Black Victims of the Holocaust

Young Rhinelander, classified as bastard and hereditarily unfit (see image description)

Although the fate of the Jews during the holocaust is well known, the fate of Germany’s Black population goes without mention.  This an interesting article on the terrible experiences of Germany’s small Black population.

Black people, like Arabs, were lower on the Nazi’s racial ladder than the Jews.

Tony Greenstein

The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the‘Rhineland Bastards’

By Martin Smith | 23 April 2014

African-German girl in a school photo. Pic credit: USHMM

Most people know about the Nazi Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million others: Russians, Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, disabled people and LGBT people.

Alongside the big narrative of the Holocaust there are a myriad of small, individual stories and testimonies that help illustrate and shed light on the cruelty and barbarity of the Nazi regime.

One such account is the story of what happened to Germany’s tiny black population.

Primo Levi once wrote, “this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns”. Some may know their story, I certainly didn’t.

Tucked away inside Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribe, Mein Kampf, there is the following passage:

It was, and is, the Jew who brought negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race he hates by persistent bastardisation, to hurl it from the cultural and political heights it has attained, and to ascend them as its masters.

Eugen Fischer with photographs of South African Basters, c. 1938

This was not entirely a figment of his imagination; there were a small number of young black children of African heritage living in the Rhineland.

Like most west European countries, by the 17th century, Germany had a small black population. The modern state of Germany was founded in 1871.

The number of black people living in Germany increased from 1870 onwards. They came mainly from Germany’s small colonies in Africa and south east Asia; they were students, artisans, entertainers, former soldiers, low-level colonial officials, such as tax collectors, who had worked for the imperial colonial government.

A sign saying that interaction between blacks and whites degrades the race

Black population

The black population of Germany at the time of the Third Reich was 20,000 – 25,000 out of a total population of over 65 million.

Even before the Nazis took power in 1933, Germany’s black population faced racial discrimination and violence. Most government, religious and colonial officials refused to register interracial marriages or births. The state promoted eugenics, and popularised arguments about the inferiority of dual-heritage children.

Following the defeat of Germany in the First World War, the Allies stripped Germany of its colonies. Also as part of the war reparations (under the Versailles Treaty) the Allies occupied the Rhineland in western Germany.

Firpo Carr in Germany’s Black Holocaust: 1890-1945, estimates that over 200,000 French troops occupied the Rhineland region. They included a number black colonial troops.
Some of these African Rhineland-based soldiers married German women and raised their children as German; other German women had children by African soldiers outside of marriage.

Estimates vary, but there were over 800 dual-heritage children living in the Rhineland region. The Nazis and some sections of the press labeled these children “Rhineland Bastards” or “Rhineland Mischlingers” (mixing their blood with “alien” races).

African-German child with his schoolmates, under the Nazi regime. Pic credit: USHMM Afro-German Hans J. Massaquoi tried to join the Nazi youth

The term “Rhineland Bastard” is of course vile. It both articulated the Nazis’ biological construction of race and colonial conceptions of race and racial mixture that were seen as posing a threat to “white” superiority.

The isolation, segregation and attempted eradication of Germany’s black population was carried out in stages. This mirrors (obviously on a tiny scale) the methods used by the Nazis in their attempts to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population.

Black inmate of Dachau concentration camp when liberated in 1945

Some of these children and their families fled Germany after the Nazis took power; others were killed in the round-ups that followed.

The Nazis enacted a new law providing a basis for forced sterilisation of disabled people, Gypsies, and blacks on the 14 July 1933. If you want to read further about this horrific practice go to Benno Muellar-Hill’s Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945.

Under the Nazis, African-German mixed-heritage children were marginalised, isolated socially and economically, and not allowed to attend university. Racial discrimination prohibited them from seeking most jobs.

Then followed the Nuremberg laws of September 1935. These prohibited miscegenation – mixed marriages between Aryans and others. Any young Afro-German woman who got pregnant was forced to have an abortion.

Commission Number 3

An organisation named “Commission Number 3” was created by the Nazis to deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised under Dr Eugen Fischer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. It was decided that the African-German children would be sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.

All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilised. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilisation and abortion programme.

What happened to these Afro-Germans is very complex – their experiences were not uniform. Some of these children were subjected to medical experiments and others mysteriously “disappeared”.

Hans Hauck, a black Holocaust survivor and a victim of Hitler’s mandatory sterilisation programme, explained in the film Hitler’s Forgotten Victims that when he was forced to undergo sterilisation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilisation certificate, he was “free to go”, so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations whatsoever with Germans.

Tina Campt, in her path-breaking book, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, interviewed several black Rhineland survivors.

She published testimony from one male member of this Rhineland group. In his complex statement he recalls being sterilised under the Nazi programme, then later he became a member of the Hitler Youth movement. He then joined the German army, was captured by the Russians and spent several years as a German prisoner of war in Russia.

Not enough research has been done to unravel what happened to Germany’s black population. We know that most – alongside other black Europeans and many black soldiers – ended up in Nazi concentration camps and were murdered.

A black inmate at Dachau, photographed immediately after liberation. Pic credit: USHMM

Like their Jewish counterparts they did not go meekly to their deaths – they resisted the best they could. A tiny handful survived and were able to tell their story.

One such black survivor was Johnny Voste, a Belgian resistance fighter who was arrested in 1942 for alleged sabotage and then shipped to Dachau concentration camp.

He told that one of his jobs was stacking vitamin crates in the camp. Risking his own life, he distributed hundreds of vitamins to camp detainees, which saved the lives of many who were starving and weak. His motto was: “No, you can’t have my life; I will fight for it.”

Obit of the Day: “Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany”

http://www.obitoftheday.com/post/41275233204/hansmassaquoi

Hans Massaquoi was very disappointed when his teacher told him that he could not join the Hitler Youth. Massaquoi’s friends had all joined and he was enthralled with the uniforms, the parades, the camp-outs. But Hans’ desire to join was trumped by the color of his skin.

Born in 1926, Mr. Massaquoi’s parents were a German nurse and the son of a Liberian diplomat. He would grow up in Hamburg as the Weimar Republic was collapsing and the the Third Reich was building up.

When he was in second grade, Mr. Massaquoi was so taken with the Nazi imagery that, at his request, his nanny sewed a swastika to his sweater. Although his mother removed it when he returned home from school, a picture had already been taken. (See above.)

Mr. Massaquoi’s family lived in Germany for the duration of the war. According to Mr. Massaquoi’s memoir, Destined to Witness, he theorized that there were so few blacks living in Germany that they were a low priority for extermination. Eventually he would move: first to his father’s home country of Liberia and later to Chicago.

In the United States, although trained in aviation mechanics, Mr. Massaquoi would become a writer for Jet magazine and eventual move to its sister publication, Ebony, where he became managing editor.

Mr. Massaquoi, who passed away on January 19, 2013 on his 87th birthday, was encouraged to write down the story of his unusual childhood by his friend and author of Roots, Alex Haley.
Sources: L.A. Times and Chicago Sun-Times

(Image is from Mr. Massaqoui’s collection and copyright of William Morrow Paperbacks via spiritosanto.wordpress.com)

A sign saying that interaction between blacks and whites degrades the race 

Weaponising Jewish Suffering in order to Inflict More Suffering

It takes the genius of imperialism’s ideological and propaganda offensive to turn the industrial annihilation of 6 million people into a propaganda weapon in aid of further suffering and murder.  Israel, a state that has either murdered or helped murder some quarter of a million people since its formation, has made the misuse of the holocaust into an art form.  It is a state which has created some 6 million Palestinian refugees by way of compensation for the Jewish dead of Europe.  Except for the small matter that the Palestinians were not, despite the best attempts of Netanyahu and Zionist ideologues, responsible for the death of the Jews of Europe.  [see rewriting the holocaust]

Harvey Garfield, Roberta Moore of the Jewish Defence League and Jonathan Hoffman, Vice Chair of the Zionist Federation demonstrating outside Ahava with the EDL (in army fatigues at rear)

One would have thought that the most obvious of lessons from the Holocaust was that if the Western countries had opened up their doors to the Jews of Europe, then millions could have been saved.  But that of course would not fit with the present racist politics of immigration control, to say nothing of anti-Muslim racism, which pervades Europe and the United States.  If the lesson of not turning away refugees from our shores were to apply, then we would be queuing up to grant permission for Syria’s refugees to enter this country.

Stephen Pollard, far-right Editor of Jewish Chronicle and ex-editor of Daily Express, leapt to the defence of European anti-Semites as long as they were Zionists

David Cameron however cannot find it within himself to even allow 3,000 refugee children to enter Britain.  They are just a ‘bunch of migrants’ a ‘swarm’ and little more than a pestilence.  Allowing them in will only encourage others.  Yet nothing that is said today wasn’t said in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  The idea that if we let one Jew in then we will have to allow more in was the prevalent orthodoxy.  In the United States under baleful influence of Breckenridge Long, an Assistant Secretary at the State Department, even the miserable quotas for Jewish refugees that did exist were not fulfilled.  It took until 1944 until Henry Morgenthau, the US Treasury Secretary, ousted him.  Breckenridge Long was however a strong supporter of the Zionist movement.

The EDL attack Birmingham PSC stall - flying the Israeli flag and giving the Hitler salute!

And the Tory press that is today so vehemently anti-immigration when it comes to Syrian and other asylum seekers, was equally hostile to Jews in the 1930’s and during the mass immigration of refugee Jews from the  pogroms in Czarist Russia.  As Tony Kushner of Southampton University observed, "The Daily Mail has been an anti-alien newspaper since the 1900s. There's great continuity."  Its owner Lord Rothermere was a  Hitler supporter.  On 20 August 1938 an article fulminated that "The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage... (it is) a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.’’  The Daily Hate Mail is very prone to outrage.

Jonathan Hoffman with fascist activists outside Ahava

The Sunday Express was also outraged about the perils of Jewish immigration:  “There is a big influx of foreign Jews into Britain. They are overrunning the country. They are trying to enter the medical profession in great numbers. Worst of all many of them are holding themselves out to the public as psychoanalysts.”

The newspaper went on to explain that psychoanalysts, of whom there were a number of Jews ‘often obtain an ascendancy over the patient of which bad use can be made if the psychoanalyst is a base man.”

The British establishment, from Churchill down, excelled themselves.  A certain R. Dew, a Foreign Office official was of the opinion that ‘a disproportionate amount of time in this office is wasted in dealing with these wailing Jews'.  Another official, A.W.G. Randall, head of the Foreign Office Refugee Department, worried in December 1943, after which some 5 million Jews had been killed, that 'once we open the door to adult male Jews to be taken out of enemy territory, a quite unmanageable flood may result.’  And another official believed that ‘(Hitler may facilitate it!)'

See ‘Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945’- London and Oxford: Institute of Jewish Affairs and Clarendon Press, 1979.

Stephen Pollard in the Guardian defending pro-Zionist anti-Semite Kaminski

Churchill was of the opinion, as he wrote after the war, that: 'There were known to be twenty thousand organised Nazis in England at this time'. A sentiment which the liberal Manchester Guardian supported.    It has now been updated to a belief that amongst the Syrian and other refugees, there may be hiding ISIS moles.

We can however thank Donald Trump for his honesty in wishing to ban all Muslims from the shores of the United States.  President Obama is pursuing exactly the same policy, not by legislation but by administrative decree.  Muslims are now finding that their ability to travel to the United States has been revoked at a moment notice.  Revealed: 20 British Muslimfamilies 'stopped' from entering US amid fears 'Trump ban is already in place'

That is why I have always been opposed to Holocaust Memorial Day.  It isn’t a means of renewing our anti-racism but a means of glorifying present day racism.  The holocaust has become a means of defending not only the Israeli state and its racist barbarities but western civilisation as a whole.  It is the way that racism in Europe, not least in Germany, cleanses its conscience at the expense of the Palestinians.

In Britain we can see this in the way fascist organisations like the English Defence League and the British National Party openly proclaim their support for Israel and their hostility to the Palestinians.  We even had the obscenity of leading Zionist activists such as Jonathan Hoffman and Harvey Garfield, demonstrating alongside the English Defence League at the demonstrations outside Israel’s ‘beauty’ products shop, Ahava, in London.  Likewise the tie up between Zionist activists and the Jewish Nazi Jewish Defence League.  In Birmingham the EDL attacked a Birmingham PSC stall flaunting the Israeli flag in one hand and giving Hitler salutes with the other!

Indeed across Europe far-right and fascist organisations are, almost uniformily, pro-Israel.  People like the anti-Semitic Polish politician, Michal Kaminski combined hostility to Poland Jews with avid support for Israel.  In this they receive fulsome support from leading Zionists such as the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard who wrote that ‘"Far from being an anti-Semite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists."  Which of course is true.  You can be pro-Israeli and virulently anti-Semitic!  See Pollard – Upset by Corbyn’s‘anti-Semitism’ but a devotee of the anti-Semitic Michael Kaminski.   

Tony Greenstein

‘We are all Jews’ — the Holocaust as imperial export

Obama after his speech at Israeli embassy Jan. 27, 2016, on CSPAN

This is taken from Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss.

As International Holocaust Remembrance Day dawned, I was in the Philippines on a month-long teaching and speaking tour. In the Philippines, remembering the Holocaust feels different. The experience of devastation and suffering is ongoing here. When Filipinos look back to their history of suffering, they see their future.

For Filipinos, the future is different than the future Jews around the world experience. Rather than empowerment, with the unbridled and increasing aid Israel receives from the United States, the Philippines remains dependent and vulnerable to American imperial power. It’s unlikely that the current or any future president of the Philippines will be invited to address Congress as Prime Minister Netanyahu did some months ago. Prime Minister Netanyahu was critical of the proposed US deal with Iran. If a Filipino president addressed Congress, and was honest, what would he or she have to say?

So when President Obama declared at the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C, that “We are all Jews,” Filipinos might wonder how that applies to them. If it did apply, the Philippines would soon have a memorial museum in proximity to the Mall in Washington. Such a museum would commemorate their martyrs to the Spanish, the Japanese and, yes, to the Americans. What would that museum be named?

To internationalize Holocaust remembrance, it must cease being Jewish in time and place. Or become truly Jewish in light of Israel and the Palestinians. With the organized, systematic and permanent oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel, with the enablement of Jews in America and the United States government, the Holocaust has ceased to be a prophetic warning for the future. The Holocaust has become an imperial export that continues the cycle of violence and atrocity in different parts of the world, often in its name.

Later that day, I lectured on a Jewish theology of liberation and paid tribute to those Jews who mined the meaning of the Holocaust for Jews and others. Holocaust thinkers probed deeply the disconnection between God and the Jewish people and human endeavor and ethics, as a challenge to Jews and humanity. Yet the trajectory of Holocaust thought is Israel, unmindful of the horrific suffering Israel is causing the Palestinian people. Such thought then censors dissent on the consequences of the use of the Holocaust as a blunt instrument against the Palestinian people.

With the suffering of the Palestinians in mind, I moved quickly to the second “after” of Jewish life. After the Holocaust, yes, but also after what Jews in Israel and beyond have done and are doing to the Palestinian people. If indeed “We are all Jews,” then Jews, too, must contemplate how the memory of the Holocaust functions to the detriment of others. It must be a critical force against the misuse of Jewish power

My Filipino audience resonated with the Holocaust’s dual after’s precisely because the onslaught here continues. But it isn’t only the Philippines where both after’s apply. The truly international importance of Holocaust remembrance awaits a further exploration as the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s permanent occupation of Palestine looms. When that exploration is named internationally, the horror of Holocaust will remain. It may even be disentangled from those who trumpet the Holocaust as an imperial and colonial power over others.

It is little wonder that Goebbels wrote in his Diaries (12.12.42.) that ‘At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff.’ (Henry Feingold, the Politics of Rescue, p. 169)

The Strong and the Weak

Israeli Knesset Rejects Bill to Enshrine Equality in Law

A Palestinian citizen of Israel waves a Palestinian flag during a protest against the police killing of Khir Hamdan in Umm al-Fahm. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

It should be no surprise that when faced with a choice of enshrining equality in Israel’s Basic Law (the equivalent of a constitutional law) the Knesset voted it down.  Not only the parties of the governing coalition but also the ‘centrist’ Yesh Atid, led by Yair Lapid, a former Israeli TV personality whose ‘centrism’ lies somewhere on the far-right spectrum.

Those voting in favour of the bill were the Joint Jewish Arab List, Meretz, a left-Zionist party and surprisingly the Zionist Union (Labour Party and Hatnuah).  It is of course no surprise but the decision confirms, if anyone were to be in doubt, that Israel prefers to be a Jewish state rather than a democratic state.  Attempts to pretend that a Jewish state can also be a democratic state of all its citizens are risible and shown to be so.

It is therefore no surprise that the authors of  Torat Hamelech (the King’s Torah) Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Elitzur will not face any legal investigation or prosecution.  Torat Hamelech is a manual which instructs Jews on how they may legally, according to the Halachah (oral Jewish law and the Talmud, which trumps the written law), murder non-Jews. 

Balad chairman and Joint List MK Jamal Zahalka. (Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

According to The Jerusalem Post, Israel court says book on killing non-Jews not incitement the book states that anyone who opposes "our kingdom" or encourages attacks against them can be killed, as can children "if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents."   

These religious injunctions are not merely a question of theory either.  The Military Rabbis who accompanied Israeli soldiers into Gaza emphasised that they are bound by Jewish religious law which stipulates that you can wipe out the ‘enemy’ without regard to casualties, yeah even the child and the suckling infant.

Now the Israeli Supreme Court has given its blessing to this kind of genocidal racism let us hear nothing about how the Israeli Supreme Court is a bastion of liberal values.

Tony Greenstein

When equality is the biggest existential threat of all

In these days of entrapping human rights activists and blacklisting ‘traitors,’ the concept of equality has become as radical as it gets — and a threat to everything the governing regime stands for.

MK Jamal Zahalka [Youtube screenshot from David Sheen & Max Blumenthal's interview, 'Racism Competition']

Last week Israeli lawmakers had the opportunity to take a first step towards enshrining equality in the law. They rejected this opportunity, voting down Joint List MK Jamal Zahalka’s proposed amendment to include a clause on equality in Israel’s Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.

The vote was taken on a preliminary reading of Zahalka’s bill, meaning that it was shot down before it even left the starting blocks. The majority of Likud, along with the centrist Yesh Atid and Kulanu, along with the ultra-Orthodox parties, voted against the bill. The Joint List, Meretz and Zionist Union voted in favor.

It may at first seem hard to fathom why Zahalka’s bill was rejected. It simply proposed adding a section to one of Israel’s Basic Laws (which collectively make up the closest thing Israel has to a constitution) that would legally declare the country a state of all its citizens, by stipulating that there can be no discrimination against Israeli citizens on grounds of race, nationality, gender, religion, religious denomination, opinions, personal or social status, political affiliation, or for any other reason. This should be a natural state of affairs for any democracy.

Yet the proposed clause strikes at the heart of a contradiction Israel has been grappling with for nearly 70 years. Israel’s Declaration of Independence contained the competing visions of a Jewish state and a state that treats all its citizens equally regardless of race, gender or religion. With the best will in the world, a country that places one ethnic or religious group above all else cannot offer full equality. It will always have second-class citizens, even if they have the appearance of holding full civic rights (which is currently not the case for non-Jews in Israel).

Even the opening paragraph of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty sets out its purpose of “establish[ing] in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” The addition of an equality clause would thus contradict the law’s stated aim.

By rejecting this amendment, the Israeli government has in effect ratified by omission the idea that certain groups can take priority over others. And indeed, any Israeli citizen who is Palestinian, queer, non-halakhically Jewish or simply not Jewish at all, is denied rights and freedoms that are automatically granted to others.

The absence of an equality clause also leaves the door open for the passing of discriminatory legislation, as has been proved in Israel: since 1948, over 50 laws have been passed that “directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens,” according to Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

This reality denies the ethical values set down in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first clause of that document states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This foundational principle — equality by birth — is the basis for all other human and civic rights, as Zahalka argued in his proposal when submitting the Basic Law amendment.

This understanding of liberty and dignity also provides recourse when there is no legal precedent in a situation relating to such rights, allowing for humane decisions to be made in the absence of specific guidance.

Don’t question policies, don’t challenge laws

The current version of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty was used to precisely this effect in 2011, when a Tel Aviv District Court judge wrote a stirring legal opinion ruling that Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk had the right to be registered by the state as “without religion.” As a rule, everyone who meets the rabbinate’s criteria is automatically classified as Jewish, whether they identify as such or not.

“We face a demand for freedom from religion in the civil registry,” the judge wrote. “Freedom from religion is derived from human dignity, which is protected in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. When the given law is laconic, the fundamental right shall decide, which tilts the scales in favor of the claimant and his self-definition in the registry.”

The judge’s legal opinion was true to the letter and spirit of that opening clause of the UDHR. He understood that Kaniuk’s right to personal dignity and liberty trumped the state’s self-appointed task of categorizing people how it sees fit, and handed down a legal opinion based on consciousness and compassion — both of which are essential to maintaining equality.

Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. (photo: Osnat Skoblinski)

When George Orwell wrote that orthodoxy is unconsciousness, he was referring to the kind of dogmatism that rules out thinking for oneself. It’s the kind of unconsciousness that repressive governments require of their subjects in order for them to be good citizens: don’t question policies, don’t challenge laws — accept the top-down social order.

Equality requires the very opposite of unconsciousness. It demands that we pay attention to our environment and to one another. It asks of us to recognize specific groups to ensure their rights are not violated, while not losing sight of our common humanity. It also requires us to be alert to conflicting sensibilities, for example when one group’s right to observe its traditions impacts another group’s right to freedom of choice.

In a state that categorizes as relentlessly as Israel does — a by-product of its cobbled-together society, the interference of religion in state and legal affairs and the effects of colonization and occupation all rolled into one — it can be difficult to find the common humanity underneath it all. This is especially true in a country that has become so accustomed to ethnic and religious separation.

A status quo of inequality

Compassion, that other pillar of equality, grows out of consciousness. As Israeli academic Eva Illouz has noted, “[c]ompassion reserved only for members of my group is not compassion, but self-preservation.” Compassion is critical in order to be able to relate to others as fellow human beings rather than members of this group or that, and to transcend the divisions that others place between us.

Lastly, and most importantly, are the occupation and the siege on Gaza, by far the biggest obstacles to equality in this land. The discrimination engendered by Israel’s policies in the West Bank and vis-à-vis Gaza is an essay on its own, but it must be remembered that the same government which rejected the equality clause for its own citizens also maintains an entire parallel legal system inside which the inequality of Palestinians under occupation is tightly sealed.

A Palestinian child stands in front of his destroyed home in the Tuffah neighboorhood of Gaza city, Gaza Strip, February 9, 2015. Six months after the Israeli military offensive, tens of thousands of Palestinians are still displaced. (photo: Anne Paq/Activestills.org)

None of this is to say that introducing an equality clause into Israeli law would be an automatic harbinger of better times ahead. It wouldn’t erase the institutionalized racism caused by decades of occupation and separation, nor would it overturn the post-colonial “between the lines” discrimination against Mizrahim, which though not set down in law is no less deeply rooted.

But formalizing equality in the law would at the very least present an obstacle to the Right’s seeming ability to operate unhindered in Israeli government and society, no matter how ruinous to others (and, in the long run, themselves) their policies may be. In these days of entrapping human rights activists and blacklisting “traitors,” and amid the increasing demands for adherence to a narrow ideal of state and ethnic loyalty, the concept of equality has become as radical as it gets — and a threat to everything the governing regime stands for.