Israeli police evacuated the area and refused to allow anyone except Israeli settlers in.

Just a few days before, on 15 May, Israeli occupation forces shot a Palestinian journalist in the face with a rubber-coated steel bullet. The man had been photographing a Nakba Day protest. He was wearing a gas mask, the glass of which the bullet shattered, wounding his left eye.

RT crew attacked by Israeli police in Jerusalem (VIDEO)

Published time: May 17, 2015 18:11
Edited time: May 19, 2015 06:30

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 a terrible time we had to pass through check points that they erected everywhere along the Old City, they asked us to move away from the Damascus gate point. They didn't do it gently, they pushed us and broke our camera,” RT Arabic reporter Dalia Nammari later told RT International.An RT Arabic TV crew was attacked by Israeli police while covering the Jerusalem Day march in the Old City. Although the journalists had all documents permitting them to cover the event, the police prevented them from going live.

The reporter added that other journalists covering the event were treated the same “brutal” way by the Israeli police.

Dalia Nammari and the cameraman Muhammad Aishu were filming the march of settlers, which they had been accredited to, when the police interfered with their work and took away the camera. The crew continued to report from the scene using a smart phone and going on air live via Skype, when the police attacked them again.

Screenshot from RT video

“They took away my earpiece ... they are demanding from everyone – even journalists, to evacuate the area. Even Palestinians who live in the city can’t be present here because of the settlers’ march,” Nammari said.

The Israeli settlers took to the streets of Jerusalem to mark the day when Israel occupied the eastern side of Jerusalem in 1967, Nammari reported. Many were carrying posters reading “Jerusalem for Israelis.”

Read morePolice fire tear gas during demo against racism, police brutality in Tel Aviv (VIDEO)

The controversial Israeli march through Jerusalem and its Muslim quarters is an annual event, marking the anniversary of Israel's capture of East Jerusalem. Police estimated that more than 30,000 Israelis took part in this year's rally, Reuters reported. They marched through the areas of the city, the overall population of which includes more than 30 percent of Palestinians.

The march resulted in confrontations, with mounted Israeli police clashing with dozens of rock-throwing Palestinians, who were protesting the Jewish nationalists march, Reuters reported. Two officers were injured and six Palestinians were arrested, police sources said.

The RT Arabic crew managed to film some of the clashes before being assaulted themselves by Israeli police.

Read more​RT office in Ramallah raided by IDF

Brutal attacks by Israeli law enforcement are “rare to be filmed, but not rare to happen,” Sarit Michaelli of the Israeli info center for human rights has previously told RT.

On Saturday, a Palestinian journalist suffered at the hands of the Israeli army, being shot in the eye with a rubber bullet. The photojournalist was taking pictures during a march to commemorate Nakba, or Catastrophe Day, when Palestinians were displaced in the creation of Israel.

“This is a usual behavior for the Israeli army against journalists and against peaceful non-violent Palestinian demonstrators,” Mustafa Barghouti, General Secretary of the Palestine National Initiative told RT.

“During the last attack on Gaza less than a year ago the Israeli army killed 18 journalists including an Italian journalist in their attack on the Palestinian people. So this violation of the freedom of expression and violation of the right of journalists to cover what happens is a frequent behavior of the Israeli army which respects nobody,” Barghouti told RT, adding that this time the clashes happened during celebrations of annexation of East Jerusalem, which is “considered illegal by every international law.”

Last year, Israeli forces raided a building in Ramallah where the offices of several media outlets, including RT's Arabic channel, were located. The troops broke down the doors of the offices, destroyed some of the equipment and confiscated records.

Israel’s Anti-Black Pogrom - the Zionist dream fulfilled

Is theJewish state becoming Klan country?

The article below needs little comment.  Although the author, Justine Raimondo, is a right-wing Republican, what he says is indisputable.  When Yehuda Bauer, the holocaust professor of Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University calls for an Evian Declaration, without even realising that they are accepting a comparison between the ugly Israeli racism in the videos below and what happened in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939.  Evian was a conference called by Roosevelt to solve the Jewish refugee problem in 1938 – it achieved very little and the ‘one bright spot’ the offer of Santo Domingo of 100,000 places to German Jews was actively opposed and fought by the Zionist movement for whom the idea of seeking sanctuary anywhere but Palestine negated the whole purpose of establishing a Jewish state.

I disagree with Justine Raimondo that this is a Jewish problem.  It is a Zionist problem, but since Israel calls itself the Jewish State it is unsurprising that many people accept it on its own terms.

This is the logic of Zionism.  The idea of the victims of racism fleeing to set up their own separate state, in alliance with colonialism, could only have one outcome.  It also did the work of the anti-Semites for them, accepting as it did that Jews didn’t belong where they lived.  What it proves is that any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, can be transformed from oppressed to oppressor.  In Israel, a Jewish society was formed, composed of different classes and it is inevitable that hostility to non-Jews, not just Palestinians, forms the glue that binds the ‘Jewish nation’.

No doubt Zionist leftists, who have long since become immune to any amount of racism and massacre, having committed enough themselves, will find a justification for Israel becoming a state of the Jewish KKK.

Tony Greenstein

African counter-demonstration in Tel Aviv

Anti-African mob

by Justin Raimondo, January 07, 2013 

A screaming mob of whites gathers in a public square, their placards proclaiming their hatred of blacks, their shouts of "N—-r!" reverberating and bouncing off the walls of nearby shops and homes like the ominous thunder of a coming storm. They loot shops that cater to blacks, and a prominent elected official is at the head of the mob, declaring that blacks are "a cancer" that must be eradicated.

Mississippi in the Sixties? A neo-Nazi rally? A Klan conclave? 

Aryeh Eldad of National Union/Strong Israel is part of a growing fascist movement in Israel

Michael Ben Ari - Knesset member for National Union - Jewish Home - rousing the mob

No, it’s a recent scene in southern Tel Aviv, Israel, where Likud member of the Knesset Miri Regev – a former IDF spokesperson and prominent political figure – led a well-organized march of ultra-nationalists demanding the expulsion of all blacks from Israel. Just look at the ugliness of these people – listen to them screaming "White Power"! And here are the Jewish Hitlers, proclaiming their desire to set up a "Jewish monarchy." A few extremists? No. Israel’s Interior Minister has pledged to ship all blacks back to Africa, and the issue of the African refugees has become the major issue in Israel’s election campaign.

looting a shop that serves Africans

Rising ultra-nationalist star Naftali Bennett, of the religious fundamentalist "Jewish Home" party, is demanding their immediate expulsion in order to preserve the "purity" of the Jewish state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, has pledged to get rid of the Africans in short order, and ordered the construction of a "security fence" bordering the Sinai, where most of the refugees turn up seeking asylum from Africa’s wars.

They come from Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, for the most part, victims of the constant conflict that has made East Africa a bloody battlefield for many years. As Israel has made a concerted effort to boost arms sales to African nations, including Ethiopia, where many of the refugees come from, the influx can be seen as blowback – otherwise known as karma.

The face of Israeli fascism

Israel has a longstanding military connection to Ethiopia: ever since the 1970s, when the genocidal Derg took power in Addis Ababa, Israel has been intimately involved with the Ethiopian military, providing training, weapons, advanced aircraft, and direct subsidies, which the government used to battle regional insurgents. The main target was the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which fought a bitter 30-year war of independence against the Ethiopians. Israel’s main interest in this, aside from the arms sales, was to secure control over Eritrea’s strategically important Red Sea shoreline. In 1991, Eritrea finally won its independence, yet there was but a short breather before the two sides started up again. The Israeli arms pipeline has fueled the conflict, along with generous US aid to the late Ethiopian tyrant Meles Zenawi, so beloved by Susan Rice.

The mob gathers, mainly religious Zionists (see the kippahs on their heads) - from victims to perpetrators of pogroms

There are 20,000 of these "infiltrators," as the anti-African demagogues call them, and that they have showed up on Israel’s doorstep is not just karmic, is it also geographic: Israel is the closest country with any promise of providing them with work, and they are often invited in by Israeli employers, who cannot find enough people to do menial jobs. Israel’s growing ultra-nationalist movement finds in them a convenient target, and a politically promising issue. Violence against the refugees is on the upswing: last year, 20-year-old Haim Mula was arrested for firebombing an orphanage for very young African children: he got off practically scot-free with a three-month plea bargained sentence.

Far from being considered a criminal and a pariah, young Haim might well run for the Knesset – because he has the Israeli people with him, particularly the young people who are flocking to the banner of "Jewish Home."

One of the mob - no arrests were made

This is what is so disturbing about recent events in Israel, where outright anti-Arab racism has long been tolerated and even encouraged by the government and religious authorities. Instead of denouncing and isolating the anti-black hate-mongers, Israel’s elites are defending and succoring them. A recent declaration initiated by Professor Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., and Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, calls for "a world solution for a world problem."

In other words: it’s not our problem. Medoff says other countries "have more room, and they have more resources. Israel has been taking a beating in the international press for how it treats the refugees, but never has there been any suggestion in these reports that maybe other countries should be lending a hand."

Africans trapped in carby Zionist mob

Gee, that’s funny, but the US has never asked for help from other countries in dealing with the millions of political and economic refugees who have sought asylum and work here. Neither have the small European countries which today find themselves playing host to numerous migrants from less fortunate areas of the world. Perhaps because to do so would be in somewhat dubious taste – but apparently such considerations don’t come into play where Israel’s professional apologists are concerned. And naturally we do not hear one word out of their mouths about the orgy of hate the African presence in Israel has aroused – not only do they not condemn it, they don’t even mention it.

To top it off, Messrs Medoff and Bauer have named their initiative, which takes the form of a petition to the world’s governments, "The Evian Declaration," timing it to "coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Evian conference, when nations around the world turned their back on Europe’s Jewish refugees," as Ha’aretz put it.

The Evian Conference was called in the summer of 1938, as Hitler’s assault on the Jews took on horrific dimensions and they tried desperately to flee. While the conference did little to provide these refugees with realistic options, US and British immigration quotas were somewhat relaxed, with some others following suit (the Dominican Republic offered to take 100,000, but only 800 actually went). However, the refugee problem was on such a large scale that this hardly made a dent.

For Medoff and Bauer to invoke the Evian episode in this context simply underscores the tone-deafness of Israel’s apologists: by effectively saying it is "everyone’s problem" – and no one’s – they are merely replicating the tragedy of that affair.

Israel was itself conceived as a home for the homeless, a refuge for those who had been refugees in their own lands and driven into exile by war and the world’s animus. How they can now turn around and say "Not our problem" defies explanation. That they dare to say it out loud is proof – if more were needed – that Israeli society has gone more than a little crazy.

After all, these two distinguished professors are liberals – they aren’t joining the neo-Kahanists in the streets, firebombing orphanages and calling for "N—–s Out!" They are merely trying to cover for them, to make the world avert its eyes as hate explodes like a ripe boil on the Israeli body politic, exuding its poisons into the organs the Jewish state.

It’s the world’s problem? No, it isn’t. The hate that is erupting in the Jewish state is a Jewish problem, one that has yet to be acknowledged, let alone confronted, by Jewish leaders worldwide. I have not heard a single word about this from the so-called "Anti-Defamation League," and its usually vociferous chief honcho, Abe Foxman, who seems to have an opinion about anything and everything, but is strangely silent on the defamation of Africans in Israel. As blacks in Israel find themselves beset by racist mobs, where is the American Jewish Committee, and all the other organizations that were important allies of the early black civil rights movement in this country – where are they now that the Bull Connors and the George Wallaces are Israeli?

They’re too busy trying to scuttle the nomination of Chuck Hagel to head up the Department of Defense to bother with speaking to the deepest values of the Jewish people and speaking out against a monstrous injustice. They’re too busy retailing the most contemptible smears against a patriotic American, who refuses to kowtow to a powerful lobby, to even acknowledge that crimes are being committed in their name and with our tax dollars. Even as I write this, detention camps – camps! – are being built with US "foreign aid" taxpayer dollars to house the "infiltrators" so they can be shipped back to Africa, often to a certain death.

It sickens me to write this. To gaze on an hypocrisy so immense, so brazen, so antithetical to everything the Jewish people have stood for historically, and to say nothing – the enormity of this kind of betrayal is simply breathtaking.

I have just one thing to say to Abe Foxman, and all the self-appointed Jewish "leaders" who arrogate to themselves the prerogative of vetting US government officials – when are you going to start vetting Israeli government officials as they whip up racist hysteria and carry out an anti-African pogrom?

I can answer this question for myself, because the answer is: never. It isn’t considered kosher to air the Jewish state’s dirty laundry in public. There is a big problem with this strategy, however: sooner or later the stench gets so bad that one can’t help but smell it.

Of course the precedent for all this is the virulent anti-Arab racism now pervasive in Israeli society, as a recent survey showed. To take just one rather vivid example: the Beitar football team has become a rallying point for swarming ultra-nationalist thugs, who beat up Israeli Arabs and engage in regular provocations against anyone deemed "alien" to the Jewish character of the state. In March of last year hundreds of them went on a rampage at a shopping mall in Jerusalem, beating Arab men, women, and children, and destroying Arab stores. Not a single arrest was made, nor was anybody charged. It’s open season on non-Jews in Israel, and no one should be surprised that blacks are now the target.

Once the American people wake up to what is going on, the much-touted support for Israel claimed by its partisans in this country will evaporate. That’s one reason why these same Jewish mis-"leaders" who are staying silent about the anti-African campaign are now voicing their "concern" that Al Jazeera, the Arab-based television network, will take over the niche once occupied by Al Gore’s "Current TV." The Arab network has been regularly exposing the rising tide of anti-African hate now at the epicenter of Israeli politics, as well as more familiar depredations aimed at the Palestinians. The last thing the Israel lobby wants is footage of the Israeli equivalent of the KKK on American national television.

How will members of the congressional Black Caucus justify voting for billions in aid to Israel in the face of live news reports of howling Israeli mobs screaming hatred for Africans? Can the country that elected Barack Obama continue to have a "special relationship" with a nation that has turned into the Middle East equivalent of Klan Kountry? I think not.

The fatal blow to the Jewish state, however, will be the rupturing of its relationship with American Jewry, which, in spite of the vociferous dissent of some noisome neoconservatives, has a long tradition of liberalism. This noble legacy of tolerance and support for the underdog is now coming into open conflict with the newer tradition of unconditional support to the Israeli government of the moment – and, by their silence, the leaders of major Jewish organizations hope the problem will be swept under the rug, and somehow go away.

This is a very big mistake. Israeli society is going over a cliff, and the Jewish state’s political class is hastening rather than impeding the slide into a moral abyss. There is no way to cover up this crisis, because it has very visible political – and human – consequences. We are seeing this being played out in the Israeli election campaign, where the crazies are gaining momentum and sanity is in very short supply.

How many young American and European Jews will want to make aliyah to a country where blacks are demonized as disease-ridden criminals and automatically deported? How many Jews will want to express their solidarity with a Jewish state where racism is acceptable and the bullied have turned into the bullies? My guess: not many.