African Refugees Get No Reprieve from Israel’s Racist Rage

Another brilliant article from the indefatigable Israeli-Canadian campaigner, David Sheen whose videos on Youtube are brilliant. See e.g. War on Africans 

Nothing better demonstrates the vicious racism of the Israeli state and what Zionism has led to than its treatment of the African refugees from Eritrea and Sudan.  Their crime is two fold - they are not Jewish and they are Black - an unforgivable combination.

They are called ‘infiltrators’ in a conscious echo of the term that was used to describe Palestinian refugees trying to return to their lands after 1948.  Thousands were murdered in cold blood as the Israeli Labour founders of Israel sought to ensure that Israel was as Jewish as possible.

Challenging the racist Zionist description of Black African refugees

Why 'infiltrators'?  Because they are non-Jews infiltrating a Jewish state and thereby making it less Jewish.

Today Africans fleeing from the vicious police state in Eritrea and the genocide in Sudan are refused en masse the right to stay in Israel.  Like the Jews of Russia and Poland in the last century they have  been subject to vicious pogroms led by the Israeli government.

Those with illusions in the Israeli Labour Party should note that the ILP has given full support to Netanyahu. 

The fortunes of the African refugee community targeted by the Israeli government for deportation have swung wildly in recent days

April 23, 2018 David Sheen The Electronic Intifada

African asylum seekers protest against Israel’s deportation plan, South Tel Aviv, 25 February. , Oren Ziv ActiveStills

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first announced a United Nations-backed deal to resettle some of them in the West, but then quickly retracted the plan after right-wing Israelis complained that the deal was too generous to asylum seekers.“I listened closely to many comments about the agreement. As a result, after reevaluating the advantages and disadvantages, I decided to cancel the deal,” Netanyahu wrote on his Facebook page.

“Despite the growing legal and international limitations, we will continue to act with determination to exhaust all possibilities at our disposal to remove the infiltrators,” he added.

African refugees walk out of Holot

In November, it was reported that the Netanyahu government secured agreements with unnamed African nations for the latter to take in many of the approximately 40,000 refugees remaining in Israel, ostensibly in exchange for a fee of $5,000 per head.

But Netanyahu’s plans for expedited deportation were quashed after protests by refugee rights activists in Israel and abroad shamed those countries, now known to be Rwanda and Uganda, into disclaiming the scheme.

Unable to deliver on his promise to quickly expel all the Africans, Netanyahu grudgingly agreed to a plan brokered by the UN refugee agency UNHCR which, if carried out, would have seen thousands of the refugees resettled in Western nations in the coming years.

Eritreans mourn the victim of lynch mob 

But Germany and Italy, two of the countries cited by Netanyahu as committed to take in asylum seekers from Israel, quickly denied having ever agreed to accept refugees under the scheme.

Opposition to expulsion

Abandoned on all sides within hours of announcing the agreement, Netanyahu walked back the deal, first in part, then in whole, suspending it, and then canceling it altogether.

Although the deal would have provided political cover for Netanyahu’s planned expulsion of the refugees, his political camp vigorously opposed it because it also committed Israel to allowing around 20,000 Africans – mainly women and children – to remain in Israel for another five years and to help them move to parts of the country other than South Tel Aviv, where most of the community is concentrated.

Although a January poll showed that 66 percent of Israeli Jews support Netanyahu’s efforts to expel the refugees to Africa, a recent survey found that positions are reversed in those very areas where residents were more likely to actually encounter any of them.

A March poll revealed that in the greater Tel Aviv area, opposition to the expulsion reached 68 percent, and in the long-neglected neighborhoods of South Tel Aviv with the largest African populations, it hit 71 percent.

refugees at detention centre Holot

On 24 February and again on 24 March, some 20,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv to demonstrate in solidarity with the refugee community and demand that the Israeli government cancel plans to deport them, and instead work to improve the lives of all residents of the city’s delapidated southern district.

Protesters have criticized the Israeli government for having one of the lowest refugee acceptance rates in the world – less than 0.5 percent.

But Netanyahu has claimed that the non-Jewish refugees – about half Christian and half Muslim – pose a threat to Israel’s “national identity.”

In that sense Israel regards them similarly to how it has viewed indigenous Palestinians since its founding, when it expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and barred them from returning because they are not Jews.

And local racists have long labored to shore up support for Netanyahu’s anti-African policies, and to demand that even crueler measures be taken against them.

“Mortal threat”

Shlomo Maslawi, representing Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party on the Tel Aviv city council, told Israeli TV that he would oppose Netanyahu’s now retracted plan, even though it included promises to invest in the overburdened neighborhoods of South Tel Aviv, until “the Eritreans are gone, down to the last Eritrean – only then will there be rehabilitation.”

In recent weeks, as refugee rights advocates across the country and around the world stepped up their protests, forcing the African governments conspiring with Israel to deny their involvement, Netanyahu lashed out at the refugees, smearing them as a mortal threat.

If he had not built a high-tech fence on Israel’s southern border five years ago, Netanyahu told an audience in March, the number of Africans in the country would be significantly higher, a condition he deemed “much worse” than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists.”

Coming under rare criticism from some of Israel’s staunchest American defenders, other government officials also doubled down to defend the mass deportations to African states.

Interior minister Aryeh Deri told Israeli army radio that to take these asylum seekers, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, and expel them to Rwanda and Uganda, would merely mean returning them “to their natural place.”

Avraham Neguise, currently Israel’s only Black legislator, a Jew of Ethiopian origin, also spoke out in support of the deportation to Rwanda and Uganda, telling Israel’s i24 TV, “Well, they came from Africa, and they’re going back to Africa.”

Yitzhak Yosef, one of Israel’s two national chief rabbis, also heaped scorn on the Africans in a sermon last month, in which he called Black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew equivalent of the N-word.

His fellow chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, had already used that Hebrew version of the N-world to describe Black people, on his very first day in office.

Vigilante violence

These and many other incidents of anti-African incitement have ramped up racism against the refugees. The rage against asylum seekers has grown into a political force capable even of pressuring Netanyahu to cancel Israel’s international agreements.

But the most frightening effects of increased anti-Black sentiment are reserved for the refugees themselves.

Vigilante violence against African refugees has become increasingly common in recent years.

In 2012, an Israeli firebombed a daycare for the young children of African refugees, and in 2014, an Israeli man was indicted for stabbing an Eritrean baby in the head.

Israel's Labour 'Opposition' is as racist as Likud

According to prosecutors, the man later stated: “I attacked Black terrorists, there was a Black baby, they said that a Black baby, Blacks in general, are terrorists.”

The firebomber received only community service, while the stabber was sent for psychiatric treatment.

Since that time, in separate incidents, two refugees – Haftom Zarhum from Eritrea and Babikir Ali Adham-Uvdo from Sudan – were beaten to death in public places by Israeli mobs.

The charges against Adham-Uvdo’s killers were reduced from murder.

One of the killers is a minor whose sentence for “intentional injury” to Adham-Uvdo is yet to be determined. The adult assailant received a maximum jail sentence of 10 years for manslaughter in a plea bargain, although he will probably be released in just a few years.

An Israeli court is currently offering Zarhum’s killers community service.

Coerced to self-deport

This anti-African incitement, coupled with the news that African refugees, including some recently expelled from Israel, have experienced torture, extortion and detention in Libya, where open-air slave markets have been documented, is taking a toll not only on adults, but on Israeli youth, as well.

In February, one refugee confessed that a group of Israeli schoolchildren had approached him on a public bus and asked him, “How much can we sell you for?”

With the Rwanda-Uganda deal shelved in shame, and the UN deal for resettlement in the West now derailed by Netanyahu himself, the fate of the 40,000 African refugees left in Israel is once again unclear.

In lieu of the UN deal, Netanyahu is now reportedly pressuring coalition partners to reopen the Holot internment camp that it closed down only last month in anticipation of the planned expulsions.

Starting in December 2013, Israel rounded up thousands of African men into this detention center, in order to pressure them to self-deport.

By Netanyahu’s count, the government was able to coerce more than 20,000 to leave Israel in this way – a third of the African refugee community.

When the Israeli high court forbade the government from keeping those men incarcerated there for more than a year, the latter banned the refugees who it was compelled to release from moving back to Tel Aviv or Eilat, the two Israeli cities with the largest asylum-seeker communities at the time.

As Israel released Holot’s remaining inmates in March, it informed them that the list of cities they were now forbidden from living or working in had mushroomed from two to seven, adding to the list Petah Tikva, Bnei Brak, Ashdod, Netanya and Jerusalem.

Now Netanyahu’s coalition partners say they may now pass an even harsher version of the so-called Anti-Infiltration Law which they have used to criminalize refugees.

The new bill would build in measures to insulate it from being overturned by the high court.

If they follow through on their threat to neuter the court’s powers, there would no longer be any legal impediment to jailing the African refugees indefinitely in Holot until they agree to self-deport to whatever destination Israel coerces them to go to.

David Sheen is an independent writer and filmmaker. Born in Toronto, Canada, Sheen now lives in Dimona. His website is www.davidsheen.com and he can be followed on Twitter: @davidsheen.

In Israel even conversion to becoming Jewish depends on your race

Not everyone can join the herrenvolk

One of the arguments used by those who say that Zionism is not racist is that anyone can convert to being Jewish and thus become part of the master race in Israel.  There is no barrier if you meet the religious criteria of adherence to Orthodoxy, observance of the commandments (mitzvot) etc.

Now we learn that Israel’s conversion authority routinely rejects Palestinian and refugee requests to convert on grounds of ethnicity or their legal status as refugees.  What has one’s status as a refugee got to do with religious adherence?  Nothing of course.  Except of course that the Orthodox Jewish institutions fulfills much the same function vs the Israeli state as the Reich Church in Germany fulfilled in respect of the Nazi state.  The difference was that in Nazi Germany the Confessing Church supplanted the Reich Church which became unpopular with German Christians (not the Confessing Church ever stood up to the Nazis).

In Slovakia during WW2 approximately 10% of Slovakian Jews, between 6,000 and 8,000 converted to Christianity to escape deportation.  In Budapest in 1944 thousands of Jews converted for the same reason.  Almost without exception the Churches put no obstacles in the way of conversion, even though they knew that the reasons for conversion were to save themselves rather than out of religious devotion.  In the majority of case it did not save the Jewish converts from deportation though it did in somc cases.

Tony Greenstein

'Palestinian requests to convert to Judaism rejected automatically'

JTA  Fri, 01 Apr 2016 

Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, director of the Israeli government’s Conversion Authority, made the statement earlier this week, according to NRG.

Photo by: REUTERS

Israel’s authority handling conversions to Judaism rejects Palestinian applicants without review because of their ethnic origin, its head said.

Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, director of the Israeli government’s Conversion Authority, spoke about his organization’s handling of requests by Palestinians to convert on Tuesday during a discussion on conversions at the State Control Committee of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, the news site NRG reported.

To initiate an officially recognized conversion to Judaism in Israel, foreigners need to apply to the special cases panel of the Conversion Authority.

“The threshold requirements” to be considered by the special cases panel, he said, “are that applicants be sincere and that they are not foreign workers; infiltrators; Palestinian or illegally in the country.” In 2014, he added, the special cases committee received 400 applications. “Half of the applicants were accepted, the rest were rejected as foreign workers, infiltrators, illegal stayers and Palestinians,” he said.

Conversions to Judaism by Palestinians are rare in Israel.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which is the legal basis for the country’s basic laws  - a set often referred to the equivalent of Israel’s constitution - ensures “absolute social and political equality to all its citizens regardless of faith, race and gender.”

The Israeli government fears that Palestinian attempts to convert to Judaism would be a covert form of realizing "the right of return," which is demanded by Arabs who were forced to flee or fled their former homes and lands in pre-state Israel just before the state's founding.

'African infiltrators have no halachic affiliation to the Jewish people' (archives) Photo: Gil Yohanan

Israel rejects Africans' request to convert to Judaism

Dozens of Eritrean and Sudanese infiltrators have asked to become part of Jewish people in past year bid to receive residence permit and perhaps even Israeli citizenship, Ynet learns.

Kobi Nachshoni

Published: 06.11.14, 00:19 / Israel Jewish Scene

Dozens of Eritrean and Sudanese infiltrators residing in Israel illegally have requested to convert to Judaism in the past year in a bid to receive a residence permit and perhaps even an Israeli citizenship, Ynet has learned.

Their requests were rejected out of hand by the Conversion Authority for failing to meet preconditions.

Refugee Problem

According to figures compiled by the Ministry of Religious of Services, dozens of Africans tried to begin a conversion process, and most requests were made when the infiltrators' problem was at the center of the public and media's attention.

A ministry official estimates that the immediate refusal made the entire community realize that it would not find a solution to its distress that way, and the number of requests soon diminished.

"The government built a fence in the south, on the state's border, and we built one here, at the entrance gate to the Jewish people," Shmuel Jeselsohn, head of the State Conversion Authority, told Ynet. "That's why even when there are infiltrators seeking to convert – it's not a phenomenon."

Rejected without discussion

According to Jeselsohn, until a few years ago there were no precondition for conversion, so that "everyone who was deported or banned entry to Israel would immediately knock on the door, and we had to summon them for an interview and start a process.

"This has been stopped," he added, 'and now foreign nationals are required to fill out a form requesting a conversion, which is discussed together with Justice Ministry representatives. If the request is filed by an illegal resident, it will be denied immediately.'

Yet religious sources have expressed their fear that the state will regularize the status of African infiltrators in the future and allow them to reside in Israel. In such a case, they will have the legal right to convert, despite the fact that they have no halachic affiliation to the Jewish people.

"The stories we hear from the religious courts, that they allegedly abuse converts, will pale in comparison to what we are expected to see with the Africans," a Conversion Authority source told Ynet.

"Today we are still talking about immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who in the worst case are assimilators of Jewish descent, and so we are still lenient with them. But here we are talking about tens of thousands who want to assimilate into us and have no connection to Judaism."

Appeals received from Palestinians too

Jeselsohn says the tension between the civil law and Jewish Law is built into the conversion issue, but is hardly witnessed these days.

Jeselsohn offers one example: "A while ago I met a woman with a head cover, who obviously maintains a very religious lifestyle and really wants to be part of the Jewish people. But then it turned out that several years ago she tried to enter Israel without a permit, and so legally she must not be converted."

Today, the exceptions committee allows the Conversion Authority to begin the process for a person who fails to meet the preconditions only in very rare cases. According to Jeselsohn, "We are occasionally approached by Palestinians who experience problems entering Israel."

He recalls an amusing incident when a Bedouin who began taking Judaism lessons called to inquire why he was not receiving an allowance like any other yeshiva student. 

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

Is theJewish state becoming Klan country?

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

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

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

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

Tony Greenstein

African counter-demonstration in Tel Aviv

Anti-African mob

by Justin Raimondo, January 07, 2013 

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

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

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

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

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

looting a shop that serves Africans

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

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

The face of Israeli fascism

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

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

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

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

One of the mob - no arrests were made

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

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

Africans trapped in carby Zionist mob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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