Israels anti-African dragnet tightens

Israeli police and immigration officers arrest African asylum-seekers near

the border with Egypt, 29 June 2014.
(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)

31 December 2014
The past year saw some of the most ruthless Israeli attacks on Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza since the territories were occupied in 1967.
Israeli political leadersincited violence against Palestinians and soldiers and
civilians carried out these commands, while the governments parallel war
on African refugees raged on.
What follows is the third annual list of racist ringleaders who have
championed Israels efforts to drive all non-Jewish African asylum-seekers
a community of 50,000 men, women and children out of the country and
back to the tortures from which they fled in sub-Saharan Africa.

10. Charlie Biton

The year 2014 began with massive protests by asylum-seekers in Tel Aviv
and Jerusalem, demanding an end to the governments war on Africans.
Tens of thousands of Africans went on strike, hobbling many of the Tel Aviv
restaurants that profit off of cheap and easy to exploit African labor.
The diverse asylum-seeker communities united and mobilized and marched
in the streets, demonstrating in front of Tel Aviv City Hall,
the Knesset (Israels parliament) in Jerusalem, the prime ministers office,
and various international embassies. For the first time, the voices of African
asylum-seekers in Israel were being heard.
activestills_downloads_img_1.jpg

Tens of thousands of African asylum-seekers rally in Tel Aviv for the release
of refugees imprisoned by Israel on 5 January 2014.
(Yotam Ronen / ActiveStills)
Activists opposed to the presence of Africans did not wait for the end of the short-lived protest
movement to register their response. While protests were ongoing, right-wingers rallied in
central Tel Aviv on 15 January to demand that the government take an even harsher tack with
the asylum-seekers, which I documented on video.
Predictably, figures like Shimon Ohayon, the far-right Member of Knesset
from theYisrael Beiteinu party, and Matan Peleg, the leader of the hardline

Zionist group Im Tirtzu, riled up the crowd of demonstrators. But another

speaker at the rally surprised some, due to his former leftist credentials:
Charlie Biton, ex-Member of Knesset for the communist Hadash Party.
Biton is famous for being one of the founding members of the Israeli Black
Panthers, a group who took inspiration from the American group of the
same name and fought for the rights of Jews from Arab lands who were
treated unequally by the Zionist leadership, which was mainly composed of
Jews of European origin. The group was established in the 1970s and is
credited with being among the first to challenge intra-ethnic inequalities
amongst Israels Jewish population.
On 7 January 2014, another founder of the Black Panthers, Reuven
Abergel, publicly spoke out in support of the asylum-seekers struggle, but a
week later Biton took to the stage and traded on his former glory to attack
Africans.
activestills_downloads_img_7.jpg

Right-wing Israelis rally against a protest against asylum-seekers organized

by Im Tirtzu in Tel Aviv, 15 January. The sign in yellow reads: Central,
yellow sign: An Israeli is attacked by Africans about every 7 minutes!!! The
lives of the residents have become hell, and everyone is silent. Where are
the human rights organizations?

(Yotam Ronen / ActiveStills)

To the delight of the audience, Biton, using the popular right-wing slur used against Africans,
accused the Israeli media of being biased in favor of the asylum-seekers: They have a single
clear objective: to bring as many infiltrators as possible. Everyone that hates Jews will help
them and work with them. They will do everything they can to destroy this country from the
inside.
It is disappointing when Mizrahi Jews, who are themselves often the victims
of racism in Israel, make the African asylum-seekers their convenient
scapegoats and demand that they be expelled from the country. When a
veteran leader of the community who ought to know better does so as well,
it is devastating.
9. Yityish Aynaw
As the international media began at least in some small measure to
take note of the plight of African asylum-seekers in Israel, the states
professional publicists sought to smother this interest with public relations
campaigns that would advertise Israel as the exact opposite of what it is: a
haven for black people.
In 2013, a black Jewish woman, Yityish Aynaw, was crowned Miss Israel.
Curiously, her win reflected a trend in pop culture contests. In the months
that preceded the beauty pageant, the winners of the countrys most
popular reality show contests, Kochav Nolad(the Israeli version of the
television show American Idol) and Haach HaGadol (the Israeli version of
reality game show Big Brother), were also black Jewish women.
Black people make up approximately two percent of Israels population, and
no black person had ever won any of these Israeli contests prior to this
string of victories. The fact that these occurred one right after the other
at the exact moment that the government was conducting a campaign to
drive Africans out of the country is more than a little suspect.
In February 2014, Aynaw was ferried around the United States in an attempt
to improve Israels image. She allowed herself, and her dark skin and
Ethiopian origins, to be held up as supposed proof that Israel is a post-racial
society. But she was not content to black-wash Israels image with her
token success story; she also used her newfound fame to specifically smear
non-Jewish Africans in Israel.

activestills_downloads_img_2.jpg

Residents of south Tel Aviv and right-wing nationalists call on the

government to force African asylum-seekers out of Israel during a rally on 5
October 2014.
(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)
In an interview she gave to Buzzfeeds right-wing reporter Rosie Gray, Aynaw trotted out the
typical baseless Israeli talking points, saying that a lot of the African asylum-seekers are not
refugees of war.
Even worse, she went on to echo the rhetoric of Israels most racist political
agitators, characterizing non-Jewish Africans as savage sexual predators:
Theres actually places in Tel Aviv where you cant walk around because
theres rape and violence, Aynaw said.
Israeli police statistics show that the crime rate for Africans is considerably
lower than that of the Israeli general public.
Aynaws tenure as Israeli beauty queen has since elapsed, but her face
and body continue to be featured prominently in pro-Israel propaganda.
8. Natan Sharansky
In January 2014, when the political struggle of African asylum-seekers
briefly made headlines in the Israeli mainstream media, Jewish

Agency chair Natan Sharansky was asked about them in an interview. The
former deputy prime minister said that Israel cannot automatically give
everybody the status of a refugee and treat them as political refugees.
Rather, he said, Jews and others who live outside of Israel should donate
money to provide a place for the asylum-seekers in Israel.
Sharanskys proposal to build the Africans a separate community in
the Naqab (Negev) desert was never realized, he said, because Israeli
leaders did not want to provide the asylum-seekers with any comforts at all,
fearing that this would entice additional non-Jewish immigrants from Africa.
But his suggestion that others foot the bill for housing the asylum-seekers
was especially outrageous, considering that others already were, to the
tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and his own organization was
siphoning these off for its own sectarian purposes.
In September, I received a tip which led me to a shocking disclosure. An
obscure item buried in a six hundred-plus page US omnibus bill revealed
that the US government was giving Israel tens of millions of dollars every
year for the purposes of resettling refugees (see article 480).
Investigative work by my colleague, the Israeli blogger known as Noam R.,
turned up a startling fact: the US government was giving this money not to
the Israeli government itself, but directly to the Jewish Agency, a sectarian
organization dedicated to the welfare of Jewish people not Israeli citizens,
regardless of race or religion.
None of these funds which add up to about $300 million in the last
decade alone, asNoam R. has found were used to ease the burden of
non-Jewish African asylum-seekers in Israel, even those few who were
grudgingly granted refugee status. The Jewish Agency, which confirmed to
Noam R. that the money is only used for Jewish families, contends that it
uses the money to resettle Jews who immigrate to Israel from danger
zones. The US funds constitute about ten percent of the Jewish Agencys
total budget.
For the Jewish Agency, profiting from African immigration to Israel did not
begin with the non-Jewish asylum-seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. Israeli
social anthropologist Professor Esther Herzog has documented how the
Jewish Agency kept Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia in a cycle of poverty,
and how the organization financially benefited from this arrangement.

7. Muli Jeselsohn
When Israel is accused of state-sponsored racism for giving preferential
treatment to Jews, some Zionists will acknowledge that this is true. Of
these, some believe that this inequality should be the natural order of
things, while others justify it as a strange form of global affirmative action
in which Palestinians must pay for Europes history of anti-Semitism.
Some Zionists, however, deny altogether that giving preferential treatment
to Jews is racist, because, they say, anyone can convert to the Jewish
religion, and thereby become eligible for that preferential treatment.
Putting aside the highly problematic second half of this statement
adopting a spiritual practice should never be a condition for equal
treatment under the law the first half of the statement is patently false:
no, not everyone can convert to Judaism.
Unlike Christianity and Islam, converting to Orthodox Judaism is exceedingly
difficult. In Israel, if you are an African asylum-seeker, it is impossible.
activestills_downloads_img_6.jpg

African asylum-seekers jailed in Holot detention center (front) and other

asylum seekers a protest outside the facility on 17 February 2014.
(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)
Most of the African asylum-seekers in Israel are content to retain the religion they arrived with,

but some at least many dozens, and likely well over a hundred have petitioned the
government to be allowed to convert to Judaism. Whether they feel drawn to Jewish spiritual
traditions, or are in a romantic relationship with a Jewish Israeli and want to marry them legally
(Israel only permits marriages sanctioned by religious officials; civil marriages are done
abroad, barring asylum-seekers from being able to obtain one) or some combination of the two,
every single African asylum-seeker that applies to convert to Judaism is being summarily
rejected.
The man responsible for implementing this policy is Israels Conversion
Czar Muli Jeselsohn. In June, he explained the logic behind his refusal to
allow even a single African asylum-seeker to join the Jewish people, saying,
here we are talking about tens of thousands who want to assimilate into us
and have no connection to Judaism.
Putting to bed the lie that any person, white or black, can become a
member of the tribe, Jeselsohn added: The government built a fence in the
south, on the states border, and we built one here, at the entrance gate to
the Jewish people.
6. The Israeli Consensus
In recent years, Israeli society has swung so sharply to the far right that
there is hardly a need for outright racists to mask their true intentions.
When lawmakers accuse all non-Jewish Africans of being responsible for
crime, terrorism and dangerous diseases, they are not booted out of office;
instead, their popularity and political power increases.
Some Israelis strongly support the governments efforts to cast out the
Africans, but are uncomfortable with the racist rhetoric it employs in its
drive to do so. To assuage the guilt of local liberals and whitewash the
expulsion plan for foreign consumption, an astroturf front group was
formed to lobby against African interests while using laundered language.
Masquerading as the middle of the road, the group called itself The Israeli
Consensus in Hebrew, and The Zionist Way in English.
The Israeli Consensus leaders say that the group only opposes deporting
victims of genocide, not other asylum-seekers. While some of the asylumseekers in Israel did flee massacres in Darfur, most of the asylum-seekers in
Israel escaped not from ethnic cleansing in Sudan, but from lifelong slavery
in Eritrea.
By drawing the dividing line at mass murder, Israeli Consensus can claim
to be combating genocide while simultaneously facilitating the forced

removal of the vast majority of African asylum-seekers in the country, who

only escaped servitude.
5. Shmulik Rifman
In December 2010, when the Israeli government was still building the
desert detention centers into which it would later hold thousands of African
asylum-seekers, then-Member of Knesset Reuven Rivlin criticized these
prospective centers, calling them concentration camps.
And yet, in January 2012, Rivlin voted in favor of the Anti-Infiltration Law
that authorized the government to round African asylum-seekers into the
camps. Following that, in December 2013, after Israels high court quashed
this law, Rivlin again voted in favor of an even more draconian version of
the law which circumvented the court ruling. In June 2014, the Knesset
elected Rivlin as Israels president.
How could someone who once sympathized with the plight of African
asylum-seekers later vote twice! to round them into what he had
himself called concentration camps?
Rivlins shift on this issue mirrored that of many Israelis. According to
a poll published byIsrael Hayom in January 2014, 80 percent of Jewish
Israelis now support rounding African asylum-seekers out of Israeli cities,
into the internment camps and out of the country.
Broad consensus for rounding up the Africans was achieved with a tactic
commonly called problem-reaction-solution. This method of manipulation
works by creating a social problem, and then using the media to
manufacture the desired reaction amongst the masses. People will then
gladly accept a proposed solution which they would have outright rejected
before the crisis broke.

activestills_downloads_img_4.jpg

Local residents and right-wing activists demonstrate against the presence

of Africans in the south Tel Aviv neighborhood of Hatikva on 11 June 2014.
The sign reads: The Action Committee for Expulsion of Infiltrators is
making it clear to the government: UP TO HERE AND NO FURTHER!!! We will
not consent to being a city of refuge for the infiltrators.
(Yotam Ronen / ActiveStills)
When the African asylum-seekers first arrived in Israel, almost all were all sent to the same
poor neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv, over-burdening its already crumbling public services. A
concerted campaign was then launched by top Israeli officials to blame the African asylumseekers for all of south Tel Avivs social ills.
When city councillors started to warn that local youth would soon take out
their anger on the Africans in the streets, the government responded by
announcing that it would solve the problem it had created by removing
the Africans from south Tel Aviv and forcing them into desert detention
center camps.
The government has now set in motion a second round of the problemreaction-solution process. By quickly building an internment camp without
providing it with sufficient services, they have created a social and
ecological disaster. Thousands of men are now stuck in the middle of the

desert with nothing to do all day, and sewage from the complex is spoiling
the surrounding environment.
The government has repeatedly said that it wants to deport those
languishing in the detention center back to Africa. But how to get from the
problem it created to the solution it desires?
Enter Shmulik Rifman, mayor of the Ramat HaNegev Regional Council, in
whose territory the aforementioned desert detention center is located. In
remarks to Israel Channel 2, Rifman warned viewers that unless the
government gets these infiltrators out of his district, local residents will
begin to beat them up.
Now, as Israel deports the asylum-seekers back to Africa, it can claim that it
is merely responding to the demands of its own citizens, and doing its
utmost to prevent the vigilante violence that it instigated at the outset.
4. Tzipi Livni
National elections have now been called for March, and Tzipi Livni is being
touted by some political pundits as the progressive candidate to unseat
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But if there is any difference to be
found between Livni and Netanyahu, it is only in their rhetoric. Just as
Livnis policy vis--vis the Palestinians is nearly indistinguishable from
Netanyahus, so too is her stance on the issue of African asylum-seekers.
In January 2012, when Livni was in the opposition and the Kadima party she
led controlled more seats than any other party in the parliament, she did
not instruct her legislators to vote against the first iteration of the
Netanyahu governments Anti-Infiltration Law. Of Kadimas twenty-eight
legislators in the 18th Knesset, only the single (Jewish) African Member of
Knesset and one other lawmaker voted against the bill while another
voted for it (the others did not bother to show up for the vote).
After the 2013 elections, Livni accepted Netanyahus offer to head the
justice ministry. Charged with this job, she should have insisted that the
government respect the decision of the highest court in the land, when it
quashed the Anti-Infiltration Law and demanded the closure of the desert
detention centers where African asylum-seekers are held.
Instead, she remained in the government while it worked furiously to pass
another version of the law, even more draconian than the original. When it
came up for a vote, her Hatnuah faction supported its passage in the
plenum.

activestills_downloads_img_5.jpg

Residents of south Tel Aviv protest against African asylum-seekers outside

the high court in Jerusalem during a hearing regarding a petition against
the Anti-Infiltration Law on 1 April. The signs in the front refer to south Tel
Aviv neighborhoods with large African populations being turned into
prisons while the signs in the back call on the high court to follow the
law protect us.
(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)
A year later, the high court quashed this second version of the Anti-Infiltration Law, making it the
first law in Israeli history to be stricken from the books twice. The government responded by
crafting yet another iteration of the law, determined to keep the Africans locked up at any cost.
When it came time for the Knesset to vote on the third version of the AntiInfiltration Law, Netanyahu had already called for new national elections
and fired Livni from her post as justice minister. She was now in the
opposition again, no longer bound by coalition discipline and able to vote
according to her conscience. Despite this, her Hatnuah faction once again
voted in favor of incarcerating non-Jewish Africans whose only crime is
asking for asylum.
Tzipi Livni has been branded a moderate who wants to steer Israel in a
different direction, away from its current course the ultra-nationalism of

Netanyahu. But Livnis parliamentary record reveals that this image is an

illusion. Rather than pose an electoral threat to Netanyahu, she has chiefly
served as his fig leaf, putting a moderate face on his government of farright extremists, thereby permitting them to pass reams of racist
legislation.
3. Gideon Saar
In Israel, the person in the powerful position of interior minister determines
in large part the fate of African asylum-seekers. In his hands (except for six
weeks in 1970, the position has always been held by a man) lies the power
to grant entry permits, residence permits and work permits to those who
need them or to deny them, condemning these people to hopelessness.
Interior Minister Gideon Saar chose to use his power for the latter purpose.
As news of Israels treatment of Africans began to leak in the international
press, Saars team hatched a plan to divert attention from the plight of the
asylum-seekers.
Government officials began to hold talks with representatives of the African
Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, negotiating a deal which would see
hundreds of members of their community receiving some kind of legal
status.
(After trying to drive them out for decades, the Israeli government finally
granted residency to most members of the community in 2003, but
hundreds of African Hebrew Israelites who have been in Israel for decades
some for their entire lives still lack legal status of any sort.)
By granting residency or citizenship to a few hundred diaspora Africans in
this case African Americans who immigrated to Israel in the 1970s and
1980s Saar hoped to black-wash Israels image and shield the
government from scrutiny over its treatment of tens of thousands of
continental Africans.
With the promise of a deal on the horizon, Saar and his staff were received
with fanfareon 1 April in the African Hebrew village of Dimona in the Naqab
desert. Once the photo-op was over, however, little progress seems to have
been made. By years end, the stateless African Hebrew Israelites were no
closer to receiving their long-denied legal status.
During his year and a half long stint as interior minister, Saar continued to
rail against African asylum-seekers at every opportunity, just like his
predecessor, Eli Yishai. His only significant departure in this regard seems

to have been his reticence to accuse the Africans of being AIDS-infecting

rapists, as Yishai did on numerous occasions.
It is unlikely that Saar holds asylum-seekers in higher regard than Yishai.
Rather, Saars reluctance to frame non-Jewish Africans as sex criminals may
be the same reason he is widely suspected of abruptly resigning his
commission in September: allegations of his own sexual impropriety.
Even after tendering his resignation, Saar continued to incite against
African asylum-seekers, in the hopes of putting pressure on the high court
to permit their continued incarceration. With the historic high court decision
in September to quash the Anti-Infiltration law for the second time, a
defeated Saar finally bowed out and a replacement interior minister was
appointed in his stead.
2. Gilad Erdan
After Saars departure, Netanyahu chose Gilad Erdan to fill the powerful
position of interior minister. The choice was especially interesting because
as recently as 2007, the Likud lawmaker then in the opposition served
as the head of the Knesset lobby for Darfuri refugees. Were talking about
victims of genocide, he then said about the asylum-seekers. In Israels
treatment of Darfuri refugees, he said that we Jews must be a shining
example to the world because of our history.
Two years later Likud took power, initiating a reign of terror on African
asylum-seekers that has continued to this day. The governments hardhanded approach may have initially caused Erdan some embarrassment.
When it passed two consecutive Anti-Infiltration amendments that
authorized it to round Africans up off city streets and into desert
detention centers, Erdan was absent from the Knesset plenum on both
occasions, in January 2012 and in December 2013.

activestills_downloads_img_8.jpg

Immigration police arrest African asylum-seekers during a raid in southern

Tel Avivs Levinsky Park on 21 May 2014.
(Shiraz Grinbaum / ActiveStills)
But once Erdan was appointed interior minister and charged with ensuring that Africans
continue to be incarcerated in Israel, he took to the task with gusto. In the last two months of
the year, Erdan worked hard to iron out the wording of the third Anti-Infiltration amendment
and safeguard its passage in parliament. Sure enough, the legislation was passed under his
watch, in the final minutes of the last session of the nineteenth Knesset.
After the laws passage, Erdan expressed regret that it was not nearly harsh
enough on the asylum-seekers, and he vowed that once a new Knesset
body is elected in March one likely to be even more right-wing than the
current Knesset, if such a thing is possible he will further tighten the
screws on the non-Jewish Africans.
1. Benjamin Netanyahu
Once again, for the third year running, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahuheads the list of Israels racist ringleaders.
From the top, he coordinated the countrys policy of rounding non-Jewish
Africans into wretched detention centers as a temporary measure until they

can be coerced into accepting deportation orders and expelled altogether.

But in 2014, Netanyahu broke all previous records for anti-African nastiness.
Since his election as prime minister in 2009, members of his government
have stooped so low as to blame African asylum-seekers for the spread of
plagues, and even derided them as living personification of deadly disease.
In October 2009, then-Interior Minister Eli Yishai told Israels Channel 2 that
African asylum-seekers will bring with them a profusion of diseases:
hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS and drugs.
In May 2012, Likud lawmaker Miri Regev told a crowd of thousands of
Israelis that African asylum-seekers are a cancer in our body. Minutes
later, members of the crowd broke off and smashed the storefronts of any
African cafe they could find, and smashed the heads of any African man or
woman they could catch.
Jewish Israelis should be especially sensitive to insults of this nature
because of the way they have been used to incite racist violence against
Jews in the not so distant past. In Nazi Germany, anti-Semitic poster
campaigns conflated Jews with vermin that spread diseases and viruses
that cause diseases. Despite this, Netanyahu did not discipline either Yishai
or Regev in any way for their racist statements. Just the opposite: in 2013,
Netanyahu promoted Regev to head the interior committee, which
coordinates government policy on African asylum-seekers.
And yet, in his first five years as prime minister, Netanyahu refrained from
making such statements himself, choosing instead to besmirch African
asylum-seekers as a threat to the countrys national security and
national identity.
But after Israels high court threw out his governments Anti-Infiltration Law
for the second time, Netanyahu lost his cool and stooped to publicly
associating non-Jewish Africans with a poisonous plague. In October 2014,
Netanyahu announced that he would take steps to prevent the spread of
Ebola into Israel as part of the struggle against infiltrators the term the
government uses to dehumanize the asylum-seekers.
Netanyahu is so proud of his war on Africans that he bragged about it in
his annual video message to the Israeli people on Rosh HaShana, the Jewish
new year. In the YouTube clip, Netanyahu claims that Israels anti-African
policy making their lives so miserable that they reluctantly agree to
return to the tortures from which they fled is a successful solution that
other nations have failed to achieve, implying that they would be wise to

emulate it.
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.
Photo caption translation by Dena Shunra