Israel will collapse unless Africans and Palestinians are expelled, fenced, says legal advocate

Ali Abunimah 23 May 2012

The separation fence must be closed and sealed. The Egyptian border fence must be closed and sealed. We must build a fence on the Jordanian border immediately, no one gets in or out! Jews who live in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] may come in and out - Arabs may not come in and out.

That was the proposal of Ilan Tsion, the head of an Israeli group called “Fence for Life,” moments after he forcefully objected to Israel being called an “apartheid” state.

Tsion, an Israeli lawyer and activist, who boasted about his efforts to prevent the reunfication of Palestinian families, spoke at a conference in Ramle, on 15 April where he also called the presence of Africans a mortal threat to the lives of every single Jewish man, woman and child.

Video of his speech was taken, translated and posted on YouTube by David Sheen, a journalist who has documented the alarming upsurge in racism in Israel particularly against people of African origin.

Sheen characterized the event as a “right-wing” conference “on Israel’s immigration policies” at which prominent figures including Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai spoke. Yishai reaffirmed his call to expel all refugees and migrants from the country, calling them a “criminal element.”

Demographic threat

Tsion is far from unique in viewing non-Jews as a “demographic threat” to Israel – this is a consensus position among Zionists – but his strident words lay bare the raw racism and paranoia of the belief that Israel has the right to control the indigenous Palestinian population and others just because they are not Jews.

Young woman holds sign reading “Stop talking, start expelling” at an anti-refugee rally in Tel Aviv on 22 May 2012. Yossi Gurvitz Flickr

He argued that unless drastic measures were taken against migrants – particularly from Africa – and Palestinians, then by 2030, “there will be a drastic reduction in the percentage of Jews in the population of Israel.”

“Every person that aids foreigners who enter the country is chopping off the tree-branch that we are sitting on and is threatening the lives of every single one of us,” Tsion said.

But just like apartheid ideologues in South Africa, Tsion, couched this obsession with demography in terms of “survival” rather than what it really is: an insistence on maintaining Jewish supremacy and privilege:

We’re not talking about a threat to the character of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish people. We’re talking about a threat to the very lives of every single person living here.

The United Nations representative sitting here said that people who are deported would face the death penalty.

So I’m telling you that the migration from Africa and from the Palestinian Authority and the Arab countries is about to sentence every single one of us to death. The death sentence is for us, not for anyone else.

Tsion said repeatedly that Israel is “not Sweden” and therefore had a unique right to be racist:

We are a country that is surrounded by 20 enemy countries that want to destroy us. They’re just waiting for the moment that our army will grow weak, for the moment that foreigners take control of the army, so they can overcome us and murder us.

Babies: the mortal enemies of Israel

While Tsion’s rhetoric could easily be dismissed as marginal, it is echoed at the highest levels of government. Danny Danon, a lawmaker from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, claimed that African migrants had established “an enemy state, a state of infiltrators” in Tel Aviv.

Interior Minister Yishai targeted babies, specifically stating last week on Israel army radio, according to The Guardian:

I want everyone to be able to walk the streets without fear or trepidation … The migrants are giving birth to hundreds of thousands, and the Zionist dream is dying.

At a demonstration in south Tel Aviv demanding the immediately expulsion of all non-Jewish African asylum-seekers, a lone Israeli woman who does not agree with the rest of the crowd is shouted down with ferocity and told that she deserves to be raped

Breaking up Palestinian families to maintain Jewish power

One of Tsion’s achievements he told the Ramle conference was that “I fought very hard in the Supreme Court against the reunfication of Palestinian families.”

In January, the Israeli Supreme Court threw out a challenge to Israel’s racist Citizenship Law that prohibits Palestinian citizens of Israel from living in their native country with their non-citizen Palestinian spouses. The court upheld the view that Israel’s desire to maintain a Jewish majority trumped the human rights of Palestinians.

Adalah explained:

The Supreme Court approved a law the likes of which do not exist in any democratic state in the world, depriving citizens from maintaining a family life in Israel only on the basis of the ethnicity or national belonging of their spouse. The ruling proves how much the situation regarding the civil rights of the Arab minority in Israel is declining into a highly dangerous and unprecedented situation.

Tsion and his group had urged the court before the ruling to throw out the petitions against the discriminatory law. The logic is remarkably frank and clear, as explained – in Hebrew – on Fence for Life’s website:

Accepting the petitions would not only mean the flow of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into Israel, but also would deny Israel’s right to “discriminate” between Jews and non-Jews for immigration to Israel – a statement that would mean denying the right of Israel to exist as the state of the Jewish people and its transformation into a state of “all its citizens” – and which would lead to a Muslim-majority country in only two generations – meaning the state of Israel within the 1967 borders!

To anyone who supports universal human rights, this logic ought to be horrifying. And while it might sound “extreme” even in a Zionist context, there is little substance separating Tsion’s apocalyptic vision from that of so-called “liberal” Zionists.

Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace and horrified by Palestinian babies

Recently, Chicago-native and far-right Zionist settler Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post and the racist Israeli show Latma TV wrote an article claiming that population projections were exaggerated and that Israel could safely annex the occupied West Bank without losing its Jewish majority.

Hannah Weisfeld, whose identifies herself as “Director of Yachad, the UK’s pro-Israel, pro-peace movement” – a liberal Zionist group, reacted with utter horror:

Ben White and I challenged her to no avail:
Racism against non-Jews is inherent in the political goal of maintaining a “Jewish and democratic state” in Palestine. Weisfeld was unable to deny it.

The difference is that the likes of Tsion and more importantly Israeli ministers such as Eli Yishai proclaim their racist and segregationist goals openly.

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Comments

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Matt replied on

Thanks for your efforts - it is truly shocking to watch those videos and witness utter paranoia, unbelievable racism and aggression which -horrifyingly - are characteristic of not only some fringe of Israeli society or some organisations, but of the highest government officials, too.

The way I see it, the racist apartheid state of Israel is unsustainable. What we're witnessing now is - I hope - the final crumbling of it!

Keep up the great work!

Keen follower
Matt (@mjrinski on twitter)

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Tony Greenstein replied on

The practice of the Israeli state has always been to discriminate on the basis of the 'demographic threat'. Except that under Israeli Labour it was hidden away and buried under nonsense terms about a 'Jewish democratic state'. What we are seeing is culmination of a catching up process and that means naked ideological racism as opposed to the hypocritical Mapai/Mapam hasbarah.

It should also be noted that racism against African Jews, the Ethiopian Falashas, is horrifying and in general they are not seen as Jews at all. I was speaking to a woman tonight and she described how she and 2 others women got on a bus in Jerusalem and she couldn't find a seat. The bus driver pointed to an Ethiopian and said that he could get off and everyone on the bus agreed as the poor man was about to be evicted over the protests of the women.

What we have seen is a stripping away of the nice ideological justifications. Today Israel's primary justification is power, the fact that it is strong and in alliance with the US. However that is not enough to sustain Israel as an apartheid state indefinitely. I think Israel has proceeded from the end of the beginning to the beginning of the end.

That may be a short time or a longer time but the time may be shorter than people imagine when Israel will no longer exist as a racist Jewish state. Hopefully i will be around to see it!

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emwatcher replied on

David Sheen has performed a great service by documenting and distributing these projections of racist hatred.

The second video, of the anti-African demo, needs more subtitles. What was the dissident woman saying?

Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.