What is the Meaning of Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Israel’s Far-Right Government?

 Those Who Think Israel is Becoming a Fascist State do Not Understand What Fascism is

To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, when all those around you are losing their heads, it’s a good idea to keep a firm grip on your own head! Never has so much hysterical nonsense been written by so many as in the past few weeks following Netanyahu’s unexpected triumph in Israel’s elections.

The election of the new coalition government, including the far-right messianic settler party Religious Zionism, itself made up of 3 parties, does not herald the dawn of Israeli fascism. Israeli democracy is not under dire threat if only because such a beast never existed.

This pogrom against Palestinians in East Jerusalem was allowed to go ahead by Israeli Labor Party's Omar Bar-Lev

Of course liberal Zionists find it difficult to defend the street thug and criminal Kahanist Ben Gvir as Police and Security Minister. It would be far better for Israel’s image if the Labor Party’s Omar Bar Lev was still in place. But let us remember, it was Bar Lev who, last May, gave the green light for Gvir and his settler mob to rampage through East Jerusalem chanting ‘death to the Arabs’, ‘may their villages burn’ and other delightful ditties from the settlers’ prayer book.

According to Richard Silverstein, ‘Zionism has finally embraced the fascist ideology that inspired major sections of the movement… a century ago.’ It is true that fascism did indeed inspire the Revisionist Zionist movement but it was untrue, even then, to say that the Revisionists were fascists, despite the taunt ‘Vladimir Hitler’ that Ben Gurion regularly hurled at its leader Vladimir Jabotinsky.

One thug inspects other thugs

If anything the opposite was true. It was the ‘Socialist’ not the Revisionist Zionists who most resembled the National Socialists. It was Labour not Revisionist Zionism that had cordial relations with the Nazis and which negotiated a trade agreement Ha'avara with the Nazis and whose agent, Feivel Polkes, offered to spy for the Nazis.

Labour Zionism saw the role of Labour as a national not a class force. The late Ze’ev Sternhell, a Zionist and holocaust survivor, described Labor Zionism in The Founding Myths of Israel as ‘nationalist socialism’. He would have used the term ‘national socialism’ but it ‘has been contaminated by association with the Nazis.’

It was the Revisionist movement which opposed Ha'avara and it was Revisionists Peter Bergson and Shmuel Merlin who campaigned for the rescue of Jews, wherever their destination and who led the campaign which led to the US setting up the War Refugee Board in January 1944 against the bitter opposition of the Labour Zionists.

Palestinian demonstrator in Beit El near Ramallah 8.10.15

Let us put it another way. Was the America of Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act a fascist state? Was it any less terrible for the Indians that it was not fascist? Was South Africa a fascist state?

Fascism is a specific political phenomenon that seeks the atomisation and destruction of working class organisations. Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain are the most obvious examples. In more recent times Chile under General Pinochet and the military Junta in Argentina bore a close resemblance to fascism.

Israel on the other hand, like South Africa and the United States before it is a settler colonial state. The key difference between fascism and settler colonialism is that the latter involves an alliance of the settler working class with its own ruling class. Rather than the destruction of working class organisations, it is the settler working class which is usually the most racist and chauvinist section of settler society as for example in Northern Ireland.

Ben Gvir - a Genuine Jewish neo-Nazi

Ben Gvir and Smotrich Do Not Represent a Break with Previous Zionist Governments

Gvir and Smotrich represent the logical outcome of decades of rule, by Labour Zionism and Likud. They do not represent a fascist break from Zionism. The agreed platform of the coalition was:

“The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

How is this different from previous governments? Support for ‘Jewish settlement’ has always been the policy of both wings of the Zionist movement. It was not a Likud/Religious Zionist government which began the policy of Judaisation of the Galilee.

The 1976 Koenig Memorandum, named after Yisrael Koenig, a member of the Israeli Labor Alignment and Director General of the Northern District outlined the policy. It was a nakedly racist document which spoke of the Israeli Arabs having a "Levantinistic Arab character" whose "imagination tends to exceed rationality."

Koenig advocated denying work, educational opportunities and benefits to Israel’s Arab population and the thinning out of the Arab population through Jewish settlement. It took for granted that Israel’s Arab population were a threat to Israel’s Jewish character.

The document put forward a number of strategic goals and tactical steps aimed at reducing the number and influence of Arab citizens of Israel in the Galilee region. The Memorandum was the first publicly available document to outline some of the policies of discrimination and containment that Palestinian citizens of Israel had been subject to since 1948, reflecting “planning and deliberations at the policy-making circles.” See The Koenig report and Israeli policy towards the Palestinian minority, 1965-1976: old wine in new bottles.

Judaisation of the Galilee was the policy and practice of Israel even before the conquest of East Jerusalem in June 1967. This began under a Labour not a Likud or Religious Zionist government.

On 24 June 2013, the Israeli Knesset approved the Prawer-Begin Plan for the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab. It proposed the destruction of 35 ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages and the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel, and the confiscation of their historical lands.

It is clear that the new government in Israel represents a continuation of the policies of previous Israeli governments not a break with them. Those who talk of the destruction of democracy speak exclusively to Israel’s Jewish society. As Ahmed Tibi MK once noted, when Zionists talk of a Jewish Democratic state this is an oxymoron. Israel is Jewish towards Arabs and Democratic towards Jews.

No-one doubts that the accession to government of Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two Jewish neo-Nazi settlers, will result in an intensification of repression in the West Bank although it is hard to see how much further the repression of the military dictatorship in the West Bank can be intensified.

It was not under Gvir and Smotrich that 6 Palestinian human rights groups were banned as ‘terrorists’ but under the ‘Change Government’ that included the Labor Party and Meretz. When Smotrich described human rights organisations as an ‘existential threat’ he was simply picking up from where Merav Michaeli of the ILP and Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz left off.

The real threat of the new government is two-fold. Like in South Africa we are going to see an erosion of the democratic rights of Israeli Jews. It is this which has produced panic in what is left of the Israeli left. The settlement of the West Bank is coming home.

This will involve an erosion of the difference between Palestinians in Israel and those on the West Bank. In its eyes they are all ‘Arabs’.

Desecration of Christian graveyard

Only a few days ago we saw the open desecration of a Christian graveyard in Jerusalem. Imagine the howls of protest if this took place in Britain with the desecration of a Jewish graveyard? Attacks on churches, mosques and graveyards are a regular occurrence in Israel.

As the platform of the Coalition outlines, the Golan Heights, the Negev, the Galilee and the West Bank are considered the same. In all these areas the demographic threat of the Arabs is a problem.

And not only in these areas. Gvir led the way in May 2021, with the support of the Israeli Police, in pogroms and attacks against Israel’s Arab citizens in the mixed cities of Bat Yam, Lod etc. Their intention is to recolonise these cities and drive their Arab inhabitants out.

It is Jewish ‘Democracy’ which is now under threat

At the weekend largely Jewish demonstrations of 20,000 in Tel Aviv reacted with alarm at the judicial reform proposals of the present coalition because they saw that it was their rights which were now under attack. Former Defence Minister Benny Gantz, who took pride in bombing Gaza back to the stone age warned of civil war in Israel.

Israeli Gays, who have been complicit in pinkwashing Israeli colonisation, have reacted with alarm to the inclusion of the anti-gay Noam party and leader Avi Maoz in government. Those who were happy to collude in the repression of Palestinians now realise that Messianic Zionists have no place for alternative sexual lifestyles either. It is hard to work up much sympathy for these pink racists.

Racist?  Perish the thought!

The protestors in Tel Aviv were divided on the question of Palestinian rights. A large section was extremely unhappy about mixing up the threat to Jewish rights with the threat to Palestinian rights. Assaf Agmon, a leader of one group, was particularly upset:

“The protest on Saturday night is led by extreme leftist groups that are not prepared to move one millimeter from the ‘stop the occupation’ and Arab rights, which are super-important issues but they are on the agenda after we leave ourselves a democracy to advance them in."

"People may come and find themselves surrounded by Palestinian flags and stop the occupation flags and that is how [Netanyahu’s supporters] will brand all of our protests as pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist.”

Stav Shaffir, an ex-member of the Knesset was concerned that:

Netanyahu and his mouthpieces will lie afterward and say the protest was organized by the treasonous left and funded by foreign money and supports our enemies. Let them say it.

This resulted in there being 2 separate marches.

The real fear of liberal Zionists is the coalition’s proposals for reform of Israel’s judicial system. Israel’s Supreme Court is their pride and joy. It is the symbol of Israeli Democracy. What is proposed is an override clause whereby any legislation that is rendered unlawful by the Supreme Court can be overridden by a majority in the Knesset. The Judicial Appointments Committee will be stacked with government appointees. They fear the death of Jewish democracy.

This is a battle that liberal Zionism is going to lose. There is nothing democratic about unelected judges not having the power to veto legislation. Of course Israel, being an ethno-nationalist state, is not a democracy anyway. Arabs have always been excluded from power and that includes the last ‘Change’ government in which an Arab party was nominally part of the coalition.

Israel’s Supreme Court and Torture

The position of Israel’s Supreme Court on torture is instructive. It has ruled that torture is allowed under the ‘ticking timebomb’ scenario.

In 1987 the Landau Commission into the use of torture the use of torture, but it accepted their argument that physical pressure was necessary for efficient interrogation.

The Landau Report recommended psychological pressure and "a moderate amount of physical pressure" i.e. torture against Palestinian detainees. Israel was thus the only state in the world to legalise torture. HaMoked, the Centre for Defence of the Individual, found that 85% of Palestinians were tortured.

In 1994 the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel petitioned the High Court to protest Shin Bet interrogation tactics. The following year the Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned the High Court demanding an end to vigorous shaking of prisoners.

In 1999 the High Court ruled that Shin Bet can't use violence in interrogations, but interrogators could use the "necessary defense" argument if they used torture in "ticking bomb" situations. Thus the Court allowed Shin Bet to continue to use torture because every case of torture and abuse uses the same ‘ticking bomb’ excuse.

Israeli actor in torture session

It was the ‘liberal’ Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who presided over this decision. Fast forward 23 years and we find Barak so enraged by the plans to reform the Supreme Court that he has offered to go before a firing squad if that would prevent the enactment of the new legislation! If I was Netanyahu I would take Barak up on the offer! Barak explained that:

he sought to be neither overly activist nor overly conservative and to deliver verdicts that took heed of Israel’s history, Zionism and the country’s security needs.

Barak claimed that ‘the rights of everybody — Jew, Arab, ultra-Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox — are in grave danger.” This is a lie. Not once has the Supreme Court used its powers to overturn nakedly racist anti-Arab legislation. Always it has bowed the knee to Zionism’s concern about a Jewish demographic majority. In the West Bank /Gaza it has explicitly disregarded international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

stress and torture position

The Supreme Court has refused to override the 1950 Absentee Property Law which allowed the confiscation of thousands of dunums of Arab land for Jewish settlement since the establishment of the Israeli state. Jewish land has never once been confiscated for the benefit of Arabs but the Supreme Court had no problems with its racist intent. The Supreme Court also approved the use of this law to confiscate Arab homes in East Jerusalem in order that they could be handed over to the right-wing Ateret Cohanim settler group.

In the West Bank the Supreme Court has openly connived in the use of fraud and trickery in the theft of Palestinian land, including private land that was stolen in ‘good faith’. A thousand Palestinians are, at this very moment facing eviction from their homes in Yasafer Mata yet the Supreme Court happily allowed the Israeli army to establish a firing range on peoples’s land and next to their homes in order to facilitate yet more ethnic cleansing.

In the process the Supreme Court dismissed evidence proving that Palestinians had lived in these homes for generations. They preferred the lies of the State that Palestinians had only lived in the area recently. Not once did they ask why it was only in Arab villages, not Jewish settlements, that the Israeli Army established firing zones.

Likewise in the Negev the Supreme Court approved the destruction of the village of Umm Al-Hiram to make way for a Jewish only town of Hiram. Never, not once, was it the other way round.  Not once were they asked to approve the confiscation of Jewish land for the benefit of Arabs.

Israel detains hundreds of Palestinians, including Israeli citizens, under Administrative Detention without any trial whatsoever. When used by the British under the Emergency Regulations future Israeli Justice Minister Ya’acov Shapira remarked that ‘Even in Nazi Germany, there were no laws like this.’

Not once has the Supreme Court overturned such a detention, even though the Defendant cannot challenge the ‘evidence’ because the Defendant and their lawyer are unable to see it. Every scrap of rumour by Shin Bet is accepted in good faith by the Supreme Court.

On 8 July 2021, the Supreme Court in a 10 to 1 decision, upheld the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which enshrines Jewish supremacy and racial segregation as a Basic Law with constitutional status in the State of Israel. The only dissenting opinion was issued by the only Arab justice on the court, Justice Kara.

As a matter of course the Supreme Court has failed over the years to challenge or even scrutinise the openly anti-Arab evidence of the Shin Bet secret police. The Supreme Court has colluded in the State’s refusal to open the archives and release information concerning the Nakba. There can be no possible national security reason for not releasing 70+ year old files other than a refusal to countenance evidence of Zionist ethnic cleansing.

This deference to Shin Bet even extended to the Court’s refusal to order the release of evidence concerning the State’s suspected involvement in the murder of Nazi collaborator Rudolf Kasztner in 1957, 62 years previously. The Supreme Court accepted Shin Bet’s rationale – ‘national security and lack of resources’. How could national security possibly be damaged by the revelation that Shin Bet had murdered an Israeli citizen over 60 years ago?

Far from the Supreme Court being the last ditch defender of Israeli  democracy, it is a supine creature in all but one respect. It is the decisions of the Supreme Court to challenge the monopoly of Orthodox Jewry, such as conversion by other strands of Jewry, which has antagonised Religious Zionism and Orthodox Jewry. The current proposals have nothing to do with Netanyahu’s legal problems.

The Supreme Court has rejected every petition aimed at forcing the Israeli state to reveal which repressive states it arms and equips. Arms to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion? In a ruling on 27 June 2021 the court ruled that no future appeals would be discussed in court. As lawyer Eitay Mack commented:

“It’s incredible that in a state which defines itself as Jewish and democratic, it was decided that preventing aid to genocide, to crimes against humanity, to war crimes and to severe violations of human rights is not a topic with which courts should engage,”

Since 2007 the Israeli government has approved every single arms deal brought to it. The Supreme Court was happy to allow Israel to equip every mercenary, fascist and genocider. This is the figleaf for Jewish supremacy that liberal Zionists fear will be stripped away.

If I was a member of the Knesset I would have no hesitation in voting for the reforms proposed by the governing coalition. The Supreme Court is a Zionist body complicit in the colonisation of Palestine.

Another proposal, which I would support, would be to remove the ‘grandfather’ clause from the 1950 Law of Return which allows the partner of someone whose grandparent was Jewish to obtain entry to and citizenship of the State of Israel. 

Given the racist nature of the Law of Return, in allowing Jews who weren’t even born in Israel to claim citizenship as of right whereas Palestinian refugees have no such rights, I can see no possible objection to this proposed law. It is the logic of racial supremacy that the racists are always seeking to redefine who is and who is not part of the ubermenschen. That is why the question Who is a Jew has for Israel been an insoluble question ever since its inception.

In so far as this proposal furthers the already existing breach between American Jewry, most of whom are not Orthodox Jews, and Israel, then this legislation can only be welcomed.

Of course there is much reactionary legislation proposed by the coalition such as a refusal to ratify the Istanbul Convention against violence to women.

Budgets will be increased to strengthen “Jewish settlement in Arad,” a city in the Negev. The planning procedures for the city of Kasif, a future planned ultra-Orthodox city in the Negev region, will continue and approximately 14 settlements in the Negev will be continued and accelerated and NIS 800 million ($227M) will be budgeted each year.

In compliance with Smotrich’s demands regarding human rights associations, the government will dissolve organizations financed by external parties and international funds. This will severely harm Palestinian Arab civil society and will further entrench human and civil rights violations against minorities in the country.

This is a government of open racists. In a 2018 radio interview, Likud MK Miki Zohar claimed that the Israeli public will never believe that Netanyahu is guilty of corruption because he “belongs to the Jewish race, and the entire Jewish race is the highest human capital, the smartest, the most comprehending.”

But how is this different from ‘centrist’ Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s declaration that “My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians”?

If I had any doubt about my position then arch-Zionist and Trump supporter, Alan Dershowitz, laid them to rest when he said that:

“It will make it much more difficult for people like me who try to defend Israel in the international court of public opinion to defend them effectively, It would be a tragedy to see the Supreme Court weakened.”

But it is Aharon Barak, who has provided the definitive argument in favour of the legal reforms. Barak said that

the High Court has acted as a kind of legal “Iron Dome,”. Without a credible independent court, deemed as ensuring Israel’s democratic functioning, including in its treatment of the Palestinians, “our chief of staff and government ministers will immediately be arrested when they travel overseas…  The leaders of the country will be put on trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

Could there be any more persuasive argument for giving Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s proposals our full support?

Tony Greenstein

Israel Moves Another Step Nearer Being a Police State – Even for Jews

Plan to Outlaw ‘Breaking the Silence’ the group which reveals Israel's war crimes

The reality of the most benign occupation in the world

Settler colonial societies, be it Israel, Algeria or South Africa, always created a certain democratic space for the settler population.  The indigenous population were always faced with a racist police state but Whites South Africans, French colons or Israeli Jews were always granted freedoms that resemble those that exist in Western bourgeois societies.

However the very nature of a settler colonial society leads to a situation where those members of the settler community who sympathise with and support the oppressed native population find that their democratic space is constantly being encroached upon.  So it was in South Africa that White opponents of Apartheid were also banned, detained, framed and deported.  So too in Israel, anti-Zionist Jews are increasingly coming under pressure, political and physical.  Not just anti-Zionist Jews but even those Zionists who are human rights activists and oppose the war crimes of the settler state.

How the Right see it - revealing human rights violations is a distortion of reality

I have had an argument with a good Israeli comrade, Ronnie Barkan, who tells me that ‘Breaking the Silence’ is no better than the rest of the Zionist population.  I disagree with him.  Although they, like Btselem, are undoubtedly liberal Zionists the fact is that the work they do is seen, rightly, as a threat by the Zionist regime – and not just the regime but most of the Zionist opposition too.  The 'centrist' Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid has been one of the most hostile parties.

Israeli NGOs have already been the target of hostile legislation.  Last year they were forced to reveal prominently in their literature if they received more than half their funding from abroad.  [Israel passes law to force NGOs to reveal foreign funding]  The reason for this was in order to demonstrate that human rights activists are really traitors, who received their money from foreign governments.  Of course there was no obligation on other mainly right-wing groups or e.g. the most popular news paper Israel Hayom which is funded by US billionaire to reveal its funding.

Breaking the Silence speak out in Berlin

The aim of the new law is to ban organisations which seek to harm Israeli soldiers, whatever that means and which seek to put them on trial in international courts.  BTS which collects testimony from soldiers on the human rights violations of Israeli soldiers would be caught by this.

Yair Lapid of the 'centrist' Yesh Atid attacks Breaking the Silence alongside Israeli army officers

Netanyahu pushes for bill to ban Breaking the Silence, BDS NGOs

By Lahav Harkov,  Jerusalem Post, October 17, 2017 13:29

The bill would shut down Israeli groups that try to put IDF soldiers on trial in international courts.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pauses while addressing attendees during the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. Headquarters in New York, October 1, 2015. . (photo credit:CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS)

New legislation supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would shut down any organization that seeks to harm IDF soldiers or try IDF soldiers in international courts.
The bill would also ban NGOs that promote a boycott of Israel or any area in its controls, meaning that it would apply to settlement boycotts, Channel 2 reported on Monday night.

The new details followed Sunday’s unanimous decision by the coalition to launch a two-pronged attack on foreign funding of political NGOs, consisting of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into “the involvement of foreign governments in the funding of political organizations and activities to harm IDF soldiers,” and legislation that will be more stringent than the current laws requiring organizations to report foreign funding and announce it publicly if more than half of their budget comes from a foreign political entity.

Israeli soldier poses with detainees

The vast majority of organizations that are mostly funded by foreign governments  – 25 of 27 NGOs listed by the Justice Ministry in 2016 – are left-wing.

Earlier this year, Netanyahu appointed Tourism Minister Yariv Levin to come up with a new bill on the topic, because he thought the existing laws are too permissive.

Closing Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony from former IDF soldiers claiming war crimes and airs them around the world, was reportedly specifically mentioned in discussions of what the legislation should entail.

Breaking the Silence Exhibition - Netanyahu wants to clamp down on such embarrassments

Breaking the Silence’s executive director Avner Gvaryahu said his organization “is here to stay, now and after Netanyahu,” and argued that the “persecution” of his NGO is a distraction from the investigations into alleged corruption by Netanyahu.

“This is yet another pitiful witch-hunt from a right-wing government that knows its days are numbered,” he stated. “Yet again, Netanyahu chooses to use IDF soldiers, who have broken the silence and oppose the occupation, as a human shield, deflecting the consequences of his own criminal entanglements. Neither a commission of inquiry nor legislation will deter us. There is only one way to stop Breaking the Silence: end the occupation."

Opinion The Right-wing Assault on Israeli Democracy

A plan to outlaw Breaking the Silence is part of a campaign that aims to erase the liberal democracy that Israel once aspired to be

Chemi Shalev Haaretz, Oct 17, 2017 5:45 PM

The reported plan to declare the anti-occupation NGO Breaking the Silence illegal is an indication of Israel’s heavy-handed government and of its weakened democracy. It would be considered breaking news were it not for the fact that it is actually more of the same. The blacklisting of Breaking the Silence, which would surely serve as a gateway to banning more dissent, is part of the overall right-wing assault on the liberal democracy that Israel once aspired to be. Like the (apparently false) claim that a frog will tolerate water being heated up until it’s boiled to death, Israeli public opinion, including the part that was supposed to offer resistance, has adapted to the dismantlement in stages of the country’s democracy. If and when the public wakes up, it might very well be too late.

The onslaught is being executed on many fronts. It is a calculated and integrated campaign. To allow the government to enact anti-democratic laws as it sees fit, it must first revoke the authority of the High Court of Justice to nullify Knesset legislation. To diminish the stature of the court, the justice minister tries to clip its wings through legislation while her fellow coalition members delegitimize the High Court’s decisions and makeup. Without the threat of High Court nullification, right-wing lawmakers can start dreaming about remaking Israeli democracy into the Jewish ethnocracy they desire. To justify the required curtailment of equality and civil rights, Israeli Arabs are portrayed as a Fifth Column, opponents of the occupation become terrorist collaborators and demonstrators for the rule of law are dubbed anarchists and harassers. All the while, the government’s education commissar tries to edit academic freedom to make it conform to government policy and its culture czar threatens the livelihood of artists who challenge dogma and buck right-wing convention.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to save himself from what increasingly look like likely indictments only add fuel to the fire already consuming Israeli democracy. A frantic and haunted prime minister waging a personal vendetta against the media and the legal system for his own survival is a crucial element in the anti-democratic revolution. So the coalition stays silent when Netanyahu attacks the police just as they will look the other way when he will try to intimidate his potential Justice Ministry prosecutors, not to mention the ecstasy that engulfs right wingers whenever Netanyahu tries to torment the media. He launches bitter personal attacks on journalists, like Donald Trump on steroids, opens and closes public broadcasting stations, like Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, enforces regulations or relaxes the rules to send a message to reporters – but mainly to those who pay their salaries – that investigative exposés and biting criticism might not be the shortest avenue to fame and fortune.

The breaking and smashing frenzy, which is slated to peak in the Knesset’s upcoming winter session, is shared by cynical politicians and true fanatics. The former are looking for headlines that will grab their incited voters but the latter represent a comprehensive world view that derides Western and liberal values and seeks to replace them with an authoritarian regime in which Jews reign supreme. They want to discriminate between Jews and Arabs without knee-jerk liberals getting in their way, to grab Palestinian land while the High Court cowers in the corner, and to continue managing the occupation in darkness, without the rays of disinfecting sunlight occasionally shed by NGOs such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem.

This aggressive campaign is fed by the right wing’s perpetual self-victimization, orchestrated and conducted by Netanyahu himself, and by the arrogance of Likud politicians – and those from the national-religious Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) Party even more so – who show no compunction about undermining the values that made Israel what it is today. Maybe their amok is a function of an urge to erase the last remnants of the Israel in whose creation and consolidation their political movements played only a minor role. After the mission is accomplished, the internal destroyers and demolishers of the Zionist revolution that created the state can continue pretending that they are its children and successors.

The ethnic cleansing of Africans in Israel

The Top 9 Israeli Government anti-Refugee Racists 2015

David Sheen The Electronic Intifada 28 December 2015

mobfire - the people want the Africans to be burned

Anti-African racism was peddled by both center-left Zionist Union candidate Isaac Herzog and right-wing Zionist incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu while campaigning ahead of the March election. Oren Ziv ActiveStills

Since 2012, the number of non-Jewish refugees from African countries in present-day Israel has shrunk from a peak of approximately 64,000 to fewer than 46,000.

Israel’s successful efforts to reduce the number of Africans living in territory it controls must be recognized for what it is: ethnic cleansing.

For the last four years, I have compiled an annual list of the public figures most responsible for Israel’s racist treatment of Africans.

The list reads as both an indictment of populist opinion-makers and a retrospective of the assaults on refugees that have taken place in the last 12 months.

9. Yisrael Katz - transport minister

In April this year, around 800 refugees drowned when the boat carrying them sank in the Mediterranean.

African Refugees Leaving Holot Internment Camp

In the face of this horrific tragedy, a top Israeli minister chose to revel in the government’s successful efforts to keep refugees out. Yisrael Katz, a leading figure in the right-wing Likud party who heads both ministries for transportation and intelligence and atomic energy, wrote in a Facebook post:

“Europe is having a difficult time dealing with the migrants, and with creating solutions for this difficult issue. While there are differences between us (the migrants traveling to Europe must cross a sea while those heading for Israel have a direct overland connection), you can see the rectitude of our government’s policy to build a fence on the border with Egypt, which blocks the job-seeking migrants before they enter Israel. The elections are over — you can give us some credit now.”

Racist ringleaders

The same week that Katz posted his morbid message, it emerged that among a group of African men who Islamic State militants in Libya had executed for not being Muslims were three Eritreans who Israel had previously deported for not being Jews.

Infiltrators is a loaded term that was used to refer to Palestinian refugees, expelled from Palestine who tried to return.  Its use with refugees is intended to convey the message that the refugees are 'as bad as' the Arabs

Taking a cue from Katz, some Israelis responded to the news over social media with expressions of joy and calls for more of the same.

8. Ben-Dror Yemini - journalist

For years, Ben-Dror Yemini has used his regular column in Israel’s best-selling daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot to attack Africans, as well as Palestinians and progressive Israeli Jews. This August, one of his articles may have shattered all previous records for the depths to which an establishment journalist is willing to descend in support of Israel’s war on Africans.

In it, Yemini argues that African men should be transferred out of Israeli cities and into desert detention centers, in order to prevent romantic relationships between them and Jewish Israeli women, specifically, Black Jewish Israeli women. Yemini notes that this motive would be rejected as racist if it were stated aloud, so he advises against raising this point publicly.

Suggesting that Jews in south Tel Aviv were paying an “unbearable price” because of the Africans living among them, he claims that there are arguments for reducing the number of Africans in city centers that “cannot be presented because they are outside the rules of political correctness.”

Racist riot against refugees

7. Tie: Nissan Ben Hamo and Rafi Ben Shitrit - city mayors

In August, after Israel’s high court ordered the release of African refugees who had been held in the Holot detention center for more than a year, the government grudgingly agreed to let them go, but with a condition.

In the final days before the deadline decreed by the court, the government issued documents to 1,200 of those being released, declaring that they were not permitted to live or work in either Tel Aviv or the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

Eritrean refugees mourn their comrade who was killed by a lynch mob in Beersheva bus station

The decision to restrict entrance to the two cities which contain the largest African communities in Israel posed a serious challenge for the released internees. Barred from accessing their only real support system in Israel — family and friends — the refugees scrambled to find lodging for the night in smaller towns where they didn’t have close contacts.

Within hours of leaving Holot, 20 were arrested in Tel Aviv for violating the conditions of their release.

Residents in Tel Aviv protest against African refugees in August. Keren Manor ActiveStills

On the morning that the first 600 were released from Holot, Nissan Ben Hamo, the mayor or Arad, wrote on Facebook that he would not permit any of these Africans to settle in that city. Ben Hamo followed up his tough talk by posting police officers at entrances to the town with instructions to stop Africans coming in.

Ben Hamo also called upon residents to “maintain alertness” and threatened to mobilize the entire town to resist the arrival of Africans, potentially with physical force. He wrote on his Facebook page: 

Holot Internment Camp

“If we have to strengthen our struggle on this issue, I won’t hesitate to call on all residents to join the fight for the city’s well-being.”

Soon, the local authority of Bisan (Beit Shean), a town in the north of present-day Israel, issued a similar declaration that it would not permit African refugees to settle there. Rafi Ben Shitrit, the mayor, urged the town’s police commander to take “immediate action to prevent illegal infiltrators from staying in Beit Shean,” insisting that they were “not only unwanted but dangerous.”

6. Moshe Yaalon - defense minister

In August, Israeli soldiers shot and wounded three citizens of African states attempting to enter Israel from Egypt. When asked about the incident, the army provided several different accounts of the event that contradicted one another.

And when Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon was asked about the incident in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, he refused to comment.

Yaalon displayed a similar nonchalance about the shooting of an African a few months later.

In October, after a gunman opened fire at the central bus station in the southern city of Bir al-Saba (Beer Sheva), killing an Israeli soldier and wounding 11 others, an Israeli security guard shot an innocent passerby, Eritrean refugee Haftom Zarhum.

Other Israelis at the scene proceeded to kick Zarhum in the face and slam a large bench onto him as he writhed on the floor, cursing him all the while. The crowd then blocked medics who tried to evacuate him to the local hospital.

Eritreans mourn in Tel Aviv on 21 October during a memorial for Haftom Zarhum, who died after he was shot by an Israeli security guard and beaten by a mob in Bir al-Saba. Oren Ziv ActiveStills

The killing of Zarhum would seem to be an open and shut case of a murderous hate crime. His attackers were caught on camera assaulting him.

They were even interviewed on Israel’s Channel 2 and gleefully took credit for stomping Zarhum to death.

A week later, one of Zarhum’s attackers returned to Channel 2 and said that he had no regrets over his role in the incident.

And yet, Yaalon’s defense ministry decided that Zarhum would not be recognized as a victim of terrorism because he entered Israel “illegally.” Without this status, his surviving family members are not entitled to any Israeli government compensation.

More than two months have passed since Zarhum was killed. No charges have yet been filed against the men who were responsible for his death.

5. Issac Herzog - opposition leader

Another one of the ways that Israeli society becomes increasingly racist is when centrist parties like Labor adopt right-wing rhetoric in order to chase after right-wing votes.

In recent years, Labor has not played the foil to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but instead acceded to almost all of his hawkish proposals. Instead of standing firm against Israel’s lurch to the right, Labor has attempted to ply votes away from Likud with right-wing proposals.

That tendency has increased ever since Isaac Herzog was elected to lead the party in November 2013. It has been especially evident in Herzog’s solid support for Netanyahu’s military campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank, but also in his support for expelling Africans from Israel.

It was not always so. When the Knesset first voted to amend the country’s “anti-infiltration” law in January 2012 to sanction the roundup, detention and expulsion of African refugees, Herzog opposed the measure.

When the Knesset voted to amend the law a second time in December 2013, Herzog didn’t show up for the vote. And by the time the Knesset voted to toughen it a third time in December 2014, he voted in favor of the amendment, along with several other Labor lawmakers.

In May 2012, Herzog wrote an opinion piece, challenging arguments by human rights groups that Eritreans in Israel deserved protection as refugees.

In March 2015, Herzog repeated this refrain in an attempt to peel anti-African votes away from Netanyahu on the eve of the Israeli national elections, saying, “We need to negotiate with Eritrea on the return of the Eritreans back to Eritrea.”

This year, Labor led a successful effort to abolish the Knesset’s committee on foreign workers, one of the few forums in which the concerns of refugees could receive a hearing in parliament.

In September 2015, Labor publicly complained that Netanyahu’s government has not done nearly enough to expel Africans from the country. In a public statement, Herzog’s Labor Party wholeheartedly adopted the far-right’s propaganda points, insisting without any basis that most refugees in Israel have no valid claim to refugee status.

“The crisis of the refugees from Syria is not similar to the issue of the infiltrators from Africa who are mostly migrant workers,” the statement read. “If only Bibi’s government had created immigration laws, it would be possible to send back to their country those who are in Israel for their welfare and for work. But the Likud government is only good at talking, and it is responsible for the troubles of the residents of south Tel Aviv.”

4. Ayelet Shaked - justice minister

During her first term as a Knesset member, from 2013 to 2015, Ayelet Shaked headed the parliamentary “lobby to return the infiltrators to their countries,” a group dedicated to expelling all African refugees from Israel.

In her second term, Shaked was appointed justice minister, a position she has not shied away from using to advance the lobby’s objectives.

Each time Israel’s high court has struck down amendments to the “anti-infiltration” law as a violation of the country’s basic laws, right-wing lawmakers have raged against the judicial decisions and plotted to neuter the court’s ability to void legislation.

To this end, Shaked introduced a bill in the Knesset to limit the high court’s power to overturn laws. And as judges entered the eleventh hour of deliberations over the Knesset’s third amendment to the “anti-infiltration law” this year, Shaked began to upload videos to the Internet which purported to show African refugees in a negative light.

Shaked expressed a desire to pressure the judges into issuing a ruling that would leave the Africans under lock and key.

Within hours, Shaked removed one of the videos she had uploaded after it was pointed out to her that the footage had been filmed in Turkey, not Israel.

Ultimately, under threat of losing some of their powers, the high court judges agreed to let the government’s third amendment stand, with the caveat that refugees could only be detained for a year.

Disappointed that her victory was only partial, Shaked has begun to examine ways of filing criminal charges against Africans who enter Israel.

3. Gilad Erdan - public security minister

During Gilad Erdan’s brief term as interior minister, he secured the passage of the third amendment to the “anti-infiltration” law that enabled the incarceration of Africans in desert detention centers.

In the new Netanyahu government, Erdan heads the information, strategic affairs and public security ministries.

But before taking on his new roles, Erdan decided that any African who did not have a refugee status application pending must return to Africa, or be imprisoned indefinitely if they refused.

In July, an Israeli court threw out an appeal by human rights groups to quash this draconian directive.

A report by two groups working with refugees in Israel found that some of the Sudanese nationals that Israel had sent back to Sudan were being tortured by government forces upon their return.

African refugees jailed in Holot desert prison camp pray after eating a meal breaking the Ramadan fast in July. Oren Ziv ActiveStills

For the remainder of 2015, Erdan’s attacks on refugees consisted not of legal injunctions, but rather of racist incitement.

In April, a massive earthquake shook Nepal. This tragic event was mainly a cause for consternation in Israel because the country is a popular destination for Israeli tourists, and also a popular source of surrogate mothers to bring babies to term for gay Israeli couples.

Then serving as interior minister, Erdan responded rapidly to the quake by ordering the airlift of Israeli citizens out of the danger zone, and to also bring along a small number of local women who were in the final stages of pregnancy with Israeli fetuses.

Appearing on a popular television news show to discuss the development, Erdan emphasized that the Nepalese women’s presence in the country was “temporary.”

“We won’t convert them [to Judaism] and let them stay here,” he said.

The show’s host retorted sarcastically, “Of course, after the birth they will obviously end up in Holot,” referring to Israel’s desert detention center for African refugees.

In response, Erdan burst out in hearty laughter.

Four months later, after Erdan had already left his post at the interior ministry, he admitted that the true purpose of the third amendment to the “anti-infiltration” law was to incarcerate Africans in order to put pressure on them to leave Israel.

As public security minister in the current government, Erdan has used news of Islamic State’s activities in Africa as a pretext to call for tightening the screws even further on refugees in Israel.

Without evidence, he has warned that African refugees could be Islamic State recruits, casting them as “a real security risk.” Erdan has prodded Netanyahu’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau into considering some African refugees as terrorists.

2. Silvan Shalom - interior minister

In Israel, the person with the most influence over the lives of refugees is the interior minister, responsible for deciding who is and who isn’t allowed to enter the country. For the bulk of 2015, that person was Likud legislator Silvan Shalom.

It came as no surprise when Shalom maintained the anti-African policies of his predecessors. At least as far back as 2011, Shalom publicly identified refugees as a “threat.” At that time, when citizens of African states accounted for 13 percent of the population of the southern city of Eilat, Shalom, then minister for development of the Naqab (Negev) and Galilee regions, proposed the building of a border fence to keep Africans out of Israel.

“The fence is critical for the defense of the city of Eilat from terror cells and of course from huge waves of infiltrators flooding the city,” Shalom said.

Though Shalom’s hardline stance came as no shock, the level of anti-Black racism that emanated from his own household managed to exceed the expectations of some outside observers.

Just a month into his term as interior minister, his wife, the broadcaster Judy Shalom Nir Mozes, publicly insulted the US president in a reductionist and racist tweet: “Do u know what Obama Coffee is? Black and weak.”

In August, Shalom decreed that any African refugee freed from Israel’s desert detention centers by a high court order would henceforth be forbidden from living or working in either Tel Aviv or Eilat, turning those cities into “sundown towns.”

Many Israeli cities have long operated as de facto sundown towns. Palestinian citizens of Israel are harassed and run out of these cities once the sun sets, ostensibly in order to prevent romances between Jews and people of other religions.

While some of the groups who chase non-Jews out of town after dark are vigilantes who operate independently, others work in concert with the police and the municipalities.

Also in August, in an effort to undercut the refugee claims of Eritreans, who make up three quarters of the asylum-seeker population in Israel, Shalom defended the dictatorship in Eritrea. “You apparently don’t know what is happening in the country,” he responded to the accusation that Eritrea is an autocratic regime, but admitted that his belief was based on testimony by Eritrea’s own ambassador to Israel.

“Of course. Who [else] would provide the information?” he said.

Before the month ended, Shalom authorized a new rule that would put almost every non-Jewish African living in Israel at risk of being rounded up and taken to the desert detention center Holot.

Prior to the new protocol, only Eritreans and Sudanese who had already lived in Israel for many years could be summoned to Holot. Shalom’s new criteria stipulated that any Eritrean or Sudanese in Israel can be detained in Holot, regardless of the date that they entered the country.

In November, Shalom’s ministry distributed the proposed text of a fourth amendment to the “anti-infiltration” law, seeking to increase the duration that refugees can be incarcerated at Holot. In addition, the new amendment specifies that even asylum-seekers who are parents to young children can now also be forced to live at Holot.

In the last days of December 2015, Shalom resigned his post and quit the Knesset after six women came forward and accused him of serious sex crimes.

1. Benjamin Netanyahu - prime minister

Just days before national elections were held in March, Prime Benjamin Netanyahu published a video recounting what he considered to be the greatest accomplishments of his last term in office.

Among these, he took credit for preventing the entry of African refugees or in his words, “infiltrators.”

“We shut off, completely closed off access to terrorists, to infiltrators to the State of Israel,” he said.  “The only state that managed to control its borders.”

This was no idle boast. Eritreans and Sudanese make up more than 90 percent of the asylum-seekers living in Israel. And yet Israel has awarded refugee status to only four of the former and zero of the latter.

In the words of an editorial published by the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz in February, “Israel is the least moral country in the world when it comes to awarding asylum to those who deserve it.”

Once Netanyahu secured reelection, he set to the task of divvying out government ministries among party loyalists and coalition partners.

Among those appointed to serve in his new cabinet were all three Likud lawmakers who were featured speakers at a May 2012 anti-African rally in Tel Aviv that devolved into a full-on race riot: Danny Danon, Yariv Levin and Miri Regev.

For years, Netanyahu has led a team of ministers who demonize Africans in the minds of the Israeli public by associating them with terrorism and fatal diseases.

But Netanyahu knows that it isn’t appropriate for the head of the government of a self-styled Western democracy to cast all refugees as criminals.

So while he calls refugees “infiltrators” in Hebrew, his English-language statements mistranslate his slur word as “migrants.”

For four years running, Netanyahu has led Israel’s war on refugees: promoting racists to positions of power, ensuring the passage of anti-African legislation and inciting racial hatred against a defenseless community.

Haaretz accurately summed up Netanyahu’s anti-African legacy in an editorial it published in July, under the headline, “Israel thinks African asylum-seekers aren’t human beings.”

David Sheen is an independent writer and filmmaker. Born in Toronto, he now lives in Dimona in present-day Israel. Website: www.davidsheen.com. Twitter: @davidsheen