Activism

Do Americans want to know that Israel is waging war on Africans?

In December 2013, the Israeli Knesset circumvented a three-month old High Court ruling, quashing the law that criminalized all African asylum-seekers in the country. In its place, the Netanyahu government instituted a new policy to corral the Africans onto an ethnic-cleansing assembly line that forces them into a dead-end desert detention center, where they are pressured to self-deport.

Since December, tens of thousands of African asylum-seekers in Israel have taken to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to protest the government’s master plan to expel them all by the end of the decade. For all of their considerable efforts, they have not managed to convince the Israeli people or their elected representatives to end the efforts to expel them and examine their refugee status claims instead.

Under these circumstances, it seems that the only possible political development that could force the Israeli government to put an end to its war on the Africans is a massive outpouring of international support for their cause.

On January 22, activists in dozens of cities around the world protested in front of Israeli embassies, in solidarity with the Africans, echoing their demands for freedom. But the plight of the asylum-seekers still remains largely unknown outside of Israel and diasporas African emigre communities.

For the last four years I have been doggedly reporting on this story from the corridors of the Knesset and the streets of south Tel Aviv. In the coming month, I will travel across the United States and Canada, speaking and screening slides at university campuses and community centers across the continent, trying to raise awareness about the ruthless persecution that African asylum-seekers are facing in Israel.

I invite you to come hear  what I have to say and decide for yourself whether these people are deserving of protection, or whether they should be abandoned to their fate.

http://www.davidsheen.com/tour

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Does the average american know anything about middle east?

Blacks, muslims, arabs, who cares seems to be the standpoint by many americans and westerners in general.

You have to wonder if Israel will lock up the whole world eventually.

Palestinians, guilty or not/Asylum seekers/peace activists/whistle blowers/stone throwers oh and 10 year old children.

What a light unto the Nations Israel turned out to be.

Future historians will be compelled to ask at what point did Judaism become Fascism.

How is the project coming on ?

Israel is such a tragedy, I think
Started off with such hope and turned into such a shoddy kip.
Take away the hasbara and it’s a real ugly country.

Sure they have the IDF with its pro GLBT stance but what does that matter when people are shafted left right and center because they aren’t Jewish ?

Let’s be honest about it. The Zionists in the US media are trying to keep this information under wraps. They suppress anything negative about Israel and we do not protest. Or even our protests are suppressed by the media. We rarely see anything about it other than here at Mondoweiss.

The root of this problem is, that this state was not established as the state of its citizens like other states. It was established as a state of a certain nation within citizenship who happened to be less than 50% of the citizens.

This left and leaves only two options for the minority to become and maintain a majority.
1.) It increases the number of its members by allowing other members of the same collective to immigrate or improving their reproduction and living quality (preventing them to emmigrate)
2.) It reduces the number of those who are not members of this collective, by deporting or even expelling/denationalizing them or impairing their reproduction and living quality (in hope for a voluntary emmigration). Or, it redraws its borders to chop them off.

If the chances for 1.) don’t look very promissing, option is 2 is inevitable with all the racist incitement which is necessary to make this option popular.

The problem is not even Zionism as an abstract national ideology. The problem is that the existing demographic reality of the Zionist state was unfavorable from the get go. And while other states are demograhically far away from a ‘threatening threshold’ that could change its ‘national character’, because they started out with 100% citzens = 100% nation (see the US), Israel has never achieved and probably will never achieve to distance itself significantly from this threshold by option 1. While other states could allow to change their national character slowly over many generations, Israel will always have a problem, because it wants to preserve the same national character eternally and finds itself increasingly running out of time to rely only on option 1. The same racism can occur in other countries which want to preserve a certain character eternally and are close to the threatening threshold. This has nothing to do with Zionism as such or allegations of supremacy, etc.

But unlike in 1948 when the world after the Holocaust allowed Israeli Jews to literally get away with murder, it will no longer accept Israel’s crimes against equality and humanity. And unlike in 1948 when the world didn’t know what was going on, Israel today can no longer hide its actions and its character which are not Jewish, but simply racist and inhumane for the above mentioned reasons.

Zionism is doomed to fail in our times.