Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Israel: African Refugees Protest Racist State Crackdown

The first week of January saw an unprecedented wave of mass demonstrations by African asylum-seekers in Israel. Tens of thousands took to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to protest against Israel’s refusal to grant them refugee status as well as against the opening of a new detention center. They also demanded the release of those detained. Solidarity protests were held at Israeli embassies in capitals around the world, including London, Paris and Washington. A young Sudanese woman told a January 5 rally in Tel Aviv: “We left our countries due to prosecution, war and genocide—and we are treated like criminals.”

The protests were triggered by the December passage in the Knesset (parliament) of an amendment to the so-called Prevention of Infiltration Law that allows the authorities to jail asylum-seekers indefinitely. Enacted in 1954, the law targeted Palestinians who sought to return to their homes after the Zionist-orchestrated mass expulsions of 1947-48. This is but one example of how measures directed against African refugees were prepared by decades of repression of the Palestinian people.

Over the past decade, some 60,000 black Africans fleeing repressive regimes in Sudan, Eritrea and other sub-Saharan countries have arrived in Israel. Zionist leaders have responded with a racist campaign demonizing African refugees as “criminals” and “rapists.” Former interior minister Eli Yishai attacked African refugees for refusing to recognize that Israel “belongs to us, to the white man.” Knesset member Miri Regev branded Sudanese refugees as “a cancer” in Israeli society. Her later “apology” was directed not to the Sudanese but to cancer patients.

The Israeli rulers are doing everything possible to make the lives of the African asylum-seekers so miserable that they give up all hope of normal life and leave. Denied legal work permits, the refugees eke out an existence in dead-end jobs washing dishes in restaurants and cleaning bathrooms and changing diapers. They live in constant terror, subjected to beatings and stabbings by racist mobs that go largely unreported because of the victims’ fear of arrest. In May 2012, whipped into a frenzy by Zionist politicians, mobs rampaged through the heavily African neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv, attacking dark-skinned people, looting shops and throwing firebombs, including into a kindergarten courtyard. To even reach Israel, these refugees endure a horrifying trek across Egypt’s Sinai Desert, where they are routinely shot at by Egyptian forces and brutalized by traffickers.

In 2009, the government set up a new immigration police force known as the Oz Unit to round up migrants and deport them. A massive prison complex in the Negev Desert has been constructed at a site where thousands of Palestinians were imprisoned during the first Intifada. Designed to eventually hold up to 11,000 people, the detention complex was projected by the British Guardian (17 April 2012) to become the “world’s largest holding facility for asylum-seekers and migrants.” Conditions in detention centers are so harsh that many held there have attempted suicide.

The draconian measures against migrants were accompanied by efforts to penalize those who shelter or transport them. Employing refugees incurs fines and a jail sentence. In 2010, hundreds of rabbis throughout Israel issued a religious edict instructing Jewish people not to sell homes or rent apartments to migrant workers and asylum-seekers.

What is posed is a fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, including the African refugees and everyone else who has made it into the country. In Israel, this democratic demand raises far deeper issues. The Zionist rulers rail against “infiltrators” because the influx of non-Jewish immigrants runs up against the very foundations of the Zionist state, at the heart of which is the “Law of Return” that grants citizenship on the basis of Jewish ancestry. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ranted: “If we don’t stop the problem, 60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000, and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

The plight of African asylum-seekers is inseparable from the oppression of the Palestinians, a defining axis on which the Zionist state turns. Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories are under lockdown and imprisoned behind a barrier of huge concrete walls, electrified fences, trenches and razor wire, with exit and entry tightly controlled by the Israeli army. The walls divide families, separate farmers from their land and cut the population off from jobs, hospitals, schools and water. Palestinians are continually robbed of their land, their homes razed to make room for new settlements. In Gaza, Palestinians are further subjected to a starvation blockade, raids and assassinations.

Israeli Arabs suffer widespread discrimination in housing, jobs, social services and virtually all aspects of life. Accorded far fewer rights under the law than Jews, they live under constant threat of having those rights stripped away. As a condition of accepting the latest “peace” plan hatched in Washington, Netanyahu’s far-right foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has stipulated that predominantly Arab regions in central and northern Israel must be cut off from the rest of the country and incorporated into a rump Palestinian state.

Israel, a major recipient of U.S. military aid that is routinely hailed as Washington’s “only democratic ally” in the Near East, is a prison house for not only Palestinians but also Ethiopian Jews, Bedouins and others. Brought into Israel in the 1980s-90s to inflate the Jewish population, Ethiopian Jews face rampant racism and discrimination in housing, transportation, education and employment. Last year, following a public exposé, the government admitted that it had been injecting Ethiopian women with Depo-Provera—a potent and long-lasting contraceptive—without their knowledge, causing a dramatic fall in the community birth rate. Bedouin Arabs, who have lived for centuries in desert villages, have been denied basic services such as water, electricity, schools and health care. A bill introduced in the Knesset last year but later shelved had sought to forcibly displace 40,000 Bedouin from their “unrecognized” villages in the Negev.

At the same time that the Zionists vilify immigrants, Israeli capitalists rely heavily on migrant labor, especially to fill low-wage menial and unskilled jobs. After subduing the first Palestinian Intifada, in the 1990s the Israeli rulers initially moved to replace Palestinian labor with that of foreign migrants, many from East Europe and Asia. Denied any and all rights, these migrant laborers live in constant fear of police breaking into their homes in the dead of night to arrest and deport them. Many children born in Israel to immigrant parents have been deported along with their families to countries that are totally foreign to them.

Full citizenship rights for all migrant workers, refugees and their families as well as the right of return for Palestinians cannot be realized without a fight to shatter the Zionist capitalist state from within through socialist revolution. Although the Jewish working class is heavily imbued with Zionism, it is exploited at the hands of its “own” ruling class. After years of government austerity and wage-gouging, Israel has one of the highest poverty rates of any industrialized country in the world, fueling resentment and anger among workers in both the public and private sectors.

The Near East is a cauldron of peoples carved up by the imperialists and competing at the expense of each other. At the same time, imperialist penetration has created strategic concentrations of the proletariat, from Iran’s oil workers to Egypt’s textile and port workers. What is needed is the construction of revolutionary internationalist workers parties throughout the region to unite the proletariat—Arab, Persian, Kurdish and Jewish; Muslim and Christian; native-born and migrant—in struggle on the basis of a program of world revolution.

Israel/Palestine is a case of two interpenetrated peoples laying claim to the same piece of land. Assuring the right of self-determination for both the Palestinian and Jewish peoples requires the overthrow of the Israeli capitalist rulers and also those of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, where the Arab capitalist rulers oppress millions of Palestinians. Only through the creation of a planned economy in a socialist federation of the Near East can conflicting claims over land and resources be equitably resolved.