Over the past five years racism in Israel against Africans, Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, has swelled. In discourse, it rivals that of racism against Palestinians. And with 40,000 to 45,000 refugees entering Israel since 2007, coupled with no comprehensive placement policies for asylum seekers, racism against this group will only increase. Yesterday, Al Jazeera‘s The Stream covered the recent vigilante attacks against African communities in Israel, increases in prison terms for undocumented immigrants (up to three years incarceration before deportation) and the existential questions of Israel’s Jewish character. Guest of the program and writer for +972 Magazine, Mya Guarnieri, closes the show with: if Israel is a Jewish state, “where do non-Jews fit into it?”
Watch the program in full here.
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Guarnieri was joined by fellow guests, Sanjeev Bery, Middle East Director at Amnesty International; Yohannes Bayu, Founder and Executive Director for the African Refugee Development Center; and Mondoweiss contributor David Sheen.
Exposing racism as a day-to-day practice, The Stream also showed this video clip first posted on the Electronic Intifada by Jalal Abukhater where an Israeli woman is asking people on the street to sign a petition to not deport refugees. The first petition is for a Danish girl and all of the people stopped sign it. The second petition is for a Sudanese child. No one signs it.
Last place on earth I would want to be a refugee in.
>> … Mya Guarnieri, closes the show with: if Israel is a Jewish state, “where do non-Jews fit into it?”
They fit into it in the only way they are permitted to fit into a religion-supremacist state: As second-class citizens.