“Israel’s most liberal city introduces racially segregated kindergartens,” at the Daily Beast, by Lisa Goldman:
When the children of south Tel Aviv head back to school on Tuesday, kindergarteners will attend facilities that are segregated by race. The children of asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa will go to their kindergartens and all the other kids will go to their own. As of this year, the municipality of Israel’s most liberal city decided that separate-but-equal for three-to-six year olds was the way to go—in 2013.
According to a report published by Ynet (Hebrew edition), the city built the new preschools for black children after Jewish-Israeli residents of the inner city area threatened to keep their children at home rather than allow them to learn how to count, fingerpaint and play on the swings alongside their peers from Eritrea and Sudan.
Speaking of Open Zion, the other day Mira Sucharov celebrated Sam Horowitz’s over the top bar mitzvah and offered this description of the website’s purpose:
Open Zion—and my role as a blogger within it—is not an entertainment magazine, but rather a forum for evaluating, critiquing and reimagining a Jewish future, both in Israel and in the Diaspora. In a sense this Bar Mitzvah video represented an attempt by one Jewish boy to do just that….
It is sad that a burlesque routine at a fancy hotel for 13-year-olds is a mainstream American publication’s idea of imagining the Jewish future. Doesn’t the Daily Beast have other concerns that might counter such imaginings?
But Open Zion calls itself a “new conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future.” The Palestine part got left out by Sucharov.
Again, this is exactly like French colonials and French imperialists telling themselves through the 1950s that they could figure out Algeria’s future without the Algerians taking a leading role, or any role at all, in the discussion. And how did that work out? With a massive bloodletting and all the colonials gone, including families that had been in Algeria for hundreds of years–Derrida’s, for one.
It is in fact an urgent task to imagine a future of two peoples in Israel and Palestine that is not the Jim Crow Lisa Goldman has documented. The only other way is violence.
“According to a report published by Ynet (Hebrew edition), the city built the new preschools for black children after Jewish-Israeli residents of the inner city area threatened to keep their children at home rather than allow them to learn how to count, fingerpaint and play on the swings alongside their peers from Eritrea and Sudan.”
Israel is circling the proverbial drain. Any and all declarations of Israel as a democracy are false, and the fact that the threats of the “Jewish-Israeli residents of the inner city area” were acknowledged and acted upon is just more proof of that piled on top of the ginormous heap of all of the other demonstrations/expressions of racism and Apartheid within Israel proper.
Why, oh why does the US support Israel unconditionally?
As for little man Horowitz– his parents should be ashamed. How about donating his little fortune of “donations” to inner city kids right here in America? Maybe he could send it to the segregated Sudanese and Eritrean kindergartners who are being discriminated against in their new “home”.
If this is the “future” for Jewish folks, it is indeed bleak.
And still the usual suspects will claim Israel isn’t an apartheid state, that Zionism isn’t a ideology of bigotry. Not because they don’t believe it to be so, they do and revel in it, but because they know how damaging the truth is in the outside world, that Israel is if anything even worse than South Africa could ever dream of being.
“the city built the new preschools for black children after Jewish-Israeli residents of the inner city area threatened to keep their children at home rather than allow them to learn how to count, fingerpaint and play on the swings alongside their peers from Eritrea and Sudan”
https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2013/08/hadassah-author-claims-american-jews-are-turning-against-israeli-military.html
“It bewilders me …that diaspora Jews do not offer unequivocal support
We live at a great distance from the country about which we care so deeply. But that distance does not mute our concern nor should it mute our voices. Our obligation is to persistently engage in unpopular arguments, to persistently speak up for the children of Sderot and Kfar Azza.(***but not those with darker skin***…) … We will continue to write letters to the editor expressing our solidarity with the people of Israel (***right or wrong, my mother drunk or sober***) , although we may despair of ever seeing them in print.
***We will never despair of Israel, regardless of how low it goes.***
For certain Israeli and American Jews, Israel has always been the strongbox of Jewishness, the place where the most vivid, authentic strain of its modern existence has been unfolding for the last sixty-five years, and there has been a constant stream of American Jews passing through Ben Gurion Airport on their way to imbibe this heady brew from the source.”
Yes, authentic Jewishness – anyone can define it.
Such a “light to the nations!”
The “Daily Beast’ (Open Zion) piece has not sorted out its own racist writing.
Mizrahi Jews (a.k.a. Oriental Jews): no, they were called “Arab Jews”
about 65,000 African asylum seekers spread around Israel. (btw, the link provided only says “50,000 Eritreans and Sudanese”, not 65,000). How are we supposed to understand “sub Sahara” asylum seekers are meant? Blacks.
the other kids will go to their own [kindergarten]. This suggests all others, Jewish and non-Jewish children mix happily in “their own” white kindergarten. No segregation there uh?
This read-between-the-lines code makes Lisa Goldman’s piece unintelligible.