Being black is their only crime

Thousands of Israelis are attempting to stop the deportation of African refugees 

African asylum seekers

Although Israel was an early signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it has never welcomed refugees who are not Jewish. It has admitted in total about 200 such refugees since its foundation,¹ the most publicised incident being Menachem Begin’s acceptance of 66 Vietnamese in 1977, who had been rescued by an Israeli ship.

In 2007, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert granted temporary residence permits to 498 Sudanese asylum-seekers.² However they were not given the right to reside and, as the number of African migrants increased to over 60,000 by 2013, the refugees were confronted with an organised and systematic campaign to drive them out. The vast majority were fleeing authoritarian regimes in Eritrea and Sudan.

As Lia Tarachansky explained when the refugees first arrived, they were welcomed by the Israeli public: “But when the government of Netanyahu decided to take a 90-degree turn on the treatment of the African refugees, what resulted was a full-out war against them.”³ Many had chosen Israel because they believed its propaganda that it was a democracy and also because it was easier to reach than Europe.

Most refugees have been living in poor and overcrowded neighbourhoods in southern Tel Aviv. Dozens squatted in a park across the street from the city’s main bus station for weeks on end. A handful of high-profile incidents, including an alleged rape of an 83-year-old woman by an Eritrean asylum-seeker in 2012, were blown up by Israel’s media into an attack on all asylum-seekers.
Israel has one of the highest rates of rape and sexual assaults in the world. According to the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel, one in seven Israeli women will suffer rape in her lifetime and one in three will experience a sexual assault.⁴ This, however, did not stop allegations against the refugees that were similar to those levied in Nazi Germany. Just as individual crimes by German Jews were attributed to the whole Jewish community, so the same is true of asylum-seekers in Israel.

In November 2010, the Israeli government approved a plan to build a massive detention centre, Holot, in the Negev desert to hold thousands of asylum-seekers and their families before deportation. Holot is the biggest prison for refugees in the entire developed world. Israeli police then embarked on mass racial profiling and went down the streets of Tel Aviv asking for IDs from anyone who was brown or black - and packed them off to this prison.

Netanyahu stirring up racial conflict in South Tel Aviv

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was quite clear as to the reasons for his hostility to the refugees - they were a threat to the Zionist ‘dream’: “We must stop the mass entry of illegal migrant workers because of the very serious threat to the character and future of the state of Israel.”⁵ The very existence of a ‘Jewish’ state was apparently threatened by the presence of 60,000 refugees. In the racial fantasies of Netanyahu: “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.”⁶
As Lia Tarachansky pointed out,

the refugees 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.⁷

When Palestinians were expelled in 1948, this was said to be necessary to create a Jewish majority state. But, incredibly, those who tried to return were called ‘infiltrators’. Only the warped mentality of settler colonialism could label those who were indigenous to the land from which they had been forced out, and whose families had lived there for centuries, in such a way. But Israel is the most racist state in the world - a state where a plurality of Jews - 48% - want to see the deportation of Israeli Arabs. According to a poll published in 2007, 75% do not wish to live with an Arab in their apartment block.⁸

Sheffi Paz leads protest against asylum seekers

Nor does Israel comply with the biblical injunction, “You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy10:19). This most certainly does not form part of Zionist values. There are some 50 references in the Old Testament to befriending the stranger (or refugee), but Israel’s ultra-right rabbinical establishment is strangely oblivious to all of them.⁹ Zionism prefers the book of Joshua, which instructed the Israelites to wipe out the non-Jewish inhabitants of Canaan - every man, woman and child.

Israel is not a fulfilment of biblical prophecy about the return of the Jews to the Promised Land. It is a settler colonial state, the brainchild of evangelical Christians, for whom biblical and imperialist imperatives coincided. Yet Israel is only a Jewish state in that the settler population is racially defined as ethnically Jewish. Being Jewish means having as few non-Jews as possible. Israel’s Arabs are a barely tolerated fifth column, but black African refugees are neither Jewish nor white - hence they must go. This is the logic of Zionism.

The need for Jewish racial purity was what led to the ban on a book from the high school syllabus in Israel - Borderlife portrayed a relationship between an Arab and Jewish teenager. Another of Israel’s taboos is ‘mixed-race’ - ie, Arab-Jewish - relationships. The fascist Lehava group, whose ‘charity’, Hemla, is funded by the Israeli state, uses packs of its activists to hunt down and attack Arab males suspected of wanting to establish relationships with Jewish women.¹⁰

New moves

In 2013 Israel built a border fence with Egypt and Netanyahu’s government embarked on a series of measures whose purpose was to make life more difficult for asylum-seekers in Israel. It also began secretly pressuring Eritreans and Sudanese to leave for unnamed third countries.

The two countries chosen for deportation were Rwanda and Uganda. Netanyahu reached a corrupt and criminal deal with the dictator of Rwanda, Paul Ngame - although they are denying it now. Once the asylum-seekers reached these countries, they were abandoned and rendered stateless - and subject to deportation back to the country they had escaped from. Most of those who have already been forced out - up to 20,000 - live in a stateless limbo in Kampala or Kigale. Many have now been forced out of Uganda or Rwanda, making them vulnerable to blackmail and physical abuse at the hands of smugglers and security forces. Some have continued north to Sudan or Libya in an effort to reach Europe. A few have been captured and killed by Islamic State fighters or drowned in the Mediterranean.¹¹

Many refugees have settled in the south of Tel Aviv, where they have been subject to pogroms and violent demonstrations by racist Israelis. They are accused of having illegally entered Israel, because most asylum claims in Israel are not recognised.

It is one of the achievements of the Israeli state to have turned Jewish people - the victims of past pogroms - into pogromists themselves, all with the encouragement and support of the Israeli government. Culture minister Miri Regev has called refugees a “cancer” in Israeli society. When criticised for this, she apologised to cancer patients, for having compared them to asylum-seekers.¹²
Among the measures used to ‘encourage’ such asylum-seekers to leave is a 2014 law that allows Israel to confiscate - ie, steal - 20% of the income of refugees. These are part 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.¹³ The confiscated money is deposited into a special bank account and theoretically the asylum-seekers will be able to access the money upon leaving the country. The Israeli bank, Mizrahi Tefahot, which won the tender to manage these accounts, 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 could use it to offset loans.¹⁴ In essence the African refugees, like Palestinian labourers, have paid taxes to the state of Israel, whilst receiving absolutely no services whatsoever.

The normal excuse for discrimination against the Palestinians is ‘security’, but even that excuse is missing here. People who are innocent of any of the things the Israeli state accuses its enemies of are still being treated as an enemy, simply because they are black and not Jewish.

When Israel’s supreme court ruled against detaining the refugees for longer than a year or forcing them out of the country, the government has simply ignored those rulings - and it has done this with the complicity of the Israeli Labor Party:

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.¹⁵

Celina Shapil 92 holocaust survivor

However, large numbers of Israel’s holocaust survivors, in whose name the state has committed so many war crimes, have spoken out against all this. Many of them are also kept in abject poverty in Israel.¹⁶ If there is one lesson that everyone can draw from the holocaust, it is that, if the west had taken in the Jewish refugees from Hitler, then far fewer would have died. Today the same forces that opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees in the 1930s - the America Firsters, the Daily Mails and the far right - support Zionism and the Israeli state. But many holocaust survivors perceive the contradiction between Zionism and the lessons of the holocaust. Zionism’s desire to create a Jewish state that is as ethnically pure and Jewish as possible is no different from the desire of Hitler and the Nazis to create an ethnically pure German state. But some non-Jews are more unwanted than others. In Israel today there are thousands of non-Jewish Russians who are not being deported. The difference is that they are white.

Avi Gabbay - Israeli Labor Party leader

Israeli Labor Party

What is most shameful is the role of the Israeli Labor Party, which abroad tries to present itself as progressive. Under its new, even more rightwing leader, Avi Gabbay, it is fully behind Netanyahu. The refugees from Eritrea are ‘bogus’, the party claims - no matter that every international body and human rights agency says that Eritrea is one of the worst police states in the world.
According to Jill Hoffman of the Jerusalem Post the Zionist Union parliamentary faction of the Labor Party voted 12-11 to back the government’s plan to deport refugees after Gabbay told the members of the Knesset: “This is not an issue of right or left. We would pay a price for arguing with the public.”¹⁷ This prompted Tamar Zandberg, a member of the Knesset for the left Zionist Meretz Party, to ask:

What has become of you? Are you the Zionist Union or the expelling union? Have you gone mad? In your tactics for wooing votes, you’ve abandoned your fundamental values and ability to tell right from wrong.¹⁸

Now, of course, Tamar is wrong. The ILP never had any anti-racist values. It was first and foremost a party of Zionist colonisation. It was therefore predictable that it would come out in support of Netanyahu’s proposed deportation of black African refugees.

We should be calling out those in Britain like the Jewish Labour Movement who are helping to drive the anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism witch-hunt in the Labour Party, but who refuse to condemn the behaviour of what the JLM describes as its “sister party” in Israel. ¹⁹ I have sent messages to both Jeremy Newmark, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, and Rhea Wolfson, who is a member of Labour’s national executive committee, as well as the JLM itself, asking them to condemn the ILP’s support for Netanyahu. But I have been met with silence. It is the JLM who has subjected Jackie Walker, a black Jewish anti-racist and former vice-chair of Momentum, to a scurrilous political lynching.

Rhea Wolfson is politically close to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. She spoke at the Labour Party fringe meeting of the AWL front group, Stop the Purge,and she is on the editorial board of the AWL’s The Clarion magazine. Perhaps the AWL can persuade Wolfson to dissociate herself from the JLM’s support for the ILP and its stance on Israel’s refugees - and to do this in the most public way by resigning from the JLM. Wolfson should be congratulating those like the holocaust survivors who condemn the deportations, not keeping company with racists.

But holocaust survivors are not the only ones. On January 22, David Sheen, a Canadian-Israeli who has campaigned tirelessly in support of Israel’s refugees, wrote in Electronic Intifada that Israel was set to win its war on African refugees²⁰ and Netanyahu would be able to deport them. Yet in the space of a week it was claimed that Netanyahu’s plans were now in ruins.²¹

There has been considerable embarrassment among Israel’s more liberal middle classes against what has become an international scandal. Even Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, has warned that this affair is making Israel even more of an international pariah. “It is particularly welcome that hundreds of Israeli academics have spoken out,” wrote professor Rachel Giora of Tel Aviv University in a message to me:

It’s really rare that I can feel proud of Israelis. Indeed recently there are many demonstrations and lots of published petitions against governmental policies. But today language turned into acts. Today Israeli pilots and crews announced their refusal to cooperate with the government on the deportation of African asylum-seekers to Africa. They won’t fly the refugees to their death! And they call on other airlines to join in.

Israel’s refugees can breathe a little more easily due to this refusal. And the signatures of several hundred professors and intellectuals to a letter calling on the prime minister to put a halt to the expulsion of asylum-seekers from Eritrea and Sudan are also a breath of fresh air.

B Michael, a contributor to the Ha’aretz newspaper, has compared the policy of Adolf Eichmann towards the Jews of Vienna with Israel’s policy of forcing out black African asylum-seekers.²² 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 Holot, depriving them of the right to work, pogroms and racist attacks. Israel has learnt well, as B Michael said, from the Jews’ traditional enemies.

Although only a few weeks ago activists such as David Sheen were conceding defeat on deportation, according to Anshel Pfeffer, the wheels had been coming off the hastily drawn expulsion plan for months.²³ One of Netanyahu’s proudest achievements had been the border fence with Egypt. He described it in 2013 as “one of the greatest engineering feats ever achieved in Israel.”
Netanyahu and the far-right Zionists have used the poverty of south Tel Aviv’s existing Jewish working class residents as a rallying point for far-right activists - including members of the outlawed Kahanist groups. It was in May 2012, after ‘culture’ minister Miri Regev had made her “cancer” speech, that a mob of one thousand Israelis ran amok, attacking any refugee they could find. With record low unemployment rates and a growing demand for foreign workers, a plan to legalise the asylum-seekers and resettle them across Israel would have been sensible, but Netanyahu and the coalition government, with the support of the ILP, preferred incitement against the “infiltrators”.
A few thousand asylum-seekers were prevailed upon to leave “voluntarily”. Dozens of planes were to be chartered - the refugees given the stark choice of leaving voluntarily with $3,500 in cash or facing indefinite detention. But news of how they were mistreated upon arrival soon filtered back - and then no-one was prepared to volunteer any more.

But the high court refused to let the government incarcerate them for more than 60 days. However, it eventually backed down and approved deportation to “third countries” of any refugee whose asylum request was not pending. The interior ministry has made it almost impossible to request asylum - and of 12,000 requests just 10 have been approved.

Legal clinic Israeli law students

Wheels coming off

Only a few weeks ago it seemed all was over. But, even as the first notices were being issued to the refugees, the wheels were coming off. The Israel Prison Service, already suffering from massive overcrowding with Palestinians, had no space for the thousands of expected detainees. The refugees made it clear they would not accept the financial inducements and when the government threatened to deport them by force they ran up against legal obstacles.

No less important, the small circle of activists supporting the refugees had begun to grow rapidly. A series of petitions circulated, with the signatories committing themselves to hiding refugees in their homes if necessary. Thousands have signed the petitions and hundreds of people turned out for meetings on a rain-soaked Wednesday night in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which were organised by a group called Standing Together (Omdim Beyachad), to oppose the deportations. Thousands of Israelis are supporting the airline workers in their stand and Zazim, a new national organisation founded by university students, is holding protests and setting up information booths across the country.
The government’s backers in the media have derided these groups as anti-Israeli and far-leftists who did not care for the poor residents of south Tel Aviv. But still the protests grew,²⁴ with petitions signed by over 1,000 doctors and medical staff; and, perhaps most damagingly, a personal letter was sent to Netanyahu, signed by 36 holocaust survivors.²⁵

The publicity has already caused Rwanda to announce that it will not accept refugees deported against their will. How much one can trust this is another matter.

The timing could not have been better. The survivors’ letter was the main Holocaust-related news coming out of Israel just in time for International Holocaust Remembrance Day! For once the occasion is being put to good use instead of being employed to justify Israel’s racism.

Then there is the case of Celina Shapil, who spent the winter of 1943 on the run from the Nazis - she crossed the borders of Poland, Slovakia and Hungary on foot through the snow at the age of 17.²⁶ Now 92, she was outraged at the government’s deportation plans and decided it was time to speak out:

I too have lived through a situation where the whole world was apathetic. I know what it feels like to be alone and feel like no one cares. It’s shameful we are the ones now doing this. It should not have to come to this so there needs to be public pressure. The government must change its policy.

As for the 36 survivors, they wrote to Netanyahu:

We - who know what it means to be a refugee, to be without a home or a country that would protect and defend us from violence and suffering - cannot understand how a Jewish government can expel refugees and asylum-seekers to a journey of pain, suffering and death.²⁷

This is why, far from being anti-Semitic, it is essential to compare Israel’s racist actions to those of the Nazis. It is only in this way that sections of Israel’s own Jewish citizens can be confronted with what Zionism means. What is sad is that it is left to those like the holocaust survivors, as young Israelis are overwhelmingly racist.²⁸ However, there are exceptions. Ella Navot, a 24-year-old sociology student at Tel Aviv University and one of the founders of Stop the Expulsion, said:

Deportation is like a red line for many people. Until now we could just sit at home and say, ‘Oh no, this is bad.’ And for the past few years people who care and follow the issue have been outraged, but this is the last straw.²⁹

Navot explained:

There are so many aspects to what drew me to this. I could talk about the fact that my grandmother is a holocaust survivor or about my parents, who are leftwing and have always advocated for human rights, but really what brought me to it is when I met the people themselves and started to understand the issue. They became friends and when one hears their stories one cannot ignore them.

The campaign launched last week, which called on Israelis to hide asylum-seekers if it becomes necessary, was inspired, its organisers say, by the story of Anne Frank.³⁰ The massive response to the campaign, now called Miklat Yisrael (Israel Refuge) took its organisers, including American-born rabbi Susan Silverman of Jerusalem, who came up with the idea, by surprise.
As for the 92-year-old Celina Shapil, who continues to mourn her parents and younger brother - all murdered in Auschwitz - she feels lucky to have been able to rebuild her life. But she hopes the African asylum-seekers will find refuge in Israel too. Otherwise, she warns, “We will go down terribly in history”.

Notes

1. www.haaretz.com/.premium-seeking-asylum-israel-oks-under-1-1.5252984.
2. www.haaretz.com/.premium-israel-hardens-vs-sudanese-1.5306418.
3. http://imemc.org/article/israel-begins-to-confiscate-20-of-asylum-seekers-incomes.
4. www.1202.org.il/en/union/info/statistics/general-statistics.
5. www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-migrants/israel-to-crack-down-on-illegal-migrant-workers-idUSTRE6AR17Q20101128.
6. www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/20/israel-netanyahu-african-immigrants-jewish.
7. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com
_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=
74&jumival=19084
8. www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,
L-3381978,00.html.
9. www.centralreformtemple.org/event/torah-
study-strangers-in-a-strange-land-jewish-views-on-immigration.
10. www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/01/novel-about-jewish-palestinian-love-affair-is-barred-from-israeli-curriculum.
11. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-agonizing-stories-of-refugees-israel-deported-to-africa-1.5626827.
12. www.timesofisrael.com/mk-apologizes-for-comparing-migrants-to-cancer.
13. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-law-forces-asylum-seekers-to-set-aside-fifth-of-salary-1.5481564.
14. See interview of Lia Tarachansky by Shir Hever: http://imemc.org/article/israel-begins-to-confiscate-20-of-asylum-seekers-incomes.
15. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option
=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=
74&jumival=19084.
16. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/12122754/Tens-of-thousands-of-Israeli-Holocaust-survivors-are-living-in-abject-poverty.html.
17. www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Party-leader-Gabbay-forces-Zionist-Union-to-back-expulsion-of-migrants-514743.
18. www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Party-leader-Gabbay-forces-Zionist-Union-to-back-expulsion-of-migrants-514743, Israeli Labor sells out African refugees, as ‘infiltrators’, http://mondoweiss.net/2017/11/israeli-refugees-infiltrators.
19. www.jlm.org.uk/about.
20. https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-set-win-its-war-african-refugees/23061?utm_source=EI+readers&utm_campaign=8846778102-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e802a7602d-8846778102-290649781.
21. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-anatomy-of-an-israeli-pr-disaster-1.5766754.
22. www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-historical-precedent-for-israel-s-asylum-seeker-expulsion-push-1.5730153.
23. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-anatomy-of-an-israeli-pr-disaster-1.5766754.
24. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/opposition-grows-to-israel-s-plan-to-deport-african-refugees-
1.5763832.
25. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-shoah-survivors-beg-bibi-don-t-send-asylum-seekers-on-death-journey-1.5766089.
26. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-holocaust-survivors-join-israeli-backlash-against-refugee-expulsions-1.5766648.
27. Ibid.
28. See ‘Zionism and holocaust abuse’ Weekly Worker November 30 2017.
29. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-holocaust-survivors-join-israeli-backlash-against-refugee-expulsions-1.5766648.

30. ‘Inspired by Anne Frank, rabbis in Israel plan to hide African asylum-seekers facing deportation’ Ha’aretz January 19 2018.

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.

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Between anger and denial: Israeli collective memory and the Nakba
A new documentary aims to decipher some of the anxiety that accompanies the Israeli debate over the events of 1948.
By Noam Sheizaf

Ruins of Palestinian Nakba village Qula, 2010 (photo: Deborah Bright / Zochrot.org)

A strange thing regarding the debate on the Nakba: the responses it generates in Israeli society are becoming more and more hostile, while at the same time, the Nakba is mentioned more and more often. Those contradicting elements live side by side, as if the more we work to forget the Nakba, the harder it gets – the recent campaign regarding "the Jewish refugees" that the Foreign Office launched is just one example.
Israeli-Russian-Canadian journalist Lia Tarachansky (from The Real News) is presently finishing up work on a documentary that tries to deal with the complexity of Israeli sentiments towards the Nakba. "Seven Deadly Myths" (working title) tells the stories of four veterans from 1948, linking them to the lives of modern-day Palestinian refugees and to Tarachansky’s own childhood in a West Bank settlement. When Iwrote about the memory of the Nakba on this blog, I also began with my childhood memories. Of all the political and historical issues here, the Nakba has the most intimate feeling to it – another reason it is such a taboo.
Filming has ended, and Tarachansky is now engaged in a fundraising effort to allow her to complete editing and post-production (more details on the film’s website). The project is also taking part in the Cuban Hat competition.
This week, I conducted an email interview with Lia Tarachansky on the roots of her project and the memory of the Nakba in Israeli society. The video below explains how this project was born.

How did you find the people you interviewed? How many Israelis who fought in 1948 were interviewed? Were they eager to speak?
LT: Most of the people in the film I found by word of mouth. I had asked around in the left’s circles. Then I stumbled onto Sergio Yahni of the Alternative Information Center who knew Tikva Honig-Parnass [seen in the above video] from when she edited the journal "Between The Lines" with Toufic Haddad.

Amnon Noiman I met through Zochrot ["Remembering," an Israeli NGO that deals with the memory of the Nakba – N.S], other veterans (some of whom later refused to take part in the film) I met through friends of friends or through the various war museums. At first, most were not willing to speak about the war and that period in general. They reminded me of my grandfather who until his dying years couldn’t talk about his memories of the Holocaust. I realized through their silence the immense power of memory and that’s what drove me to dig through my own.
Did you find regret in the Israelis you interviewed, or a feeling that "we did what we had to do?"Honestly, most of the veterans, both those who are in the film and those who refused, didn’t want to "reopen that file." One particularly profound moment in the film was in my various conversations and interviews with veteran Amnon Noiman. About three years ago, the Israeli activist Amir Hallel convinced him to give a testimony of his experience in 1948 to a small crowd in the Tel Aviv offices of Zochrot. When I heard about it I grabbed my camera and begged to film it.

I was amazed at how critical Noiman was that evening speaking about the general approach of the Israeli forces during the war, but it was clear even through his criticisms that there were corners of his memory that he refused to touch. Eitan Bronstein, the director of Zochrot asked him about one specific place – Burayr. In April 1948 its residents were expelled to Gaza by the Palmach unit Noiman was part of, and yet he refused to talk about it. It was only in our interview months later that he was ready to speak about what happened that April, 65 years ago.

Your question is very interesting for me because in the beginning of the project I interviewed the veteran and former politician Uri Avnery, who published a war diary during 1948. A year later he compiled his dispatches into the book "In the Fields of the Philistines." While in these reports he didn’t spare any details of what was happening on the battlefields, when I interviewed him in 2010 he was really defensive, repeating again and again that "if you weren’t there, you can’t judge it."

This process of opening and closing, which I understood from my own experiences with denial, became really fascinating to me and eventually became the center of the film.

You seem to place an emphasis not just on the events themselves, but even more so on their memory. Why so?I’ve come to realize that to understand the Israeli self-identity it’s important to understand that it’s not so much the events that shape our understanding of reality, but really our memories of them. I believe the Israeli collective memory is deeply tied to our understanding of our culture, our place in the Middle East, and of course our relationship with the Palestinians. I think that my experience and that of the veterans in the film is a microcosm of that collective memory.

Discussion of 1948 is still taboo and therefore incredibly reflexive. What I mean by that is that the main and most effective way the mainstream nationalistic narrative works is to deny the experience, and foremost the memory of the experience, of anyone who dares to challenge it (or as in my case, has slowly strayed away from it).

In that act, which is incredibly violent, the denial of the ruling narrative translates into denial of the objective history that goes along with the memory. That’s how powerful I think it is. And it is because of that power that we as Israelis grow up blind to what is all around us. That’s how I could grow up in a settlement and be blind to the villages around us.

When I grew up in Israel I never heard the word "Nakba." Now I do, often. Do you think Israelis have a better understanding of their past? If there is a denial, what causes it?This is a very important question. When I first started working on the film not only did I never hear the term "Nakba" I didn’t heard anything about expulsions or massacres, or even refugee camps. My family immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1991 so my grandmother didn’t fight in 1948, like most "Sabra" Israelis. That means I didn’t inherit any family narrative of the creation of the Israeli state and the war, not even an augmented one.

That’s why when I set out in making the film I thought most Israelis had the same experience as I did, and knew absolutely nothing. I quickly realized how wrong I was. I think the New Historians have played an enormous role in breaking the monotonous and simplistic history we learn as Israelis – we were innocent, we were attacked for no reason, we fought back and miraculously won.

But I think these historians and the turmoil they caused with their books failed to seriously change the Israeli understanding of 1948 because all reforms to the education system were effectively blocked by the right wing. Ironically, I think it was the right wing itself that made "Nakba" a household name with the proposal and later approval of the Nakba Law.

And even together, the New Historians and the Nakba Law failed to educate the Israeli public on what actually transpired in those fateful years of the war and immediately after it when hundreds of villages were systematically wiped off the map, the Absentee Property and Anti-Infiltration laws were instituted and the Palestinian right of return was legally denied.

Yossi Mekyton, one of the founders of Zochrot, put it best in an interview that will unfortunately not make it into the final film. He described a conversation he had with a young man while riding in a bus past some ruins of a village destroyed in the Nakba. Mekyton said that the difference is that twenty years ago the youth wouldn’t have any clue what these ruins were while today the only thing he knows is that whatever happened, was justified.

This is my feeling too. You grew up in a settlement, and often mention that you yourself were in a sort of denial of Palestinian existence around you. What was it like, and what changed your political thinking?I don’t think I can answer what it is like to live in denial because of course I wasn’t aware that I was in denial. I only know what it is like to crack that wall and come out on the other side. I first realized that something was deeply wrong when I was in university, in Canada. It was during the Second Intifada, and people were constantly asking me what I thought about the conflict when they found out I was Israeli. All my answers seemed rehearsed – we (Israel) have to do whatever we need to do to protect ourselves from terrorists. That’s the narrative I knew.

But then I met a Palestinian student, and had my first real conversation with a Palestinian person. I don’t really remember what he looked like or what his name was, but I remember thinking "huh, he knows I’m an Israeli, but he’s not trying to kill me. Strange." That was my first step in a very long process of unraveling what I was taught and discovering what I myself believed. The more I listened to Palestinian stories, the more they echoed my and my family’s experience from the Soviet Union where I was born. Experiences of racism and discrimination.

I had to shed everything I had taken for granted, my entire worldview and rebuild it from scratch. It was a devastating process and of course very alienating because my childhood friends and family were (and remain) very Zionist. Surprisingly, I came out of this process with a profound sense of belonging. For the first time I could form a logical line in my own understanding of the conflict and discover my responsibility as a journalist and a filmmaker.

1948 is not just a piece of history but a loaded political problem. Do you have your own thoughts on what would be a just solution for the refugee problem?This film doesn’t attempt to give political solutions; it only tries to ask questions. I think organizations like Zochrot, and Badil have invested a lot of thought and work into coming up with just solutions to the historical problems 1948 created, including developing methods for a realistic return. I believe the right of return cannot be denied and that today millions of people live in refugee camps in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in the countries surrounding Israel and that they will never stop dreaming of return and fighting for their right to do so. I think that as a people who carry such a long and painful history, we have a special responsibility to justice and historical honesty.

What responses have you received from Palestinians to this project?When I talk to Palestinians about the film, many support the idea and are glad that I am going to the source – the people who themselves fought in the war. But most Palestinians I speak to simply cannot understand how to this day Israelis refuse to learn about the Nakba and to understand their narrative.

One of the people in the film is my friend Khalil Abu Hamdeh. He is 27 and the grandson of 1948 refugees from the village of Kakun (near Qalansuwa). Today he lives in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Nablus (Schem). After years of applying for permits to visit his ancestors’ lands he was finally allowed to leave the West Bank during Ramadan this year.

In the film we follow him as he tracked the place from which his grandmother was expelled. As he looked at the ruins of the village around the historic Kakun castle, where today a national park exists, he couldn’t understand how generations of Israelis could come to this place and never asked themselves what these ruins are, or where are the people who lived there. These are the questions that guide the film and my journey to try and understand the nature of denial.